HIST 353 : Critical Black Voices: Africans in Diaspora

This seminar focuses on critiques of social relations of power by black intellectuals and artists of the African Diaspora. We study works by Jean-Jaques Dessalines, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Susie King Taylor, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Malcom X, Kwame Nkrumah, Angela Davis, Bessie Smith, Audre Lorde, Cheryl Harris, and others. To contextualize these voices, we examine central themes in a Pan-African, African American History: slavery/abolition, the rise of Islam and Christianity in Black communities, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, Decolonization, Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism, The Civil Rights Movement, Neocolonialism, Black Power and Black Feminism. The course is an incitement to creative and critical thinking about the endurance of racism and the possibilities of social justice solutions. We take inspiration from Critical Race Studies and students acquire a nuanced understanding of black critiques of race and the history and future of struggles against anti-black racism.