African American Pol Thought

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

When Audre Lorde argued in 1979 that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," the lesbian feminist writer challenged the marginality of black women in the feminist movement. In doing so, she questioned the epistemic resources feminists in general retrieved to grapple with political, economic, gender and cultural domination in the U.S. and abroad. To this end, Lorde's hermeneutical turn fundamentally altered the conceptual schemes and pragmatic aspirations steering contemporary writings on Black politics, freedom and justice. This course retrieves Lorde's critical theory as a framework for examining social domination and inequality in the current historical moment. We will then turn to figures such as W.E.B Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Well-Barnett to explore the major questions and debates that framed Black liberal, conservative, nationalist, Marxist and feminist concerns between Emancipation and the Civil Rights Movement. This historical framework will give us the tools for examining the major political categories at stake (and contested) in Lorde's project and within contemporary African American political thought: neutrality, double consciousness, domination, respectability, freedom, racial uplift, intersectionality and solidarity.