'Race', Empire, Postcoloniality

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

This interdisciplinary module stretches across the social sciences and arts and humanities. It is framed by contemporary debates on new wars, ultranationalisms and internationalisms and the violent disorder in Britain in August 2024.

In the module we explore early modern histories of conquest and the beginnings of global racial capitalism, slavery, indenture and other forms of colonial labour and new imaginations of race and nature. We then turn to debates on race and other systems of 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 production. We will discuss colonial cultures, nationalisms, class, respectability, the invention of whiteness and the further reimagination of different categories and forms of anticolonial resistance. We will also examine the intertwined histories of coloniality and genocide, the Shoah and the further development of modern academic disciplines and multidisciplinary racial thought.

We will then trace histories of theorising race and ethnicity and histories of anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist resistance in the UK. We will examine histories of the concept of ‘identity’ before examining the postcolonial legacies of colonial inventions of race, ethnicity, nation, class, tribe, caste, religion, sex and sexuality. We then turn to psychopolitical approaches to how we come to be who we are or racialised subjectification in relation to histories of state and corporate negligence and violence and the questions on justice that these histories give rise to.

We will conclude through considering debates on the ethics and potential political contradictions of this multidisciplinary body of work.