4 credits *Course taught remotely
Professor Jimoh
Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Participants in this seminar, Critical Race Theories, will examine the general foundational ideas and concepts shaping today’s now proliferating scholarly enquiries that operate under the term critical race theories. While the basis for today’s critical race theories developed from Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory in legal scholarship, many scholars from a variety of disciplines have transformed for their own contexts the insights that have informed legal scholarship in this area. An understanding of the entrenched racial structures in the United States and their basis in the social contract informing much of Western culture is especially useful for reading and analyzing a substantial portion of African American literature. Seminar participants will read early documents (The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America The Constitution of the United States of America, The Bill of Rights, Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments) together with texts by historical figures, philosophers, and others who have shaped or have responded to systems of race in the United States (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others) texts on theories of race (Smedley, Frederickson, Eze and others), and legal as well as literary, political, and philosophical critical race theorists (Bell, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Austin, Mills, Baldwin, Neal, Fuller, Du Bois, among others).