POLI 272 - African American Political Thought

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The focus of this course is African American political thinkers’ articulations of struggles for citizenship, humanity, and freedom under the United States’ systems of racial domination from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. We will pay close attention to the variety of meanings that these thinkers give to these concepts, given the normative understandings of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and nation that define their respective historical contexts. We will also attend to the body as a site of both oppression and resistance. Moving more or less chronologically from the mid-19th century to the present, the course pairs historical texts with contemporary scholarship on the themes of enslavement and kinship; violence and resistance; feminism; genre and medium; black existentialism; and queer politics. The course will include texts by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Saidiya Hartman, and Marlon Riggs, among others. Ms. Menzel.

Two 75-minute periods.