What might Vybz Kartel, Queen Elizabeth I, and Kim Kardashian tell us about this thing called ‘race’? Or how do we make sense of someone like Eileen Clemetson-Goffe, a biracial Jamaican woman who passed for a white person in Nazi Germany? And why would the American Anthropological Association release a statement in 1998 declaring that there is no biological basis for race? 

Is it possible that examining the past can help us to produce interesting answers to these questions? 

This course will introduce students to histories of race in the Caribbean and the United States through film, literature, historical archives, and cutting edge scholarly arguments. We will spend nine weeks meditating on the concept as we strive to engage three questions each time: How does race structure our societies? How have people responded to ideas about race? Why and how have these ideas shifted over time?

Class sessions will include visits to museums and historical archives in Kingston and St. Andrew. There will be three major assignments to get students exposed to research in this area.