3.0

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Approaching black politics as a vital source of theoretical innovation and critical analysis, this course introduces students to key themes, trends, and thinkers within the literatures of modern black political thought. Black political thought constitutes not only a practice of theorization and conceptualization undertaken by African-descended peoples in response to experiences of racial domination and exclusion; it can also be understood as a critical practice that produces scholarship and political writings that situate racism and race-making at the core of the projects associated with Western modernity, and thus as formations that have affected many societies and civilizations, not only black people. Focusing primarily on the latter sense of black political thought, this course explores a series of writings that interrogate the intertwined legacies of the emergence of modernity, the elaboration of racial hierarchy, and black emancipatory struggles. Highlighting the central role played by racial domination in the formation of Western modernity, these texts complicate and challenge the underlying epistemic frames and modes of classification through which the Western tradition has made sense of such foundational political experiences and concepts as freedom, justice, liberation, community, and equality. Reading works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King, Jr., Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Angela Y. Davis, and others, students will critically engage a diverse range of methods and literary approaches within the literatures of modern black political thought for apprehending the historical and political significance of racial hierarchy in the modern world. They will also learn key conceptual resources provided by these traditions to attain a more sophisticated understanding of contemporary racial politics and its intersections with the politics of class, gender, nationality, and sexuality.