Jointly administered by the Departments of English and American Studies, this minor introduces you to key debates and theories in Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies (CRPS), the interdisciplinary study of the complex process of racialization. Students pursuing the CRPS minor are involved in the current debates and methods of this growing field.

Study in the minor is dedicated to parsing power relationships constituted by webs of social categories (such as race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality) at multiple degrees of scale, seeking to map the ways power is structured in social relations as well as through the range of categories at play in any given historical context. Work in this field is attentive to questions of material production, class, capital, and power, and is oriented transnationally and diasporically to global histories of indigeneity, colonialism, and empire.

CRPS comprises the cutting-edges of these fields as they have evolved in conversation with each other and with poststructuralist theory, integrating feminist and queer color critique at the turn of the millennium. Today this umbrella offers an interdisciplinary field with a distinctive historiography, methodology, and expanding canon. As an analytical framework, CRPS highlights dynamics of social categories as they relate to power, dedicated to critiques of inequity and exclusion in the U.S. and throughout the world.