All courses numbered 500 and above are graduate courses.
Undergraduates need to submit a course permit to enroll.
HIST 610 Race and Gender, Comparative Perspective
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This course samples some of the recent literature on historical formations of race with particular attention to the complex role of gender in those formations. The course has three goals:
- To introduce students to some of the questions animating recent scholarship on gender and race.
- To provide students with a range of concrete historical examples in which race informs and is informed by gender.
- To encourage students to begin thinking theoretically about the complex historical relationships between gender and race.
The reading ranges from early modern Europe to 20th century Africa, Columbia, India, and Australia, with a significant focus on the race relations produced by Atlantic slavery and emancipation. Some of the studies we will consider are explicitly comparative while others emphasize the connections and circulation of ideas and practices among disparate places.
Beginning with a revisionist account of how masculinity was represented in medieval and early modern western art, we consider the intertwined histories of gender and race in Atlantic slavery, the Americas under European colonization, and the post-Civil War South. Prompted in part by Ann Stoler’s pathbreaking work, we then consider a series of different colonial moments: the Belgian Congo, the Sudan, colonial India, the American occupation of the Phillipines, a comparative study of the disruptions to indigenous families in North America and Australia, and finally, a bold argument for a global shift in racial thinking in the twentieth century that centers on the Pacific. We conclude the course with two studies that shift our attention back to a national frame: the Columbian textile industry and France during the interwar years.
Our weekly readings will include the following authors: Marilyn Lake, Jennifer Morgan, Nancy Rose Hunt, Paul Kramer, Hannah Rosen, Rebecca Scott, Patricia Simons, Janice Boddy, Ann Stoler, Mrinilini Sinha, Elise Camiscioli, Farnsworth-Alvear, Margaret Jacobs.
