Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity (MA)

Birkbeck’s MA Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity stretches across the social sciences and arts and humanities and explores: debates on 'race' and racism, multiculture and postcoloniality; empire and the formation of modern Britain and contemporary transnational political communities, social identities and urban cultures; connections between histories of colonisation and contemporary social formations and inequalities in the UK; how local debates on 'race' and racism are shaped by the global geopolitics of the twenty-first century. The programme explores connections between interlocking colonial histories across the globe and our ordinary, local, everyday life here in contemporary Britain. It focuses on a broad range of subjects such as histories of colonisation, systems of slavery, indenture and other forms of colonial labour, the concept of 'race' and the invention of 'the West'; colonial cultures, nationalisms, 'respectability' and the invention of 'whiteness';  histories of criminalisation; histories of anti-racist and anti-fascist resistance; theorising culture, community, hybridity and creolisation; postcolonial belonging, place, urban cultures and diaspora; 'race' and 'beauty'; contemporary racial nationalisms and  religious authoritarian movements; 'The War on Terror'; 'whiteness' and 'race', gender, sexuality and desire.