Faculty Seminar Series: New Perspectives in Critical Race Studies
Affiliate Faculty Rose Salseda (Art & Art History) demonstrates the power of race as an interpretive and contextualizing force for understanding art.
Perlita R...
A panel of CCSRE-affiliated faculty spoke to a full house on Tuesday, February 25th, for a transdisciplinary discussion centered on "New Perspectives in Critical Race Studies," addressing the significance of the study of race and ethnicity in their respective academic disciplines as well as in various democratic institutions. Faculty Affiliate Vaughn Rasberry (English) served as moderator and fielded questions from the audience, which ranged from the ethics of national and other boundaries to transantional racist responses to COVID-19.
The range of topics addressed by Asad Asad (Soc), Matt Clair (Soc), Wendy Salkin (Philosophy), and Rose Salseda (Art & Art History) included the strengths and limits of foundational race concepts, the relationships between racialization and immigration, race and racism within the criminal justice system, and the ways specific research projects fill voids in the trajectory of certain fields.
As co-author of the Encyclopedia of Sociology's entry on "racism," Clair was a particularly appropriate person to present these definitions, and he emphasized that the most significant context for understanding race was the existence of racism: the long history of colonialism, slavery, and other forms of racial oppression that have elevated whiteness and marginalized groups defined as racial others. Clair's own work seeks to understand how differential experiences within the criminal justice system among racial groups emerge from racist practices.
Underscoring the power of images, Salseda, shown in the above photo, presented two artworks in order to demonstrate how race informs our practices of reading art. She also challenged the dominant tendency in art history to dismiss considerations of race in favor of form.
Salseda began with Frank Stella's 1959 work "Zambezi," part of his black painting series that was at the forefront of the artistic movement known as minimalism. Salseda noted that minimalism arose at the same time as the civil rights movement, yet, most accounts of minimalism do not consider this crucial historical context.
Salseda then displayed the 2005-7 work "White Minority" by Juan Capistran, which re-envisioned "Zambezi" and mixed in visual elements taken from the logo of the musical group Black Flag. "White Minority," Salseda explained, was a Black Flag song in which its Puerto Rican lead singer imagined himself as a xenophobic white fearful of becoming a demographic minority in the U.S. Capistran's work resignified the meaning of the white lines in Stella's piece, and drew attention to the fact that it was named after a Harlem night club and produced during a time of racial conflict.
Wendy Salkin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, described the approach of analytic philosophy to the study of race. Salkin described the questions that analytic philosophy takes up: what is the concept of race and what is its ontological status? What is the concept of racism and does race or racism possess a conceptual priority over the other term? What are the moral and legal considerations involved in understanding racism? What is racial injustice and how should a theory of justice respond? Ought our legal definitions track our moral theories of racism or vice versa? Salkin described a class she teaches on W.E.B. DuBois, which analyzes DuBois' democratic theory. Salkin argued that DuBois' theory of democracy was unlike any other contemporaneous theory on offer. Salkin closed by describing her current work, which looks at the ethics of informal political representation - meaning representation that is not based on any formal selection procedures - of marginalized and unjustly oppressed groups. Do those groups, Salkin asked, endure conditions that may justify informal representation?
Asad L. Asad, Assistant Professor of Sociology, described his work as looking at how the distribution of material and symbolic resources depends upon factors such as immigration status, race, and ethnicity. He gave a fascinating account of how whiteness has expanded and contracted in terms of the population groups it included, based on immigration flows. 1965 was a particularly important turning point, Asad claimed, because it abolished the racist national origin quotas that privileged Western European immigration to the U.S. However, while the boundaries of legal whiteness expanded as a result of legislative reforms such as the 1965 immigration reform, Asad argued that scholars needed to also account for the lived experience of exclusion from whiteness and the imagined polity and civic body of the U.S. Asad described how his work challenged a narrow focus on the precarity of undocumented immigrants, because even non-citizens with legal status in the U.S. could lose their right to stay in the U.S. based on the caprice of the state.