Black Internationalism and Its Discontents

Catalog description

This seminar reassesses the broad influence of internationalism in African American letters from the age of abolition to the present. We will be concerned with literary writings that foreground the global struggle of black subjects to assert political agency in relation to Western imperialism and transatlantic slavery. Equally crucial will be a reconsideration of an established body of theoretical writings that conceive of diasporic modes of solidarity and cultural expression as alternatives to the black nationalist intellectual tradition. Authors include Martin Delany, W.E.B Du Bois, Richard Wright, Angela Davis, Brent Edwards, and Paul Gilroy.