Critical Social Thought 249RN - Topics in Critical Social Thought: 'Race, Nature and Power'

How do appeals to nature -- so called "natural" traits or "essences" -- undergird the way race adheres to specific bodies? How does race, in turn, go beyond bodies to mark particular "natural" landscapes and non-human entities as other? In short, how can we understand the historically powerful relationship between race and nature? Drawing on anthropology and critical race theory, this course examines how race and nature work to convey "timeless truths", inform notions of difference, and justify inequalities. To these ends, we analyze ideas of wilderness/wildness, biological racism, human-animal relations, and environmental disasters to explore how race gets naturalized, and nature racialized.

Prereq: ANTHR-105 or 4 credits in Anthropology.