Sovereignty and Social Death: Between Black and Native Studies

This graduate seminar serves as an introduction to the fields of Black Studies and Native American Studies and considers their intersections. We will interrogate America as a project of colonization that is materially and ideologically premised upon the enslavement and accumulation of Black people and the elimination of Native people. Given this structural foundation, we will think about the differential modes of racialization experienced by each of these populations while we consider the way that race is integral for formulations of capital, coloniality, whiteness, and the national fantasy of America. We will read and discuss key theories of personhood, subjectivity, and race, in addition to histories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. This seminar ends by engaging with theories and practices of decolonization and abolition to consider refutations of enduring racial violence in America.