This course offers critical, comparative and multidisciplinary perspectives to consider various dimensions of race that emerge from Asia-Latin American historical experiences and illuminate wider global processes. It introduces students to scholarship on racial formations, racialized systems and racial triangulations to reflect and critically engage with questions about the (in)determinacy of race, single and multiple systems of meaning and power, and the relationality that emerges within and among them. These frameworks consider race as a modern global system that interacts with pre-European understandings of difference-making and their ongoing contestations by racialized and subordinated groups in relation to one another. By studying race structurally, relationally and intersectionally, the course underscores existing systems of meaning and power that establish and influence the hierarchies, connections and conflicts among subordinated groups and the logics underpinning the belonging and dispossession they experience.

Themes to be explored include East Asian hierarchies and the racial dimensions of Christian missionary projects in early modern Asia Latin America, post-Enlightenment scientific racism, and the development of modern racist biopolitical systems. We will read texts from scholars such as Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Clare Jean Kim, Takesawa Yasuko, Suzuki Kazuko, Tatiana Seijas, Ben Vinson, Oguma Eiji, and Lisa Lowe.