Practices of Freedom: Black Literature and Culture in Africa and the Diaspora

3 units

This course examines the diverse ways Black writers, artists, and thinkers across Africa and the African Diaspora have imagined freedom – not simply as a political condition, but as an aesthetic, ethical, and existential practice. From the abolitionist era through decolonization and into the contemporary moment, the course will trace how Black cultural production articulates new grammars of liberation in the face of enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism, and neoliberal modernity. Course readings will span multiple genres – novels, essays, music, and visual culture – and geographic sites, including the Caribbean, the United States, and the African continent. Authors will include Aimé Césaire, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, NourbeSe Philip, Teju Cole, and others. The instructor will pair literary works with critical texts in Black Studies, postcolonial theory, and performance studies to interrogate the relationship between freedom and its limits, memory and resistance, art and the political imagination. By the end of the semester, students will gain an understanding of Black literature and culture as both an archive of historical struggle and a laboratory of radical thought, one that redefines what it means to live freely in the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. Class assignments will emphasize close reading, comparative analysis, and creative-critical reflection.