#Black Lives Matter: The Politics and geographies of African American Liberation

elective courses

This is an MA level course. It examines African American emancipatory politics, which encompasses resistance and protest, revolt and rebellion, geared towards the creation of spaces of liberation.

Classroom
Remote learning

This is an MA level course. It examines African American emancipatory politics, which encompasses resistance and protest, revolt and rebellion, geared towards the creation of spaces of liberation.

This course examines African American emancipatory politics, which encompasses resistance and protest, revolt and rebellion, geared towards the creation of spaces of liberation. Present-day black freedom struggles have to be viewed in light of chattel slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration and urban ghettoization of blacks. These experiences find expression in the group’s cross-generational struggle for economic and legal justice, and civic recognition. Importantly, in the early 19th-century on the wave of discussions about abolitionism and African colonization of blacks, some black leaders and thinkers put forward black nationalist solutions to the question of slavery. They pursued territorial separation and self-determination, while others pursued integration within the boundaries of the U.S., working towards equality within the racially diverse American body politic. Those contrasting approaches to the blacks’ collective empowerment found direct continuities in the early 20th-century in the populist ideologies of the Garvey Movement as well as the intellectual and artistic output of the Harlem Renaissance, or the political activism of NAACP (National Asociation for hte Advancement of Colored People). The Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the 1950s and 1960s respectively can be interpreted as a natural extension of those earlier ideological paths. In the post-Civil Rights era, the emancipatory race politics became more fragmented, reflecting divisions of class, gender, and sexuality. In the last decade genetic genealogy has destabilized the long-held ideas about ancestry and identity, and spawned the emergence of “DNA diasporas” bound to geographic homes in Africa. Today racial profiling, excessive police surveillance, and the criminal justice system—all being institutionalized forms of state violence—are targeted by the new social movement #Black Lives Matter. The movement has revived the debate over reparations as a compensation for slavery, economic exploitation, racial discrimination, and legal injustice, much as it calls for national redemption and reconciliation.

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Bush, Rod. We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. New York University Press, 1999.

Brooks, Roy L. Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations. University of California Press, 2004.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Vintage Books, 1967.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

---. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic June 2014.

Cooper, Britney C. Beyond Respectability: Intellectual Thought of Race Women. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Dawson, Michael C. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. The University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Dawson, Michael, and Rovana Popoff, “Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White” DuBois Review no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 47-58.

di Angelo, Robin. White Fragility, Why It Is So Hard to Talk to White People about Racism Beacon Press, 2018.

Van Deburg William L., ed. Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan. New York University Press, 1997.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Introduction by David Levering Lewis. Oxford University Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2014)

---. Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

Grier, William H and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage. Basic Books, 1969.

Graham, Lawrence Otis. Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class. HarperCollins ebooks, 2000.

Hobbs, Allyson. The Chosen Exile of Racial Passing. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Jackson, Esther Cooper, with Constance Pohl, eds. Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning, Bold Type Books 2016.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston, Beacon Press, 2010 (1968).

Lebron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Lutrell, Johanna C. White People and Black Lives Matter: Ignorance, Empathy and Justice. Palgrave MacMillan, 2019.

Eddo-Lodge, Reni Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Newton, Huey P. To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1999.

Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA. Beacon Press, 2016.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket Books, 2016

Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

White, Shane and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Cornell University Press, 1998.

Knowledge

- learns the terminology used in Anglophone linguistics, literary studies and cultural studies

- learns/ deepens the knowledge of research methods in linguistics, literary studies and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the Anglophone context

-deepens an awareness of the symbols of culture and their role in decoding such cultural products as literature, popular culture, and the arts

- becomes aware of the complexity and plurality of cultures as systems, using the anthropological definition of culture as a reference point

- gains and broadens knowledge about the institutional foundations of culture in Great Britain and the Unites States

- learns about/ develops an understanding of geographic, historical, political, economic, cultural and social realities and problems in Anglophone areas

Skills

-learns/ develops the skill of using the terminology used in linguistics, literary studies and cultural studies proper for English philology

- can use basic/advanced methodology in the field of linguistics, literary studies, and cultural studies

- can present the knowledge gained in a logical and clear manner, both in written and spoken form.

- can interpret, analyze, hierarchize, and synthesize content and phenomena, accounting for their linguistic, cultural, social, historical, and economic dimensions

- can appreciate the diversity of viewpoints expressed in assigned readings and in-class discussions, can use them as a source of inspiration rather than as a threat to his or her value system

- can search for information using a diversity of sources, can evaluate their usefulness, interpret them from the theoretical and practical viewpoint in the context of Anglophone studies.

Attitudes

- is aware of the social import of his or her knowledge, effort, and skills

- attaches importance to individual initiative and self-reliance, as well as sees that he or she could contribute to group efforts

- identifies the nature of dilemmas, problems, conflicts and looks for the best solutions

- has the need to express himself/ herself in a coherent, clear, logical, and concrete manner to establish effective communication with others

- tolerates otherness, respects diverse cultural behaviors and points of view

Language profeciency at B2+

In class discussions students acquire skills of expressing their thoughts in a clear, coherent, logical and precise manner, with the use of language which is correct grammatically, lexically and phonetically.

Attendance, preparation, participation in class discussions, short written assignments, a group project, a final test

Three absences allowed

Retake: Written exam