Black and Brown in Babylon

Undergraduate / Graduate

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed that "the problem of the color line [is] the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." Du Bois imagined one solution to this problem in his novel Dark Princess (1928) through the romance of an African American man with an Indian princess. What other relationships have Black and South Asian people imagined and concretized in their struggles for freedom? This course explores the braided histories of Black and South Asian peoples in their various diasporas in order to interrogate the world-systems of race, caste, and colonialism. We study how the connections between Blacks and South Asians have generated new modes of critical analysis, knowledge production, and artistic creation to imagine possible worlds beyond the conditions imposed by racial capitalism.