Freedom in Black Political Thought

(4 Credits)

What does it mean to be free? Many answers to this question have relied on opposing freedom to a metaphorical slavery—imagining one’s situation as akin to slavery. Fewer draw on the lived experiences of the enslaved or of those struggling for liberation in slavery’s wake. Yet it is these experiences which pose the question of what freedom means and how to achieve it with particular urgency. This course explores the many ways African American political thinkers have described freedom and liberation. In examining their work, we will ask: How is freedom conceived when the enslavement it opposes is all too real? How is freedom a gendered experience? What does a people need to be free? Are culture and recognition a means to freedom? Are coalition and cooperation more promising to that end? What are the limitations of these strategies? And what are the alternatives to them? Texts include those by: Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Orlando Patterson, Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Jacobs, Shatema Threadcraft, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, the Combahee River Collective, and Kwame Ture & Charles Hamilton.