AFRS 271 - Theorizing Global Blackness and Indigeneity

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as POLI 271) Recent years have seen simultaneous explosions of political struggle against both anti-Black racism (from Ferguson 2014 to Minneapolis 2020) and the colonial dispossession of Indigenous communities (from Canada’s Idle No More in 2012 to #NoDAPL in 2016). But many organizers and theorists alike continue to draw hard lines between the historical experiences of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, and consequently between Black and Indigenous struggles in the present. This course in comparative political theory expands our framework for approaching these questions in two ways: historically, by locating Blackness and Indigeneity in their broader context and shared genesis; and geographically, by considering these as intertwining and overlapping global phenomena. By engaging theorists and practitioners from across the Global South, we think through questions including Afro-Indigenous histories (from the Seminoles to Latin America), African Indigeneity, the settler colonialism and indigeneity Palestine, and what it would mean to reconfigure new, future identities in the course of shared struggles. George Ciccariello-Maher.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS