Imagining American Slavery

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts, "Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh." This course—Imagining American Slavery—considers what is definable about American slavery as imagined over time in the creative arts. Examining works of history, fiction, and film, students will read and analyze depictions of the "peculiar institution" to uncover connections between America's racial past and its racial present. Beginning with the narratives of Douglass and Jacobs, students will think with what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” and Rinaldo Walcott identifies as “the long emancipation.” In doing so, they will make connections between mass incarceration, civil rights, Black politics, Black creativity, and institutional barriers to Black freedom and aspirations, all within the historical context of the disposability/devaluing of Black life. We will explore the relationship between what Robin Kelley has called "freedom dreaming" and the imagination in defining and depicting slavery in the US. Specific discussion topics may include the material conditions of American slavery; the emancipatory narrative and the liberatory narrative; pro-slavery ideology; abolition; regionalism; the archive; repetition and representation; constructions of racial identity; gender and slavery; memory and history; agency and resistance; and the idea and construct of freedom. Weekly readings, viewings, and writings will be required. The works we examine may include the following writers and artists: F. Douglass, H. Jacobs, J.W. Johnson, K. Chopin, M. Mitchell, W. Cather, O. Butler, S.A. Williams, T. Morrison, V. Martin, D. Bradley, L. Cary, H. Gerima, J. Peele, T. Coates, Q. Tarantino, S. McQueen, K. Lemmons, and J.C. Cooper.