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'Race', Empire, Postcoloniality

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor: Dr Yasmeen Narayan
  • Assessment: a 4000-word essay (100%)

Module description

This interdisciplinary module, that stretches across the social sciences and arts and humanities, is concerned with a rigorous reconstruction of, and reckoning with, histories and legacies of colonisation during the current historical moment that is defined by new wars, ultranationalisms, internationalisms and the violent disorder in Britain of August 2024.

We explore early modern histories of conquest and the beginnings of global racial capitalism in relation to forms of colonial labour such as slavery, indenture and convict labour and new inventions of race, nature and the land. We then turn to debates on race and other interconnected systems of colonial categorisation, the development of academic disciplines during 'the age of Enlightenment', imaginations of distinct human species and ideas of progress and development in relation to further colonial expansion and wealth cultivation. We discuss colonial cultures, nationalisms, class, respectability, the invention of whiteness, the further development of colonial categorisation and anticolonial resistance during the nineteenth century. We then examine the intertwined histories of coloniality and genocide, the Shoah, the further development of modern academic disciplines and multidisciplinary racial thought.

We trace histories of theorising race and ethnicity and anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist resistance in the UK. We examine histories of the concept of ‘identity’ before exploring the postcolonial legacies of colonial taxonomies. We then discuss psychopolitical approaches to how we become raced subjects or theories of racialised subjectification in relation to histories of state and corporate negligence and violence and the questions on justice, reparation and freedom that they are entwined with. We conclude the module through exploring debates on the ethics and potential political contradictions of this transdisciplinary body of work.