- Black Political Thought

Catalog description

This course focuses on black political thought in the United States and around the world by considering how Afrocentric scholars, activists, and intellectuals have considered and acted to realize justice for Black persons (and thus for all persons). The course will broadly focus on the experience of blackness since ~1500CE, also known as “modernity.” This choice of periodization is based on arguments made by foundational theorists of race such as Orlando Patterson, Omi & Winant, and Charles Mills, among others, who argue that racial formation is a sociohistorical process that unfolds over time and place, such that categories of race are neither eternal, unchangeable, or material, but subject to creation, evolution, and transformation through intellectual, political, social, and legal struggles. While we may experience race as real, the creation of race as a category of meaning was a political project. We will pay special attention to the experience and political significance of enslavement, colonization, and Afro-independence struggles to consider the meaning of freedom and grapple with contemporary legacies of violence. How does Black Political Thought enrich our understanding of significant political questions such as the nature of political equality, justice, and democracy? The course may include, among others, thinkers such as David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Franz Chinua Achebe, Fanon, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Orlando Patterson, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Michael Dawson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Davis, and Claudia Rankine.