Advanced Seminar: Slavery in America: The Politics of Knowledge Production

3 units

This course focuses on the long history of Black chattel enslavement in North America, from origins through the era of emancipation. The course foregrounds the struggles over life and death, power and resistance, that were at the heart of legalized slavery's traumatic and grotesquely violent two-hundred-fifty-year career in North America. It foregrounds the Black experience in enslavement, with attention to the imperial and hemispheric settings, and to the important comparative context of Indigenous enslavement. At the same time, this course highlights the fiercely contested historical battleground where scholars have argued about how to define American slavery--as a system or site of labor, production and reproduction; law, property and dispossession; racial and gender domination; sexual violation, rape and incest; psychological terror and social death; containment and marooning; selfhood and nationality; agency and resistance; anti-colonial and revolutionary liberation and millennial redemption. Finally, it engages the "politics of knowledge production" that have produced the slavery "archive," replete with its annihilating silences, repressions, and erasures, and overdetermined "presences" that have at once shaped and deformed modern understandings of African American experience. In the end, the course's overarching question is how the politics of slavery, of its material experiences, interpretations, and archives, have shaped the lives and afterlives of slavery and race, for Black Americans, to the present day.