This course uses a range of media – including photographs, video, music, film, and literature – to explore Black intellectual history in Africa, North America, the Caribbean, and Europe since the early nineteenth century. In doing so, we will have access to resources that challenge oversimplified accounts of Black history (e.g. narratives that deny Black agency or the capacity of Black people to analyse the modern world). We will study artistic, activist, and scholarly work produced inside and outside of academia that has addressed key themes and issues ranging from nationalism to racism, safe spaces on college campuses, environmental risks, ecological scarcities, and the redemptive power of culture. Topics covered in the course include: the marketing and reading of slave narratives; anti-lynching crusades and the visual archive of mob violence; contested memories of the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism; the relationship between anti-colonialism and existentialism; Black Consciousness Movements and the place of sex, love, and desire in discourses of liberation; and current struggles against mass incarceration and police brutality.
Assessment: Assessment for the course is based on a series of reading reflections, media and social media analyses, and a final research project that may take the form of an academic essay, creative non-fiction, or a multimedia project (such as a podcast).
