ENGL 4733 - The Future of Whiteness

(crosslisted) AMST 4733, ASRC 4733
(CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with AMST 6733/ENGL 6733.

S. Mohanty.

How should decent, anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States? What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible? This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings drawn from social and cultural theory, as well as literature and film. Texts by such writers as Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (on racial identities, whiteness studies, etc.) and memoirs of anti-racist activists. A central text will be the new book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff.