Critical Race Conversations
Critical Race Conversations: Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy
The presenters for "Critical Race Conversations: Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy" recommend that those attending the event read these three pieces in advance:
Blake, Felice. “Why Black Lives Matter in the Humanities” in Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz, Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
Hall, Kim F. “Introduction” in Things of Darkness : Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
hooks, bell. “Embracing Change: Teaching in a Multicultural World,” in Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge, 1994.
All materials are available electronically from UCLA Library. Use the links below.
Seeing Race Again by
Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.
ISBN: 9780520972148Date: 2019-02-05
Things of Darkness by
The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"?allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness?through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.
ISBN: 0801431174Date: 1996-01-18
Teaching to Transgress by
First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
ISBN: 9781135200008Date: 2014-03-18
The Sound of Whiteness
The presenters for “Critical Race Conversations: The Sound of Whiteness, or Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Other “Race Plays”’ in Five Acts” recommend that those attending the event read the following six short selections in advance:
Hall, Kim F. “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender” in Shakespeare Quarterly 47.4 (Winter, 1996): 461-475.*
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” Chapters I & II of The Souls of Black Folk (Project Gutenberg, 2008)—originally published in 1903.
Sterling Brown, David. “(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line” in Radical Teacher 105 (Summer 2016): 69-77.
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. “The Sonic Color Line, Black Women, and Police Violence” in Black Perspectives, Journal of the African American Intellectual History Society (July 9, 2018).
Sterling Brown, David. “The ‘Sonic Color Line’: Shakespeare and the Canonization of Sexual Violence Against Black Men” in The Sundial (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, August 2019).
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. “Introduction” to The Sonic Color Line (New York: NYU Press, 2016)—access courtesy of NYU Press.
The Folger Institute encourages everyone to engage conscientiously the work of Black and indigenous scholars, and scholars of color, by reading their scholarship, productively incorporating it into syllabi, and using it to frame generative lessons.