Skip to main content

Black Historiography (440-0-20)

Instructors

Kennetta Hammond Perry

Meeting Info

University Library 3622: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

What are some of the major interpretative debates which have shaped the development of Black history and how might we begin to think about the histories of Black historical production? This graduate course will examine how scholars have shaped approaches to Black history and historical knowledge production across a number of themes. Topics will include gender and enslavement, emancipation in the Americas, decolonization and Black anti-colonial thought, Black agency and resistance, racial capitalism and Black internationalism. In exploring major historiographical debates on these topics, students will be encouraged to think critically about contested visions of ‘Black history' as an academic field of inquiry and as a political and social resource across the diaspora. Likewise students will be encouraged to consider how lines of interpretation and methodological approaches to Black history have changed over time.

Learning Objectives

• Students will develop a working conceptualization of major interpretative debates which have shaped the development Black historiographies.
• Students will be able to identify how Black historical studies have shaped how we think about concepts which have shaped the field of Black studies including but not limited to gender, slavery, racial capitalism, agency, resistance, decolonization, diaspora and internationalism.
• Students will be able to critically analyze sources and methods used to produced histories of Black life and Black political praxis.
• Students will be able to critically reflect upon the craft of writing and historicizing Black life.

Class Materials (Required)

Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives
Emily Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force
Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning With Slavery
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
Daina Berry, Price For Their Pound of Flesh
Adom Getachew, World-Making After Empire
Monique Badasse, Jah Kingdom
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
Dylan Penningroth, Before the Movement
Quito Swan, Pasifika Black

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: PRE-REG: Reserved for Black Studies majors & minors.