Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-22)

Topic

Black Political Thought

Instructors

Barnor Hesse
8474913775
1860 Campus Dr Crowe 5-131

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-425: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Between 2015 and 2021 the political movement Black Lives Matter emerged in the US and different parts of the world, concerned with the mobilizations against police violence towards Black populations and oppositions to structural racism and white supremacy. In 2020 the scale and longevity of Black Lives Matter was such that the New York Times referred to it as the largest social movement in US history. While the UK Guardian newspaper described the BLM protests as the largest surge of demonstrations in the UK since the slavery abolitionist movement in the early 19th century. Indeed, BLM protests were global in 2020. Certainly, there had been nothing like it since the anti-colonial movements and civil rights movements of the late 1950s and mid-1960s or the Black power movement of the 1970s, all of which had reverberations and replications among different Black populations across the world (e.g., Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean). Clearly then Black protest, Black radical politics and Black-led demonstrations are nothing new. The intellectual and political question confronting us is how we should understand the motivations and ideas involved in Black radical politics. This course seeks to introduce students to the historical and political underpinnings of issues and questions raised by the BLM movement, examining their meaning in relation to what Cedric Robinson famously referred to as the Black Radical Tradition. Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the relation between history and theory in engaging with histories of Anti-Slavery, Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Racism and in developing analyses of Black political thought in relation to different Black political movements in the making of the modern world (e.g. civil rights, Black Power, Black Feminism, Black Lives Matter).

RECOMENDED TEXTS:

Christopher Paul Harris, 2023, To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain and Care, Princeton University Press
Richard Iton, 2008, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, US: Oxford University Press.
Shatema Threadcraft, 2016, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic, US: Oxford University Press

Enrollment Requirements

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