Thanks all for some terrific presentations, and for your attention on Thursday as we galloped through a lot of material.

Here are the readings for next week:

Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, “The Fetishist Animism of the Bahian Blacks”  (excerpt)

José Vasoncelos, The Cosmic Race, 1925 (excerpt)

Erika Lee, “The Yellow Peril” and Asian Exclusion in the Americas

Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 76 no. 4, (November 2007)

Here are some questions to guide your reading and blog posts:

ž

What kinds of assumptions about race inform Rodrigues and Vasconcelos? Are they thinking about science, religion, history in terms of defining race?

žDo they have similar goals/visions of the future?

žPut the Erika Lee article in this context: how can we characterize the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

žWhat happened to the declarations of equality in the French and Haitian revolutions? Are they gone or merely “reinterpreted”?

Even if you don’t do a blog post (here), jot down some notes for discussion. Also, you might want to pick out a few particularly interesting or problematic passages to focus our discussion.

The film tickets are all spoken for; I’m trying to get some more. But I encourage everyone to attend nevertheless; it’s only $10, about the cost of 2 lattes…

https://www.viff.org/Online/black-history-month-2017

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Looking forward to your presentations this morning!

Please come in your regular Tuesday groups, 9:30 and 10:10.  If anyone’s group is divided, just decide among yourselves which section to come to.

see you later…..

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This week we’ll think about the repercussions of anti-slavery and the politics of race in a revolutionary era.

Please read the following for our discussion on Tuesday:

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)  Chapter 3, “An Unthinkable History” or another chapter from this book if you’ve already read Chapter 3.

Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil, and Anti-Slavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic” American Historical Review, February 2012: 40-66.

Michael West and William Martin, “Haiti I’m Sorry: The Haitian Revolution and the Forging of the Black International”in West, Martin and Wilkins, eds. From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009).

As I suggested in class, please use the following strategy: read Trouillot carefully and thoroughly; and then choose one of the other articles to know well–be familiar with the argument, the evidence, and formulate a critique or a response of some kind; then, with the other article (either Ferrer or West/Martin), skim it, get a sense of the argument and some of the evidence, but don’t worry too much about the finer points.

Here is a very helpful text that will get you through not just this course but any other university course with an upper-level reading load: How to Read

If you are doing a blog post this week, post it here.

See you Tuesday, and remember, Thursday we won’t meet formally but you should be working on your group projects. Visit this page for details and guidelines.

And finally, my office hours for the next few weeks are as follows:

Friday January 20: Cancelled

Tuesday January 24: 11-2 and 3:30-4

Friday January 27: Cancelled

Tuesday January 31: 11-2, and Friday Feb. 3, 12-3.

I will be available on email throughout.

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As I mentioned in class, this week we’ll read these three articles:

1. Rebecca Earle, ““If you eat their food…Diets and Bodies in Early Colonial Spanish America”American Historical Review, June, 2010, 688-713.
2.  Kevin Dawson, “The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots” (Chapter 8) from Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs, James Sidbury, eds. The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) online via UBC library website.
3. Jace Weaver “The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3

You might want to take an active reading strategy to get through these, meaning that it will be important to focus on the main arguments and try not to get hung up on the details. It helps to ask yourself questions as you are reading:

How is this argument structured? What is the author arguing against? Can I summarize this in three main points? Choose one or two examples to know well, and trust yourself to extract the meat of the article.

More specifically, think about how these articles engage Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, and what they tell us about histories of race in the colonial period (and depending on whose colonialism). What are the spaces, objects, ideas these authors are working with? What kind of sources are they building their arguments with? Check out the footnotes! Really. Check out the footnotes.

If you are choosing to do a blog post this week, write it here.

and REMEMBER:

I’ve divided you up into two groups for our Tuesday discussions:

If your last name is between Martin-Zhao, please come at 9:30

If your last name is between Castillo-Lun, please come at 10:10.

that will give us 40 minutes of discussion for each group. We’ll switch in the middle of term, just to keep it fair..

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Hi everyone;

I’ve divided you up into two groups for our Tuesday discussions:

If your last name is between Martin-Zhao, please come at 9:30

If your last name is between Castillo-Lun, please come at 10:10.

that will give us 4o minutes of discussion for each group. We’ll switch in the middle of term, just to keep it fair..

Please come prepared to share your thoughts about the articles. You might want to think comparatively: what do the authors share? What are the points of divergence? What’s at stake for them? How is coming up with a definition of race important? Is it important to you?

See you tomorrow!

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Hi all;

Next week we’ll continue to probe the histories of this idea of race, in different ways. The readings are as follows:

1. Armand Marie Leroi, “A Family Tree in Every Gene” New York Times, 14 March, 2005

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE4D9153CF937A25750C0A9639C8B63&module=Search&mabReward=relbias:w&pagewanted=1

2. Response: R.C. Lewontin, “Confusions about Human Races” SSRC Web Forum, Is Race Real? 7 June, 2006 http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/

3. W.E.B. Dubois, Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg & Co., 1903): Chapter 1, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” online at http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Ch. 2, Illusions of Race

As you’ll see, each of these writers is trying to come to terms with some kind of a definition of race. What seems to be important to them is the utility of the term: in other words, what does the idea of race do in different contexts, and with different meanings? You might want to make some notes for yourself along those lines. If you choose to do a blog post, write your comments here.  The blog posts can really be about whatever you want. If you’d like some guidelines, use them to think through a particular idea, make a critique, raise a question. They’re better if they’re focussed: rather than trying to summarize all of the readings at once, choose one theme or issue or connecting thread and assemble some thoughts about it. The blog posts don’t need to be perfectly tied up essays–you can think about them as ways to start, rather than finish, conversations.

Watch this space for final instructions about our Tuesday discussion. I’ll post them on Monday.

have a great weekend!

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Hi everyone;

Really enjoyed meeting you today and introducing you to the course. On Thursday we’ll take a step back and think about ways to define and frame histories of race in the Americas. Please read this excerpt from Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, and come prepared with one question for discussion and one point of critique. Please let me know if you have any questions: alejandra.bronfman@ubc.ca

thanks, stay warm and avoid treacherous sidewalks!

AB

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Hi all;

I’m really looking forward to teaching this course, and to getting to know all of you. We will do lots of reading, writing, thinking and talking about the complex histories of race in this hemisphere. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with this website, and don’t hesitate to write or stop by my office (I usually have chocolate) if you have any questions or just want to say hello.

I’m in Buchanan Tower 1121, 11-12 on Tuesdays, and 12-3 on Fridays. Or, if you happen to walk by my office and my door is open, that means you are most welcome to come in.

see you Tuesday morning, and enjoy what’s left of the break;

AB

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