Race and Labor: Black Workers and the Transnational Labor Movement

This is a discussion-based, seminar-style class on the relationship between race and labor globally from the age of emancipation through the Civil Rights Movement. While this course will focus on the labor struggles of Black American workers and activists, we will also examine movements from throughout the African Diaspora in order to incorporate a Diasporic, comparative lens. Beginning with an interrogation of race and labor history within fields of historical study, the course will move along chronological and thematic axes to investigate the changes in wage labor structure, the nature of plantation economies, agricultural and industrial production, domestic and service work. It centers the experiences of Black workers through a critical Black feminist lens that centers the role of Black women’s knowledge production in the construction of modern labor movements.