After a few weeks silence due to other commitments, I am returning with the eighth blog post in the series to attend to the themes of borders and mobilities. My comments respond to Reece Jones’s book, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move which in sum…
This week we read Satnam Virdee’s Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, a book which takes seriously the role of Irish Catholics, Jews, African and South Asian migrants in the British left from the 1700s to the 1980s. I have committed to writing shorter blogs in the interests of…
This is the seventh blog in the Race Critical & Decolonial Sociology series. This week we are reading Darkmatters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne, recommended and gifted to me by Jessie Daniels (thank you!). This book is a detailed study of how our understandings of contemporary practices of…
Alexander Weheliye’s 2014 book, Habeas Viscus is a vital critique of two dominant accounts of the limits and contours of humanity: Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. But beyond providing us with a much needed problematisation of these two theories, what they omit, and the Eurocentrisms…
Lisa Lowe‘s 2015 book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, is the impetus for this week’s blog, the fifth in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series. This groundbreaking work challenges us to unread standard accounts of the development of capitalist modernity and political liberalism. It does…
This is the fourth blog post in my Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology series for my course at The New School Department of Sociology in Spring 2017. This week we are beginning to discuss books, mainly new works, in race critical studies. The rest of the…
This is the third contribution to the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series. In it I look at the argument advanced by David Theo Goldberg (2009) that a relational approach to the study of race and racism reveals more than a comparativist approach does. I…
The second post in the Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology blog series is a round-up of some of the central debates in postcolonial and decolonial thinking about epistemology. The class had a very interesting discussion where for example the historicity of Ramon Grosfoguel’s timeline was interrogated.…
This is the first in a series of posts for my graduate course, Race Critical and Decolonial Sociology offered during my Hans Speier Visiting Professorship at The New School in New York (Spring 2017). See the syllabus here. In Session 2, we discussed Robin D.G. Kelley’s…
Race Critical and decolonial sociology is premised on the idea that to understand politics in western modernity requires placing race and coloniality central to analyses. The course will therefore be grounded in political sociological, theoretical and historical sociological readings of race, racism, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, genocide,…