In modern times, wars become sites of race-making. In turn, racializations become projects of war, violence, and extraction. This seminar explores the mutual implication of race in war and war in race. It attends to the entwinement of dehumanization and humanization in race war across specific historical contexts. These include the eras of European expansion; the world wars; US-American hegemony; and the contemporary ecological crisis. We shall investigate settler-colonial racializations of Indigenous peoples; racializations of Afro-Diasporic and Asian peoples; the constitution and transformation of the White races, as well as those of humanity and the Human race, all in contexts of war and extractive violence. The course takes a “history and theory” approach, one attentive to the ways in which the events, practices, and theories of race war emerge and develop together in co-constitutive ways over time. Notably, alongside practitioners of race war and their theorizations, race war has been a key site for the development of critical theory, anti-colonial thought, Black radical thought, and other traditions of critique and resistance. In these and other ways, the course explores the contours of race war in modern political and social thought, amid empire-building and world-ordering projects, total wars and genocides, and capitalist and ecological crises.

Instructors: Tarak Barkawi & PJ Brendese