Topics in Politics: Freedom and Resistance in African American Political Thought

How do African American writers conceive of freedom, agency, and self-determination in the face of longstanding injustices and inequities in American politics, from slavery to segregation, lynching to police brutality, economic disenfranchisement to voter suppression? What tools of resistance should be employed in the struggle to confront and dismantle racial oppression? This course explores competing understandings of freedom, as well as the plurality of ideas about strategies of resistance, in African American political thought. We will engage with an interdisciplinary group of African American writers, activists, and artists, such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Note: This course counts towards either the undergraduate American Politics subfield or the Political Theory subfield.