In this session we will learn about how race was was developed and codified through performance and pseudoscience. We will see how people thought about race before the trans-atlantic slave trade in antiquity and how/why that changed with the slave trade to give us the understanding of race we have now.

In this session we will use our readings of Sarah F. Derbew, Noémie Ndiaye, Nicholas R. Jones, from session 1 and Saidiya Hartman, Rizvanna Bradley, and Matthew Morrison from this session to examine how race, racial performance, and racial impersonation are explored in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.

In this session, we will use our readings of Derbew, Ndiaye, Jones, Hartman, Bradley, M. Morrison and Bamboozled to examine how race, racial performance, and racial impersonation are explored in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and the film Passing by Rebecca Hall.

In our final session we will use our readings of Derbew, Ndiaye, Jones, M. Morrison, T. Morrison, Bamboozeld, Bradley, Hartman and Passing  to examine how race, racial performance, and racial impersonation are explored in Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism, and The Rachel Divide by Laura Brownson.