Race key theorists

Stuart Hall

• 1997 lecture ‘Race, the floating signifier: what more is there to say about “race”?’

• ‘race’ as an attempt to naturalise a power dynamic by projecting it onto the body

• There is not satisfyingly rational legitimacy for politics

• Find the full notes for this one please

Robin Kelley

• 1999 article ‘“But a local phase of a world problem”: Black History’s global vision, 1883-1950’

• Meditates on the tensions between African American studies and global Black histories

David Nirenberg

• 2009 article ‘Was there race before modernity? the example of “Jewish” blood in the late medieval Spain’

• The massive emphasis on blood, even after conversion, indicates an immutable, even biological, characterisation of race in this context

Laura Tabili

• 2003 article ‘Race is a relationship, and not a thing’

• Draws on class analysis to demonstrate the instability of racial categories

• Requires active construction

Mae M. Ngai

• 1999, ‘The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924’

• American nation attempts to define its internal unity through restrictions of immigration, by national origin

• Struggle to work out the ‘historic’ national origins of the USA, as such information had not been collected very long

  • first census to record ‘races and peoples’ in 1899

• transhistorical, blood quantum approach to national origins

• Connects immigration policy to internal treatment of racial second class ‘citizens’

A Montague

• 1942 Man’s most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race

• Deconstructs scientific claims of racism

• Reflects rethinking of racial groups in the face of Nazi antisemitism

Caroline Elkins

• Imperial Reckoning 2005 on British Mau Mau internment camps; ‘Looking beyond the Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of British Decolonisation’ 2015

• Gives evidence in British Mau Mau reparations trial

• Focuses on the construction of the imperial archive as a process of domination

  • in the lucky position to have oral evidence to construct alternate narratives

Ranajit Guha

• ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’ in Selected Subaltern Studies 2013

• Historiographical focus on layers of discourse, each of which fails to fully recognise the full personhood and autonomy of rebels

Saidiya Hartman

• Lose Your Mother 2006

• Autobiographical exploration of the enslaved origins of the African American subject

• “if the past is another country, then I am its citizen”

• ‘Venus in two acts’ 2008

• Coins ‘critical fabulation’ to deal with humanities oppressed by the archive