Engaging Slavery: RsrchRdcl

1 Credit · Level: Undergraduate

Recover, Remember, Respond: Engaging Slavery Via Research and Radical Imagination. As Nikole Hannah-Jones has recently argued, for true justice and equality to be achieved, Americans must account for the centrality of slavery to the development of America and must address what the U.S. owes Black Americans. Yet, many White Americans have resisted such accounting, preferring to erase histories and to forget the structuring legacies of slavery as an American insitutation. At Georgetown, our campus community has often forgotten the histories of Jesuit slaveholding and the sale of 272 people in 1838 by the Jesuits of Maryland. Over the past half-decade, students, faculty, alumni, and the Descendants of the GU272 have sought to recover these histories, to remember the people who were enslaved and sold by the Jesuits, and to respond to these legacies by working together to achieve justice in the present and for the future. In this class, we will review and engage with this work. We will engage different ways of exploring and understanding the histories and different ways of responding to the legacies of Slavery in America, with special interest in Georgetown’s own history of Jesuit slaveholding. We will engage with guests including faculty, members of the GU272 Descendant Community, and Georgetown student researchers, artists, and activists. We will consider projects including the Georgetown Slavery Archive, the Georgetown Memory Project, the Names Project (an effort to memorialize the 66 enslaved people who were buried on Georgetown’s campus), two creative projects of radical imagination undertaken by descendants Meli Colomb and Jessica Tilson, and the 2019 Georgetown Student Referendum in which a majority of undergraduates approved a student fee as an effort at reparations for Georgetown’s involvement with slavery. Students will have opportunities to practice research methods and to develop ideas for creative projects as a radical response to the persistent legacies of Slavery.