Claremont Graduate University: American Race Theory

From Keywords

American Race Theory

Course Description

What do we mean when we talk about “race?” Do we mean the way a person looks, a person’s country of origin, biology, religion and/or culture? The answer is that race has meant any and/or all of these things in the United States at one time or another. These shifting understandings of the word “race” reflect the fact that as Kwame Anthony Appiah has written, race is nothing that should be considered “real.” However, the concept or fiction of race had very real consequences in the early U.S. American republic in so far as it shaped what came to be called “American” notions of identity and self. This course explores some of the key ways in which early U.S. Americans helped to fashion a national “American” identity in racial and ethnic terms. We are considering the shifting meanings of words like Creole, white, black, African, slave, mulatto, Christian, Indian, and in the end, American. By examining how early American authors received, developed and then modified the definition of these words along with the general concept of “race,” this course challenges static notions of identity, showing how fluid, ambiguous, and indeed, contested the categories of race and ethnicity once were and remain.

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Our Keywords

Our keyword is Creole

The word Creole has held a variety of different meanings in the history of the English language. The goal of our course is to chart those different meanings, usages, and implications, especially as they appear in 18th- and 19th-century U.S. American literature. The word Creole is an identity marker that is sometimes used as a noun (for food, language, or a person), sometimes used as an adjective (a flavor, a type of behavior, a kind of music), and has referred to people with a variety of phenotypes since its introduction into the U.S. American lexicon. What, however, have been the political, social, and even economic ramifications of such a category or marker? This is only one of the many questions that I hope our keywords essay will explore.

Collaboratory Leads: Marlene Daut, Claremont Graduate University

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Instructions for First-Time Users

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