33145

Whiteness: Critical Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Positionality

Juliana Moreira Streva

Information for students

Modulprüfung im MA Lateinamerikastudien (SPO 2023) (Profil B): Hausarbeit (ca. 15 Seiten) oder mündliche Prüfung (ca. 20 Minuten); Modulprüfung im MA Lateinamerikastudien (SPO 2023) (Profil C): Hausarbeit (ca. 15 Seiten) close

Comments

This seminar offers a critical introduction to whiteness, which is not merely understood as a colonial form of racialization but rather as comprehensive system with political, economic, epistemic, and methodological dimensions. Historically, racism has been framed as a problem exclusively for the so-called people of color, and not for white people. In mainstream academia and society, discussions on “race” have tended to focus on any racialized group except white people. Consequently, whiteness has operated as an unspoken social and epistemological norm. By questioning the Western theory of knowledge within its colonial, malecentered and white-supremacist genealogies, we will explore the relations between the colonial making of modern identity (race, gender, sexuality, ableism, and class) and the colonial legacies within academic knowledge, characterized by practices of extractivism and objectification. Moving beyond a U.S.- centric approach, this seminar discussions will primarily draw from texts from Améfrica Ladina in critical race studies, critical whiteness studies, black radical tradition, Amerindian epistemologies, and critical feminist theories. The seminar is designed to provide the participants with the opportunity to critically re-examine knowledge systems and methodologies, through a reflection on issues of positionality, scientific racism, epistemic violence, and the unfinished possibilities of epistemic struggles. close