AFRICAN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

This course explores the history and the present of African American political theory and practice, through an analysis of theoretical texts, pamphlets/manifestos, and popular culture from the periods of the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, civil rights, late 20th century Black feminist thought, and contemporary Black politics and culture. This course emphasizes the way that Black activists, scholars, and/or artists have responded to eternal questions in political thought about freedom, oppression, resistance, citizenship, democracy, etc., from the standpoint of Blackness in the United States. Moreover, the course is not just African-American Political Thought, it is also American Political Thought, insofar as Black theorizations and experiences of America provides a vital framework for interrogating the American experiment, citizenship and non-citizenship, American slavery and its afterlives, inclusion and exclusion, liberation and domination, and ultimately what “America” is and what it does (and perhaps could) mean to be American.