Off. Hours: Tue 12:30–2:00 p.m. & Thu 1:00 2:30 pm or by appt
Office: 225 Social Sciences Building - Ext: 4-3405 - dsilva@weber.ucsd.edu
What are the causes of racial/global subjection? What sort of social configurations the notions of racial and cultural difference refigure? What sort of emancipatory strategies – counter-hegemonic discourses and practices – will more successfully dissipate the effects of racial subjection?
After almost one hundred years of social scientific accounts of racial subjection, descriptions of post-slavery and post-colonial social (juridic, economic, and symbolic) configurations, raciality continues to perform its task, which is to produce social subjects to which the principles – universality and freedom (self-determination) – said to govern post-Enlightenment social configurations do not apply.
While a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropology’s and the sociology of race relations’ projects would provide an answer (or rather answers) to this puzzle, in this seminar, we will search further back and explore the founding texts informing the social scientific arsenal. With the aid of Michel Foucault’s excavation of modern thought, we will engage in a critical reading of the philosophical and social scientific formulations of the figure at the center of post-Enlightenment thought – namely man, the modern subject – seeking to identify the presuppositions and formulations guiding contemporary renderings of racial subjection, namely racial and ethnic studies and global/postcolonial studies.
Evaluation
Weekly e-mail comments (1,000 words) 40%
Discussion mediation 30%
Participation 30%
Email Responses Guidelines
Each week you will email to everyone in the class a 1,000 word-long response to the assigned readings. In your response, you should: (a) identify the text(s)’s main concepts and formulations and (b) at least three questions (for discussion) which seek to clarify whether and how the conceptual framework developed by a given theorist informs our understanding of racial/global subjection.
Discussion Mediation Guidelines
Each week three or four students will be responsible for leading the seminar: (A) week two through week six - they will prepare an itinerary which, drawing from the questions raised in the email responses, will guide in class discussion; and (B) week seven through week ten - the itinerary will also include a summary of four recent texts in the field of racial/ethnic and global/postcolonial studies, which implicitly or explicitly uses the concepts and formulations introduced in the given week’s reading(s). Everyone will lead the seminar twice.
I. The Limits of Exclusion
Week One
Silva’s “Towards a Critique of the Socio-Logos of Justice”
Week Two
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
Omi & Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States
Week Three
Foucault’s The Order of Things
II. The Moral Subject
Week Four
Kant’ Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals [online]
Week Five
Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Week Six
Herder’s Philosophical Writings (Selections) & Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History [online]
Week Seven
Marx’s The German Ideology (Selections)
Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis & The Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter 6) [online]
Week Eight
Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society & Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Introduction & Conclusion)
Week Nine
Weber’s Economy and Society (Selections)
Parsons’ The Evolution of Societies
Week Ten
Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (Selections)