Race and Nature: How Real is Race?

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

How Real is Race?

"There are important reasons not to eliminate all considerations of biology and the body from our discussions of race, provided we understand biology as mutually constituted with culture and as significantly less determinate that it is often taken to be. In particular ... an important dimension of what race is and how it functions results from the interaction of social ideologies of race with visible human difference" (324).

Michael Hames-Garcia, "How Real is Race?" In Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman . Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2008: 307-339.

1 comment:

UnknownMay 27, 2013 at 7:50 AM
Hi Lance. Here, too, while I'm not familiar with this text, I'm interested in what seems to be a problem with its premise: not all racial difference constitutes "visible human difference." Does this essay deal with racial ambiguity at all? Are you interested in applying this to a context of c19 theorizations of race? From what little of this chapter that I can read online, the title of this piece seems not to best represent what's at stake here (which seems more interesting, to me, than the question it poses.)
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

What We Are Talking About

Participants in this roundtable discussion will examine the current state of the dialogue between critical race studies and ecocriticism on the textual ground of 19^th-century American literature. We will consider questions at the intersection of race and nature such as the following: How have discourses of race and nature coevolved, coincided, or interacted? How do considerations of race complicate notions of post-humanism and animality? What is the future of the critical conversation about raced bodies in the material world?

Initial Participants

· Joshua Bennett, Doctoral Candidate, Princeton University, working on A Mutiny of Objects: Matters of Life, Death and Animacy in 19th Century Black Performance

· Brigitte Fielder, Associate Lecturer, University of Wisconsin, working on Animal Humanism: Species, Race, and Humanity in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures

· James Finley, Doctoral Candidate, University of New Hampshire, working on ‘Violence Done to Nature’: Free Soil and the Environment in Antebellum Antislavery Writing

· Ian Finseth, Associate Professor, University of North Texas, author of Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1865

· Hsuan Hsu, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis, author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010).

· Jennifer James, Associate Professor, George Washington University, author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature, the Civil War - World War II.

· Lance Newman, Professor, Westminster College, working on Landscapes of Resistance: the Radical Pastoral in Transatlantic Romanticism

· Britt Rusert, Assistant Professor, U. Mass. Amherst, working on Radical Empiricism: Fugitive Science and the Struggle for Emancipation.