Race Critical Theories

Race Critical Theories¶

is a collaborative network supporting open access research, writing, organizing, and pedagogy initiatives centered on race, ethnicity, and media – broadly conceived. The project builds on the GEM Lab’s 2020-21 race critical theories lecture and workshop www⁄series and aims to establish and support a decentralized open syllabus platform involving scholars, educators, artists, activists, and other community partners. ¹

It borrows its conceptual orientation from Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg’s 2001 eponymous ⁄collection. The volume, which both gathered seminal scholarship on race and racism from the 1980s and 1990s, alongside newly commissioned responses to that work, sought to “look back reflectively as a way forward.” Taking up this critical call at the present conjuncture, RCT aims both to examine the specificities of race and racism in Canada, North America, and globally – settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, white supremacy, ethno-nationalism, among other critical and intersecting issues – but also to locate these problems within subnational and transnational structures and structures of feeling. This is both to take up Essed and Goldberg’s claim that race and racism have no singular national identity – “the particularities of racial configurations and racist manifestations anywhere are linked to their expression in some more or less direct and complex way everywhere” – and to assemble syllabus provocations and resources that speak to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the global idea of race. After da Silva, this “global idea” helps us to frame our commitment to examining not just the implications race and racialization have on social arrangements, both locally and across geopolitical contexts, but also the manner in which the concept of race shapes our capacity to conceive possibilities beyond our given world.

1. Rather than following from a particular concept or milieu, the RCT project aims to establish an open syllabi and resource network that is at once locally situated and globally engaged. This means accounting for diverse local and translocal experiences that do not assume North America as the normative horizon. As such, we must account for and be accountable to our own situatedness (such as the convener’s location in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, at Concordia University, on Turtle Island). We invite others to join this collaborative network and contribute provocations and resources that speak to their own communities and entanglements, all the while addressing larger frictions or affinities at the interface of race, ethnicity, and media.
   
   
2. By seeking to amplify the divergent ways race and racialization operate with/in different geographic and cultural contexts, the RCT project openly embraces the impossibility of being finished. Here, the indefinite is taken up as a critical imperative released from completion’s normative grasp. The dispersal of authorial responsibility amongst our contributors seeks to animate, rather than resolve, triangular tensions between race and racialization as concurrently local, global and onto-epistemological formations. Our aim is to gesture toward a varying abundance rather than a closed schema—a way of doing, knowing and sharing knowledge that is mindful of the shifting ways the concept of race arranges presuppositions that inform our capacity to be and live together. As Nahum Chandler reminds us: “There is no contemporary discourse that is free or independent of the itinerary of the concept of race.”
   
   
3. The unfinished or in-process nature of this syllabus network also speaks to our interest in bringing together distinct communities, disciplines, problems, etc., into a conversation of productive discomfort or incommensurability. In line with Tuck & Yang, the RCT project is committed to an “ethic of incommensurability,” and all the complexity this entails. Our approach and invitation is not solutionist, but one that recognizes solidarity as tenuous, uneven, fragile, yet necessary.
   

Who We Are¶

Race Critical Theories was initiated by faculty and students in the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab, and is convened by May Chew, Matthias Domingo Mushinski, Joshua Neves, Balbir K. Singh and Gregorio Pablo Rodríguez-Arbolay.

Contributors to the syllabus include: David Bering-Porter, Darren Byler, Michelle Cho, Bruno Cornellier, Richard Fung, Christine Goding-Doty, Aynur Kadir, Amy Lee, Nelly Pinkrah, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Jeremy Tai, Ishita Tiwary, Gabrielle Williams, Eszter Zimanyi, and others.

Call for Participants¶

Please contact us if you would like to submit a collaborative entry to the syllabus or join the organizing collective ⁄here.