Teaching

The Poor and the Powerless: Racial Capitalism in the African Diaspora

This course engages the theory, ideology and practice of racial capitalism in the African diaspora from the perspective of critical political economy. Racial capitalism is defined as a global system of accumulation, surplus value extraction, and labor exploitation constituting processes of racial dispossession, imperialism, colonialism, and war. It examines outcomes of Trans-Atlantic enslavement, direct colonial administration, developmentalism, neocolonialism, and globalization and their concomitant discourses of white supremacy and racialization. Additionally, the course analyzes the manifestations of these phenomena over time, how they are described and represented as historical processes, and the manifold ways they have been contested and challenged by exploited and oppressed populations. This will be done against a backdrop of empirical, theoretical, and cases study representations of the actualities of racial capitalism, its outcomes, its organization, and its practice. The Poor and the Powerless will also explore proposals for alternative economic approaches and formations that center the flourishing and self-determination of racialized groups.

 Introduction to Africana Studies

This course introduces students to the content and contours of Africana Studies as a field of inquiry, including a survey of its genealogy, antecedents, development, and future challenges. In particular, it centers the interrelationship between epistemology and politics: that is, how issues of race, racism, and racialization were studied, defined, and codified into knowledge, and how this study was foundational to African descendants’ activism, protest, and empowerment. The course covers historic and contemporary experiences of African-descended peoples, particularly in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and other less-explored routes of the African Diaspora. The work of activist-scholar William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectuals in modern history, structures the course. In many ways, his life and intellectual production embody the Africana Studies project.

 To Make the World Anew: Black Liberation in the Twentieth Century

This freshman seminar is designed to introduce students to a liberal arts approach to learning, which includes the development of critical and creative talents through broad and rigorous studies in the liberal arts disciplines, in our case Africana Studies. Throughout the term, it employs a variety of approaches, including discussion, critical reading, and college-level writing to explore how African descendants envisioned and agitated for a world free of racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. Overarching questions we seek to answer include: what local, national, and international strategies did persons racialized as “Black” use to improve their social and material conditions? How did the intersections of race, class, gender, and nationality shape Black insurgencies throughout the twentieth century? And, which individuals, organizations, and ideas were important to these struggles?

 The Black Intellectual Tradition

This course focuses on theories, frameworks, and approaches that constitute the Black and Africana Studies intellectual traditions in the United States, primarily in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These include Black Nationalism, Black Liberalism, Black Communism and Socialism, Black Feminism, Afrocentrism, and Afropessmism. It pays particular attention to Black ideas and epistemologies about, and strategies and struggles for, justice, recognition, self-determination, and freedom. Classic and contemporary conventional (e.g., books, journal articles) and unconventional (e.g., newspaper articles, manifestoes, petitions) scholarship on the Black experience in the United States and the African Diaspora will be read and discussed. The course will guide students to consider how this intellectual tradition created the conditions for, and continue to shape, Africana Studies.

 Black Radical Political Thought, 1919-1969

This course examines the history of Black radical political thought in the United States between 1919 and 1969. It explores internationalist and diasporic linkages that shaped, and were shaped by, Black American forms of activism, protest, and intellectual engagement. In the context of this course, "Black Radicalism" refers to militant politics and thought that fundamentally challenge economic exploitation, structural and material dispossession, social inequality, political marginalization, and private and state-sanctioned antiblackness on the national and global levels. The political ideologies and practices considered include: revolutionary Black nationalism, pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, socialism and communism, and Black gender insurgencies. The course will pay special attention to the sociohistorical and political economic contexts that give rise to different Black radical formations.

 Black Revolution on Campus

Black Revolution on Campus explores the student insurgencies on college and university campuses throughout the United States, starting in 1968, that led to the formation of what came to be known as Black Studies/Africana Studies. Students across the country organized hundreds of protests, strikes, boycotts, and building occupations. These strategies shaped, and were shaped by, an era of unrest, retaliation, negotiation, and reform that fundamentally changed campuses across the United States. Black students, along with their Third World and progressive white allies, demanded that academia serve their communities and provide a “more relevant education.” Relatedly, this course explores the linked efforts at establishing alternative educational institutions in Black communities to promote self-determination, cultural re-location, and Pan-African unity. Students will consider the influence of contemporaneous insurgencies, including Black Power, the anti-war movement, second and third wave feminism, and Third World anticolonial movements, on the formation and development of Black Studies/Africana Studies, independent Black educational institutions, and broader struggles for Black liberation beyond college and university campuses.