Issues in the Legal History of Race
University of Warwick · School of Law
In this class, students encounter different theorists from across the world who reflect upon the relation between the law and the construction of racial difference. The history of Anglo-European colonialism in the Americas is mobilized as a prism to explore the ways in which race, racism and the law intersect at different points in time and in various parts of the globe. In particular, the module focuses on understanding the United States of America as not only a colonial power, but also a set of former British, Spanish, Dutch and French colonies.
Along with the various written texts, the class engages with different media, from music videos to slam poetry to live performance. Students write reflective journals every week and take turns in small groups facilitating the discussion in their seminars. For the final assignment they write an letter to themselves responding to what they wrote in their application letter when they entered university.
For the closure of the 2021 class, students organized a public event with poet Andrea Abi-Karam to discuss their work in relation to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In 2022 students organized a public event, this time including historian Dr. Jasmin A. Young and Abi-Karam, both of whom discussed their work in relation to Fanon’s celebrated book. Dr. Young returned in 2024 to deliver the final lecture of the class, discussing her work in relation to Fanon’s.
Syllabus
Learning about Race and the Law: Education for Liberation
Paulo Freire. 2006 (1968). "Chapter Two" in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni. 2013. “Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century?” The Thinker 48: 10-5
Audre Lorde. 1984 (1977). “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press
Coloniality: The Modern Invention of Race
Aníbal Quijano. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla 1(3): 533-80
John Biewen. 2019. “The Invention of Race.” New York Public Radio Archives
Coloniality: The Modern Invention of Man
Sylvia Wynter. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation –An Argument” Parts 1 & 2. The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–83
Barbara Arneil. 1996. “Colonialism: Locke’s Theory of Property,” in John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism. New York: Clarendon Press
Cheryl I. Harris, 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707-91
Colonialism, Racism and the Law: On Dehumanization
Aimé Césaire. 1972 (1950). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1(1): 1-40
Colonialism, Sexuality and the Law: On Genealogy
Michel Foucault. 1990 (1976). “Right to Death and Power Over Life” in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Vintage
Ann Laura Stoler. 1995. “Toward a Genealogy of Racisms: The 1976 Lectures at the Collège de France” in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press
Christopher Nealon. 2020. “Introduction” in Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System. Durham: Duke University Press
Colonialism, Gender and the Law: On Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139-67
María Lugones. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Modern/Colonial Gender System,” Hypatia 22(1): 186-209
Gloria Anzaldúa. “La conciencia de la mestiza, Towards a New Consciousness” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lutte Books
Case Study: The Prison Industrial Complex
Ava DuVernay. 2016. 13th (Documentary). Kandoo Films
Angela Y. Davis. 2003. “How Gender Structures the Prison System” in Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Sever Stories
Michelle Alexander. 2010. “Introduction” in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press
Learning about Race and the Law: On Decolonization
Frantz Fanon. 2004 (1961). “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press
Jasmin A. Young. 2022. "Gloria Richardson, Armed Self-Defense, and Black Liberation in Cambridge, Maryland," Journal of African American History 107(2): 212-37
Andrea Abi-Karam. 2021. Villainy. New York: Nightboat Books
