Africana Studies 311 - Race Governance

The seminar will draw upon Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to engage the concept of race/racism as founded on, and maintained by, colonial material conditions mobilized for political outcomes. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry of origins, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of race/racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and biology, to the constitutive logics of colonial practices of governmentality in contemporary western liberal democracies. The seminar maps ways race/racism can be accounted for as necessary political tools routinely employed by states for administrative control.