POLS 234 African American Political Theory
This course aims to introduce students to key themes, questions, and debates in the field of African American political theory in the United States. Together in discussion, we will explore
issues that are so often ignored or displaced in conventional canons of political theory, which are overwhelmingly white and egregiously incomplete. Black political thinkers, generally speaking,
recognize that slavery is the foundational political, economic, and social order of the US and its legacies define both black and white experiences today. We will spend substantial time
on it in this course, as we attend to subjects such as black political rebellion, as well as the historical continuities between slavery and the carceral state. Too often, white political theory either ignores slavery altogether or treats it like an exception or aberration, rather than a regime that has shaped the tradition of American democracy; divergent experiences of citizenship between black and white Americans; and relations of power in the forms of both oppression and resistance. Also central to our discussions is black feminism, a rich, robust, liberatory tradition that challenges disco- urses of patriarchy and white supremacy and is marked by radicalism in word and deed. It is not confined to its own section of the course, but rather appears throughout all of them. For example, liberal feminism posits freedom for women as their ability to make sovereign individual choices about their own lives. Yet black feminists trouble this view by showing its limited ability to speak to the
particular of experiences of black women under conditions of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, incarceration, and other forms of subjection. While this course is organized thematically, not chrono- logically, we will engage with historical turns in the black freedom struggle, including the formal termination of slavery, the advent of Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, the rise of black power, and the origins of mass incarceration.
Course Type
SH