Graduate Topics in African American Studies (480-0-20)

Topic

Citations of Black Political Thought

Instructors

Barnor Hesse
8474913775
1860 Campus Dr Crowe 5-131

Meeting Info

Harris Hall L04: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course undertakes a critical theoretical re-reading of W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935) as a foundational text of contemporary Black Political Thought. Rather than approaching the work as a revisionist historiography of the Reconstruction era, the course reads Black Reconstruction as a paradigmatic instance of what we will call Citations of Black Political Thought: a method by which Black social life, struggle, and reflection are rendered not as objects of knowledge but as sources of conceptual production.
The course is organized around two central challenges. First, it elaborates the concepts of Black Reconstruction and the Black Constitutive Outside as the theoretical basis for this re-reading. Here, Black Reconstruction is not confined to a historical period but is treated as a conceptual methodology through which Black political thought can be understood as interrupting and reconfiguring the terms of the Western idea of the political. The Black Constitutive Outside, in turn, is a conceptual methodological site from which Black political thought emerges—not as an external supplement to the western idea of the political but as that which both founds and destabilizes it through alternative concepts.
Second, the course derives and re-reads a set of fundamental political concepts—politics, whiteness, Blackness, freedom, slavery, and race—through Du Bois's conceptual method. These are not treated as stable categories but as historically and theoretically transformed through the analytic operations of Black Reconstruction. For instance, politics is re-specified beyond institutional governance as a field structured by antagonism between Black life politics and white sovereign order; whiteness is interrogated as a political formation of sovereignty rather than identity; Blackness is approached as a site of political articulation rather than structural abjection; freedom is reconstructed through the unfinished project of abolition democracy; slavery is re-read as a constitutive relation within modern, colonial-racial political order rather than a past condition; and race is analyzed as a structuring, relational logic of the political itself.

Class Materials (Required)

WEB Du Bois (1935) ‘Black Reconstruction'

Enrollment Requirements

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