Race, The Classics and Democratic Theory

Rather than looking establishing wholly new traditions, many black political thinkers have chosen to engage with ancient narratives and concepts to arm contemporary struggles. Political theorists often overlook this strange choice. After all, these concepts have been used to justify anti-black assumptions. In this course we explore a series of black ‘classical receptions’ in which authors take up key classical concepts and enrich and extend them in their critiques of the US racial order. We will discuss this approach as well as the broader implications it has for democratic theory.