Did you get through that whole title? Yeah? Congrats, you might as well just go to the damn lecture, then, at Russell House this afternoon:

In Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality and in Society Must be Defended, Michel Foucault develops a genealogy of race and racism from their origin in what he calls the race struggles in the sixteenth century to their transformation into biological racism with the birth of biopower and the biopower state in the nineteenth century. Professor Dupuy will argue that Foucault’s argument does not hold, theoretically or historically. Theoretically because there is no necessary connection or continuity between the concept of race in sixteenth century Europe that referred to generational or filial lines of descent without imputing the transmission of immutable characteristics, and biological racism that assumes the existence of such fixed and inherited characteristics. Historically because the idea of race in the biological sense emerged first on the ground in the European colonial conquest of the Americas, the struggles against the native populations, and the subsequent enslavement of Africans to provide the labor force for the plantation economy before it was more fully theorized, codified, and systematized into ideologies of racial superiority and inferiority in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.