aluminum fence panel, air-dry clay, wire, Aqua-Resin, paint, 72 x 120 x 168 inches
Course Description
In this interdisciplinary graduate seminar, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), we will examine the central importance of family, kinship, and domestic and reproductive labor to the cultural and social reproduction of racial colonialisms. Settler colonialism, colonial slavery, racial capitalism, the nation-state, and overseas empire, depend not only on the brute force of war, captivity, and occupation; they are sustained and contested through culture, language, forms of family and household, education, and the social reproduction of race, gender, intimacy, and filiation. We will trace a genealogy that considers the long history of colonial impositions of domesticity and family separations: from the violation and separation of enslaved women from their children, to compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans, racialized gendered divisions of care labor and reproductive surrogacies, transnational adoption, and migrant detention. This genealogy simultaneously includes less acknowledged yet longstanding alternative forms of kinship and relation, amalgams of domestic sociality, and non-biological generation and affiliation.
Readings include historical and anthropological studies of household and reproduction under various colonialisms (A.L. Stoler, A. Weinbaum, J. Morgan, D. Roberts, B. Child, A. Simpson, K. Vora, D-A Davis), cultural criticism of domesticity (A. Kaplan, L. Wexler, G.K. Hong) debates on social reproduction (S. Federici, M. Mies, T. Bhattacharya, R. Benjamin, J. Melamed, A. Goldstein), and various genres and materials on kinship and sociality (S. Hartman, C. Reddy, E. Freeman, P. Powell, T. Morrison, L. Erdrich, K. Ishiguro). Students will do their own original research for the final paper.
Course Requirements
Per the policy of the Yale Registrar, the seminar will be limited to 18 students. Before classes begin, the professor will solicit some information from you (e.g. year of study in your program/department, research interests, relevance of this seminar, etc.), as the basis for limiting enrollment. After the first meeting, the class list of the admitted students will be posted on the Canvas site. By second meeting, admitted students will accept or decline their place in the course.
This is a seminar that includes guest scholars who will visit seminar and present a public lecture. Please come to each meeting having completed the reading assignments, prepared to discuss them with the class and the visitors.
Reading Responses: Beginning Week 3, students will write brief response pieces (2 pages, approx. 500 words) posted in “Discussions” on the Canvas website by Tuesday midnight. In your responses, do not summarize, but rather identify and engage key concepts, paradigms, questions and stakes in the readings or in the guest lectures. 25%
Collaborative Work: Beginning Week 3, students collaborate in pairs to open and lead class discussion for 30 minutes, engaging the class in discussion of the primary issues at stake in the assigned materials for that week. You may wish to consider disciplinary methods and interdisciplinary innovations for knowledge production. You may draw upon or bring in additional works, if you like. 25%
Final Paper: The final paper of 20-25 pages will be a research paper. You are encouraged to work with research librarians at the Sterling and Beinecke Libraries to find relevant materials. A meeting with the research librarian will take place October 20, 2:00-3:00. A preliminary proposal for your paper is due on December 2 on Canvas; the final paper itself is due December 16. 50%
Schedule of Readings
(*indicates that this text is available on Canvas site) [#indicates this text is available for purchase at Yale Bookstore]
Aug 28: social reproduction theory
*Tithi Bhattachaya, “Introduction,” Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression
*Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism”
*In Radical Philosophy (2019): Alessandra Mezzadri, “On the value of social reproduction”; Kalindi Vora, “After the housewife”; Mai Taha and Sara Salem, “Social reproduction and empire in an Egyptian century”; and Silvia Federici, “Social reproduction theory”
*Ruha Benjamin, “Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice”
Sept 4: primitive accumulation
#Sylvia Federici, Chs 1, 2, in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
*Maria Mies, Chs. 3, 4, 5 in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (e-book)
*Glen Coulthard, “From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition?” (pdf)
*Robert Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation” (pdf)
Sept 11: sexuality and slavery
*Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris, eds., Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (e-book) (Intro, Fuentes, Premo, Millward, Jones-Rogers, Stevenson, Downs)
*Thavolia Glymph, Intro and Ch. 3, “Making ‘Better Girls,’” Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (e-book)
*Alys Weinbaum, Intro “Human Reproduction and the Slave Episteme,” The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (e-book)
*The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (pdf)
Sept 18: colonial domesticity
*Ann Laura Stoler, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (e-book)
*Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity” (pdf)
Sept 25: intimate violence
*Brenda Childs, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (e-book)
*Laura Wexler, Ch. 3, “Tender Violence,” Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (pdf)
#Louise Erdrich, LaRose
Oct 2: racialized gendered labor and the home
*Grace Kyungwon Hong, "Introduction" and “Histories of the Dispossessed: Property and Domesticity, Segregation and Internment” in Ruptures of American Capital (e-book)
and "Introduction" and "On Being Wrong and Feeling Right" in Death Beyond Disavowal (e-book)
#Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Guest: Professor Grace Hong
Oct 9: governing Native women
*Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus (e-book available)
Guest: Professor Audra Simpson
Oct 23: afterlives of slavery
#Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Guest: Professor Saidiya Hartman
Oct 30: 2:00-3:00 pm Library research session, Sterling Library
Oct 30: racial capitalism and social reproduction
*Jodi Melamed, Intro, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in New Racial Capitalism
*Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism” (pdf), “Racial Capitalism” (pdf), and "Using Liberal Rights to Enforce Racial Capitalism"
*Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities” (pdf)
Guest: Professor Jodi Melamed
Nov 6: class meets without professor
*Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty (e-book)
Nov 13: racial reproduction technologies
#Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
Guest: Professor Ruha Benjamin
Nov 20: surrogacy and outsourcing reproduction
*Kalindi Vora, Life Support (e-book)
*Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski, “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor” (pdf)
*Sophie Lewis, “Full Surrogacy Now” (e-link)
#Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Guest: Professor Kalindi Vora
Dec 5: queer diaspora kinship
*Chandan Reddy, “Asian Diasporas” (pdf), “Race and the Critique of Marriage” (pdf), and “Freedom’s Amendments,” Intro to Freedom with Violence (e-book)
*Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Belongings” (pdf)
#Patricia Powell, The Pagoda
Guest: Professor Chandan Reddy
Further Reading
Akhter, Farida. “Eugenic and Racist Premise of Reproductive Rights and Population Control”
Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Land, Law, and Racial Regimes
Briggs, Laura. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump
Brown, Kimberly Juanita. The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary
Cahill, Cathleen. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of The United States Indian Service
Camp, Stephanie. Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex
Davidson, Cathy and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres
Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class
Eng, David. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
Fixmer-Oraiz, Natalie. Homeland Maternity: U.S. Security and the New Reproductive Regime
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56-80
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America; “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression”; “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor”
Grewal, Inderpal. “’Security Moms’ in the Early 20th-Century United States: The Gender of Security Neoliberalism”
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
Lewis, Sophie. Full Surrogacy Now
Loud, Jenna, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge, eds., Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis
Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
Nelson, Jennifer. Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts
Oh, Arrisa. To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption
Parreñas, Rhacel. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work
Romero, Mary. Maid in the U.S.A.
Schuller, Kyla. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century
Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West
Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
Sudbury, Julia, ed. Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex