Amidst a cast of characters and concepts ranging from Bartolome de las Casas to the myth of Ham, ideas from and about "scriptures" appear ever entangled with ideas by and about "races" in the transactions of modernity. What do we presume when we use the word "scriptures"? What do we now mean and what has often been meant by the term "race"? How and why did these two terms come to have any relationship to each other? Why, in the violent encounters of peoples, did these categories come to implicate each other? This course begins with these questions and explores how practices surrounding each term's imagination have fostered the construction of the other term in the contexts of modernity, specifically across dynamics of power. While this course will focus on the relationships between constructions of race in the post-1492 Atlantic world and "Christian scriptures," we will also consider other historical moments and places where "race" is engaged, as well as other texts and practices identified with "scriptures."