Economy and Race (CT3666T)

Content

Where it has often been contested that all political concepts are secularised theological concepts, this unit experiments with the idea that all economic concepts are secularised theological concepts. Throughout this unit students will engage in an economic-theological archaeology of the idea of economy, paying attention to the theological origins and modifications of economic concepts, e.g., debt, interest, labour, property, possession, and credit. Following the secularisation of various concepts will illuminate the role of economic-theological concepts in forms of racialisation and colonisation. The unit, therefore, will pay particular attention to the recent literature in political theology and religion on the coterminous production of the racial imagination and the emergence of modern global market economies.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

Elective undergraduate unit requiring a foundation level CT unit as prerequisite.

Pedagogy

Flipped classroom.

Indicative Bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio., The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Anidjar, Gil., Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
• Goodchild, Philip., Theology of Money (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
• Jennings, Willie James., The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale, 2010).
• Masuzawa, Tomoko., The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
• Mbembe, Achille., Critique of Black Reason (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
  
• Ferreira da Silva, Denise., Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
  
• Pattel-Gray, Anne., The Great White Flood: Racism in Australia Critically Appraised from an Aboriginal Historico-Theological Point of View (Atlanta: AAR, 1998).
• Patterson, Orlando., Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
  
• Singh, Devin., Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). ‘

Assessment