Citizens and Subjects: Race, Place and Power
What do eating turtles, dressing up, riding out a flood, bribing govt. officials to get a birth certificate in the country of your birth, being jobless have in common?
This course seeks to explore the ways in which states have created and imagined "community" by selecting a few people over others, choosing to highlight one set of issues over others, and developing resources in a way that favors particular communities, leaving large swaths of people without. It focuses as well on the ways in which those deemed dispensable create new ways of living under these various states of siege. What other forms of community are possible beyond those that already exist, and what kind of diversities are possible. This course is built around problems that people face in the Atlantic world and beyond it. Problems that are solvable. The question is how do we go about solving some of these problems that have stalled the quest for more inclusionary less fractured communities. At the end of the course, students will be expected to have developed an understanding of ' manifestoes and concrete recommendations, to tackling real and everyday problems that occur in these various quests for homeliness.
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