LS 635 - Genealogy of Race

(3.00 cr.)

Explores the modern European 'scientific' invention of the concept of race as a way of categorizing human difference in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings of intellectuals such as Voltaire, Kant, Forster, Blumenbach, as well as Gobineau and Galton. This course then turns to exploring the persistence of the category of race in scientific writing throughout the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. The course concludes with a critical analysis of statements that debunk race as a scientific category.