AFR 321 - Special Topics in AFR

Instructor
Dougé-Prosper

In all societies, present and historical, people have joined together to press for or against social change. In this course, we are most interested in the struggles of people who imagined and sometimes- even if only briefly- lived in ways other than those imposed violently by the “over-represented (Western bourgeois) ethnoclass human figure of Man”(Wynter 2003). We focus on the rebellions of the survivors of the Middle Passage who challenged the inequality of the races to re-define blackness and to counteract the imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths. We pay special attention to these visionary thinkers and doers who made claims on how to organize human (and non-human) life on the planet, thereby re-shaping modernity or rather giving shape to alternative modernities (and in this case, Black modernities). Studying Black social movements in various historical and national contexts then allows us to ultimately reflect on more general questions about the nature of political power, conflict, and legitimacy, as well as the relationship between human agency, social structure, historical change, and identity formation and politics in the modern world.

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