Writing Black School Futures: Advanced Topics in the Cultural History of Black Education

This interdisciplinary seminar invites students to explore the possibilities of more equal and affirming schools through the study of Black education’s past. Using novels, biographies, film, essays, and other primary and secondary historical accounts, we will explore the problems and possibilities of education as told through 20th-century Black cultural works. We will consider the following questions: Why and how has education been central to the political, economic, and cultural production of Black communities? How do these cultural productions describe a vision for education in the historic moment under study? And how might they offer new epistemologies to think beyond what we know and push us toward alternative educational praxis? Our historic investigation will encompass the antebellum and post-antebellum eras, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era, and will extend into the contemporary moment.