GRSJ 210: Gender, Race & Colonialism in the Americas

Instructor: Dr. Ana Vivaldi

Interdisciplinary exploration of the ways gender, class, sexuality and race shape modern histories in Canada, and transnationally, from 1920 to the present.


Term

Description: This course introduces students to an advanced discussion on the effects of race and ethnicity in the production of social inequalities in the Americas. The first part of the course will review some of the main theoretical discussions in the field with emphasis on the contributions of different approaches: culturalist, materialist, constructivist, subalternists. Students will engage in core questions surrounding ethnic and racial problems, and the historical context of these debates. We will develop an understanding about ethnicity and race as challenges to Nation-State and the making of citizenship; and simultaneously a product of transnational processes linked to colonialism and capitalist expansion. The second part of the course puts the analytical approaches into practice as we will analyze specific ethnic and racial conflicts in a hemisferic and a multi-dimensional perspective. We will consider how political, economic and cultural tensions intertwine producing specific social formations and organizing difference into structures of inequality. The third part of the course will unfold a directed research process.