Slavery and Modernity

Catalog description

An interdisciplinary examination of Black slavery as both a historical event and an enduring condition. The course highlights the foundational role of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade in the making of European modernity, the white subject of rights and the black dispossessed nonbeing, liberal democracy, and contemporary regimes of black captivities. Special focus is given to the political and economic history of the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil as slavocracies and to the incomplete project of emancipation that renders Black citizenship at best elusive. Critical transnational perspective highlights the spatio-temporal continuum between plantation regimes and contemporary global racial apartheid.