Black Political Thought in Times of Crisis

Catalog description

Heightened authoritarianism, neo-liberal austerity and intensifying geo-political conflict in the contemporary moment provides an opportunity to reflect on how prior generations of thinkers, activists, artists, governments, formal political actors, and everyday people understood and responded to the economic, political, and cultural crises of their era. This course provides an opportunity to situate our epoch in a dhistorical and structural context, to understand black responses to fascism, imperialism, apartheid, ecological degradation, genocide, and other maladies produced by humans. These and related phenomena provide the backdrop to reflect on several key texts from the 20th and 21st century, and why such texts remain important outside their moment. The objective of this course is to examine several black liberal and left responses to highly unequal economic and political orders: solidarity movements, national sovereignty, and their limitations. One of the enduring, recurrent features of movements such as environmentalism, non-nuclear proliferation, anti-racism, feminism, and adjacent movements across time and space is their emphasis on ethical and moral suasion. These and other movements have not (could not) relied on powerful armies, technologies of destruction, and vast amounts of capital to make common cause for justice, equality, reparation, or retribution. In the third decade of the 21st century we can consider whether the ethico-political posture of liberal and left movements (residuals of 19th century thinking) remain viable discursive strategies in an era of post-truth.