Law, Literature, Race & Culture, University of Hawaii, Manoa (Richardson)

Law and Literature both inhabit the realm of interpretation, rhetoric, form, ethics and epistemology. They mediate our relationship to society and share how we imagine the world, each other and ourselves. In this course, we will read and analyze literary texts to explore issues that have been central to the scholarship and teaching of Critical Race Theory. How does the law inform how we talk about or imagine race? What is the social/political/legal/aesthetic construction of whiteness and how are black, brown, Asian, and native peoples constructed by these regimes? How does racism pervade civil institutions? What are the complex intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality? In what ways do subordinated and colonized communities internalize and reproduce racist idelogies, constructions and narratives? How do these communities resist racism and create counter narratives, oppositional texts, culture, morals, epistemology and law? This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.