The Politics of Remembrance: Black Women

This course is a general overview of the methods and approaches to the histories written on slavery and resistance. In it, we will consider the expansive reach of the Transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, its relationship to modern-day capitalism, and the contemporary debates on reparations. Students will learn to interpret and read various sources that contemplate the political and socioeconomic realities of slave societies. We will mainly examine the experiences of enslaved African-descended people through Black feminist approaches and methods. Therefore, the course will mainly focus on the location of women in these societies and the construction of gendered and racialized identities within these frameworks. In effect, this course explores how Black people, particularly Black women, have organized resistance strategies during slavery and through the re-narration of slave histories in academic and public spaces.

In the second half of the course, students will consider the relationship between studies on slavery and the collective public memory of slavery in Europe, coastal Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America. To better understand activism and the construction of memory, students will visit various “memory spaces” in New York City, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the African Burial Ground, and the Flatbush Burial Ground. As this course demonstrates, the history of slavery is often written and narrated outside of official institutions and academic spaces. From this perspective, we will also engage with alternative methods (i.e., the body/corporeal forms) to narrate the slave past in theater, public protest, and “rest as activism” through outlets like the “Unheard Voices” theater workshop and yoga/ meditative practices. Overall, the course will unpack issues of gender and race by studying slavery and its narration throughout the transatlantic world and how the descendants of enslaved people have “rewrote” these histories in their intellectual work, art, and political activism