As scholars, how do we confront the diverse histories of institutionalized forms of racial domination? In this class, we seek to draw comparisons between racism(s) in the Southern United States and in South Africa, without eliding the historical specificities of each case.  Thus, the central problematic of this course is to understand how racial categories are constructed through forms of social practice that combine ‘economic’ relations, the legal apparatuses of the state, and cultural practice. The numerous similarities, and even more numerous specificities of South Africa under Apartheid and the American South under the Jim Crow regime open a range of comparative possibilities. Several of these will be dealt with explicitly: racism in the aftermath of slavery; bonded labor; the limits of legal challenges to racially defined institutions; the construction of race vis-à-vis capitalism; racial codings of agriculture and "peasant" production; gender and racial construction; the ambiguous and incomplete character of resistance; and the legacies of institutionalized racism.  The prime of expectation of students then, is to consider the complexity of two of the most famous contexts of racial domination in the twentieth century and to identify many similarities among the multiple differences offered by the assigned readings and class discussion.  The hope is through an explicitly comparative discussion of these two incredibly unique social and historical locales, we’ll be able to shed further light on the character of each society and global questions of racial domination.