Overview
Where to submit?
For all readings, you need to submit a reflection post on the Piazza discussion board the night before class.
All papers, including the Reflection Assignment due January 31st, should be emailed to Dalia.
Deadlines
All deadlines are at 11:59PM.
Paper Assignments
Paper format
All papers are 7 pages, excluding footnotes and bibliography.
Paper 1 (due February 24th)
Define white supremacy as a problem and discuss historical resistance practices to white supremacy that can serve as inspiration for us today. As we reprise practices from the past, what are the pitfalls that we may encounter? Please be sure to include direct citations to our class readings. This paper will be graded on depth of engagement with the course materials and with class discussions.
Paper 2 (due March 16th)
Define white supremacy as a problem and discuss historical resistance practices to white supremacy that can serve as inspiration for us today. As we reprise practices from the past, what are the pitfalls that we may encounter? Please be sure to include direct citations to our class readings. This paper will be graded on depth of engagement with the course materials and with class discussions.
Paper 3 (Due April 13th)
Define white supremacy as a problem and discuss historical resistance practices to white supremacy that can serve as inspiration for us today. As we reprise practices from the past, what are the pitfalls that we may encounter? Please be sure to include direct citations to our class readings. This paper will be graded on depth of engagement with the course materials and with class discussions.
Readings for RAGE
Note
January 31st is different, in that you must submit a Reflection Assignment via email. All other readings require a piazza discussion board post.
January 31
- Aisha Azoulay, “Chapter 4, Potential History: Not with the Master’s Tools, Not With Tools at All” in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.
Reflection Paper Prompt [2 points, 2 pages]:
What is Potential History and how does it differ from the way in which you have been taught to think about history? Feel free to quote the text in support of your answer. [2 points]
UNIT 1: The origins of white supremacy and the tool of “refusal”
February 5: Problems
- Matthew Restall, “Apes and Men: The Myth of Superiority,” in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest.
February 7: Problems
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John Gillespie Jr., “Anarcha’s Science of the Flesh: Toward and Afropessimist Theory of Science.”
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Context: National Library of Medicine: Reckoning with histories of medical racism and violence in the USA
February 12: Approaches
- Jennifer Barclay, “Mothering the Useless: Black Motherhood, Disability and Slavery”
- Ruja Benjamin, Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-Based Bioethics.
February 14: Approaches
- Aline Helg, “Marronage: A Risky but Possible Road to Freedom,” in Slave No More.
- Neil Roberts, Introduction and Afterword in Freedom as Marronage
UNIT 2: The science of race and the tool of “undoing”
February 26: Problems
- Nancy Lay Stephen, “The New Genetics and the Beginning of Eugenics,” in The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America.
- Alexander D. Barder Scientific Racism, Race War and the Global Racial Imaginary. This piece is also broad, but it ties Eugenics and Scientific racism squarely to White Supremacy.
February 28: Problems
- Simone Brown, “B®anding blackness : biometric technology and the surveillance of blackness” in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. PDF provided by Dr. Muller
- Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5. (PDF)
- Context for Fanon: Seunghyun Song, “Bridging Epidermalization of Black Inferiority and the Racial Epidermal Schema: Internalizing Oppression to the level of Possibilities.” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2017), pp. 49-61
March 4: Approaches
- Michelle Alexander, “The Fire This Time,” Chapter 6 in The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
- The New Jim Code: Reimagining the Default Setting of Technology and Society.
March 6: Approaches
- Victoria Wolcott, “Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias, and the Congress of Racial Equality in the Early Civil Rights Movement.”
- Irvin Hunt, “Afterword. This Bridge Called the System: An Interview with Stephanie Morningstar” in Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics and the Black Cooperative Movement
UNIT 3: The persistence of white supremacy and the tool of “critical imagination”
March 27: Problems
- Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America; Chapter 2, Safe Space for Hate by Joan Donovan, , Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg
- Cartoons of the Spanish-American War. Students should select the most shocking cartoon they can find in the collection and be prepared to discuss.
April 1: Problems
April 3: Approaches
- Critical disinformation studies: History, power, and politics
- Critical Disinformation Studies
- Escobar, Chapters 4 and 5 of Designs for the Pluriverse : Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds
April 15: Approaches
- Caraballo Muller, “The Impossible Project, A Utopian Pedagogy for a Dystopian Moment” in Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present. [Forthcoming 2024]. PDF provided by Dr. Muller.
- belle hooks, Teaching to Transgress [PDF TBD] and “Imagination” in Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom.
Finale UNIT: Seeding a just future
- TBD