Black Economics: History, Methods, Politics

Graduate / Professional

Two Yale professors meet at 81 Wall Street. One is an economist, the other a historian. They are of two generational cohorts but are equally interested in the study of Black life. Each approaches the work differently. What are those approaches? This course has two objectives. The first is methodological. We seek to introduce students to quantitative economic and qualitative historical methods. How do economists and historians explore and challenge inequality? Where do we meet? Where do we agree to go our separate ways? The second objective is to revisit an underappreciated approach to studying the relationship between race, the state, and the economy. During the late 1960s, scholars and activists such as Robert S. Browne, Norman Girvan, Lloyd Best, Walter Rodney, and others from across the African diaspora formed a number of research initiatives to assist Black people in their attempts to tackle uneven development, neocolonial extraction, the enduring problems of the plantation economy, and racial capitalism more generally in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. They built on the veritable work of Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others who traveled earlier circuits of Black internationalism. Through an eclectic selection of readings, we seek to resituate political economy as an essential approach to the study of race in general, and Black futures in particular; draw out Black political economic thought from its many corners and in its various strands; consider what the “Black” in Black political economy means and has meant; and consider whether Black political economy is indeed compatible with Black studies in the twenty-first century. W 4pm-5:55pm