Off. Hours: Tue & Wed 10:00a–12:00p or by appt
Office: 3 Gildred Latin American Studies Building - Ext: 2-5033 - dsilva@weber.ucsd.edu
What are the causes of racial/global subjugation? 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 global/racial subjection, namely racial/ethnic studies and global/postcolonial studies.
Evaluation
Weekly e-mail comments (0nline) 50%
Participation 50%
I. The Critical Analytical Position
Week One
Introduction
Week Two
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
Butler's Kindred
Week Three & Four
Foucault’s The Order of Things
II. Founding Writings
Week Five
Locke's The Second Treatise of Civil Governments (Selections) [Oline] & Kant’ Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals [online]
Week Six
Herder’s Philosophical Writings (Selections) & Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History [online]
Week Seven
Marx’s The German Ideology-Part I [Online] & Grundisse (Introduction) [Online}
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) & The Protestan Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism
Parsons’ The Evolution of Societies (Selections)
Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (Selections)
Week Ten
Butler's Fledgling