This is a space for the Understanding Race Masters of Research Unit I run at Western Sydney University. The space will include my reflections on the texts we are reading as well as student blog posts.
I was waiting for a sandwich on Tuesday afternoon and idling on Twitter when I read Falguni Sheth‘s tweet announcing that Distinguished Professor Charles Wade Mills had died. I expleted loudly in shock and had to apologise to the person working behind the counter! Charles W.…
This week we looked at how race and gender are co-constitutive constructs, specifically focusing on the centrality of reproduction in racialisation under conditions of slavery, the different relationships to work of Black, Indigenous and migrant women as opposed to bourgeois white women, and the colonial context…
Today we had a good discussion about Stuart Hall’s 1997 lecture, ‘Race, the Floating Signifier’ and the accompanying text reproduced in The Fateful Triangle, ‘Race, the Sliding Signifier’. We built on work done over the previous two weeks on W.E.B. Du Bois’ essay ‘The Concept of…
The work on this course, Understanding Race, is a work in progress. When I began teaching it in 2018 I had the ambition of providing different content each year, or developing a new theme. The first year was a collection of recent books and articles that…
In preparing for this new year of Understanding Race, the Masters of Research class I teach at Western Sydney University, I have been thinking about the call to speak more about race in settler colonial ‘Australia’. As I have written, there is an elision of race…
I was kindly invited by the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University to give a talk on postcolonial and decolonial thought for its Key Thinkers & Concepts series. I have posted in the slides and notes here. 1. I wish to acknowledgement the Darug people,…
In the age of Black Lives Matter, we have become accustomed to hearing concepts like ‘institutional’ and ‘systemic racism’ openly discussed. On one side, there are calls to recognise the extent to which race shapes experience, access and opportunity even in so-called ‘successful multicultural’ societies like…
The Masters of Research course I run at Western Sydney University is back, beginning on July 23. As usual if you want to come along (face-to-face only) or are along with us, you are welcome. Usually, the course has a special theme. In 2019 that was…
Continuing our focus on racial capitalism, Understanding Race discussed the relationship between race and class with a focus on Race and the Undeserving Poor by Robbie Shilliam. Using the book Futures of Black Radicalism, and in particular the chapter by Nikhil Pal Singh, we explored the…
This is the text from this week’s lecture on Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson. The presentation focuses on Chapter I of the book and some sections of Part II dealing with the invention of ‘The Negro’. This is the merge…