AP/HUMA 4306 6.00

Imagining Slavery and Freedom

This seminar combines creative texts—novels, music, and the visual arts—alongside slave narratives, nonfiction and theoretical works in an examination of questions of Transatlantic slavery, the imagination, and the idea of freedom. Beginning with slave narratives, students will theorize slavery and freedom, thinking through what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” and what Rinaldo Walcott refers to as “the long emancipation.” Drawing on other readings and texts from a range of thinkers, writers and artists, students will continue to think about slavery in the Americas, “archives,” sound, image, blackness and imagination. They will make connections between slave law, mass incarceration, carding, the ways that Black life is rendered disposable, and the multiple modes of resistance to the extension of Black unfreedom.