Special Topics: Black Lives and Black Protests in the Americas and the Caribbean

Catalog description

In all societies, present and historical, people have joined together to press for or against social change. In this course, we are most interested in the struggles of people who imagined and sometimes- even if only briefly- lived in ways other than those imposed violently by the “over-represented (Western bourgeois) ethnoclass human figure of Man.” We focus on the rebellions of the survivors of the Middle Passage who challenged “the inequality of the races” to re-define blackness and to “counteract the imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths.” We pay special attention to these visionary thinkers and doers who made claims on how to organize human (and non-human) life on the planet, thereby re-shaping modernity or rather giving shape to alternative modernities (and in this case, black modernities). Studying black social movements in various historical and national contexts then allows us to ultimately reflect on more general questions about the nature of political power, conflict, and legitimacy, as well as the relationship between human agency, social structure, historical change, and identity formation and politics in the modern world. In this course, we begin with the perspective that culture is politics and politics is culture. We depart from the theoretical frameworks that view rebellions as irrational outbursts or as strategic and rational dissent to an approach that views organized and seemingly un-organized movements of people as struggles over meaning and value. This perspective challenges traditional Marxist critiques that so-called “new” social movements are products of postmodern concerns and angsts. As such, we recognize that identity politics are underpinned by demands not only for recognition but also for the redistribution of resources and material goods. Consequently, the control and use of land and water (and air) is fundamental to these claims…