African American Political Thought
POLI 272: AFRICAN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT
Black Life, Humanity, Freedom

Vassar College
Fall 2015
Tuesday and Thursday 4:35 pm-5:50 pm

Annie Menzel
103 Rockefeller Hall

Office Hours:
Wednesday 1-3 p.m. and by appointment

I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1934)

The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethno-class (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy[,] of the human species itself/ourselves.

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”

DESCRIPTION
The focus of this course is African American political thinkers’ articulations of struggles for citizenship, humanity, and freedom—terms historically defined in the West in opposition to Blackness—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present moment, in what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery.” We will pay close attention to the variety of meanings that these thinkers give to these concepts, given the normative understandings of race, gender, and sexuality that define their respective contexts, as well as how these formulations can guide us in contemporary political and social life. Given that the prevailing category of “humanity” in particular, entails such radical and murderous exclusions, we are called upon to rethink what its content ought to be. What lessons do the forms of life and thought that have taken shape outside the bounds of Western “humanity” hold for envisioning freer, more just, more loving ways of being human? Relatedly, we will attend closely to the body as a site of both oppression and resistance. Moving more or less chronologically, the course pairs historical texts with contemporary scholarship on the themes of enslavement and kinship; violence and resistance; feminism; genre and medium; Black existentialism; and queer theory and politics.

TEXTS

The books below are available for purchase at the Juliet. The assigned page numbers will be from these editions. PLEASE NOTE that the City Lights edition of Douglass’ Narrative also contains the Angela Davis readings—so please do purchase this edition.

W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Dover Publications; unabridged edition, 1994)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself: A New Critical Edition by Angela Y. Davis (City Lights, 2010)

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Dover Publications; Reprint edition (2001)

James Baldwin, James Baldwin: Collected Essays, Toni Morrison, ed. (Library of America, 1998)

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Crossing Press, 2007)

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

EXPECTATIONS

Each class will consist of active discussion. Everyone is expected to complete each session’s reading prior to the class meeting and bring the reading to class.

Starting Week 3, students will take turns facilitating the discussion. Guidelines will be distributed in Week 2.

At the end of each class, we will take a few minutes to reflect on the discussion. I will collect these reflections, read them, and use them to shape the class as we go along. Please bring paper to write on and something to write with.

We may change some of the readings over the course of the semester depending on our own collective desires and/or events happening in the world.

EVALUATION

• In-class reflections (see above): 10%
• Discussion facilitation: 15%
• Appreciation paper: (~4-5 pages) 15%
• “Keywords in African American Political Thought” entry (~4-5 pages): 20%
• Comparative appreciation paper (8-10 pages): 25%
• Final reflection 15%

Participation “In-class participation” means being here, listening carefully, reflecting on what others are saying, and, if you are moved to do so, contributing a comment, question, or thought that adds to the collective project of the discussion. As we have all experienced, some people are more eager than others to speak in a group setting, and these tendencies can harden into patterns of speech and silence that do not do justice to our full potential as a group to address the difficult questions that we will be considering together. I ask that everyone, including myself, be thoughtful about how our contributions are shaping the conversation. I welcome feedback throughout the semester on keeping a good balance in our discussions.

Appreciation Paper It’s easy to critique, so we are going to practice appreciating. This assignment, whose prompt will be distributed in Week 2, asks you to detail the analytical strengths of one text that we read.

Keywords We will collectively compile a glossary of keywords from the texts that we read over the course of the semester. This will be part of the task of the discussion leaders. You will select one of these keywords and create an entry that offers a substantial explication of the term, and traces the word through the course texts (and potentially a few supplemental works). We will partly model our project on the digital component of Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Handler.

Comparative appreciation paper You will compare the insights of two or more of the thinkers that we work with regarding a particular topic. This may be a concept, like “freedom,” or it may be a current event or situation in the world. You may build on the first appreciation paper. More precise assignment parameters will be discussed later in the semester.

VIOLENT CONTENT
These texts have arisen out of an unspeakably violent history, built on crimes against human bodies, and they reflect that—some more graphically than others. This content will impact different people different ways, and I cannot know what will be a trigger for each individual. We will discuss how to approach this in our first session and moving forward.

DISABILITIES SUPPORT
Academic accommodations are available for students registered with the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity. Students in need of ADA/504 accommodations should schedule an appointment with me early in the semester to discuss any accommodations for this course that have been approved by the Office for Accessibility and Educational Opportunity, as indicated in your AEO accommodation letter.

ELECTRONIC DEVICES
Laptops and smartphones are fine for note-taking and reading, but please do not email, text, update social media, surf the net, make purchases on amazon.com, etc., as these activities draw energy away from the discussion and are distracting to me and to fellow students.

SCHEDULE

Week 1 Introductions
T 9/1 Introduction and discussion
Th 9/3 NO CLASS MEETING

PART I: Theoretical horizons

Week 2
T 9/8
Ground Rules discussion
Michael Hanchard, Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective

In preparation for Angela Davis visit:
Th 9/10 Davis, Standards for a New Womanhood, from Women, Race, and Class
Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens”

Week 3
T 9/15 Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation I

WEDS 9/16: Angela Davis lecture in the chapel, 5:30 pm

Th 9/17 Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation II

PART II: Slavery and afterlives

Week 4 Enslavement and mastery

T 9/22
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (selection) and “Venus in Two Acts”

Th 9/24
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Week 5 Enslavement, freedom, and gender I
T 9/29
Douglass, Narrative of the Life, part 1
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, Introduction (selection)
Fred Moten, In the Break, Introduction (selection)

**WEDS 9/30 APPRECIATION PAPER I DUE 5 pm on Moodle

Th 10/1
Douglass, Narrative of the Life, part 2
Accompanying text TBA

Week 6 Enslavement, freedom, and gender II
T 10/6
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, part I
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, Ch. 3 (selection)
Th 10/8
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, part II
Valerie Smith, “Loopholes of Retreat”

OCTOBER BREAK

PART III: Key Thinkers

Week 7 Ida B. Wells-Barnett
T 10/20
A Red Record, part I
Joy James, Shadowboxing, pp. 45-59

Th 10/22
A Red Record, part II
“NAACP,” from Crusade for Justice

Week 8 Du Bois: Souls of Black Folk
T 10/27 Du Bois, Souls, selection

Th 10/29 Du Bois, Souls, selection
Alexander Weheliye, Grooves of Temporality OR another contemporary reading on Souls

Week 9 Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
T 11/3 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, selection

**Weds 11/4 KEYWORD ESSAY DUE at 5 pm on Moodle

Th 11/5 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, selection
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism (Selection)

Week 10 James Baldwin
T 11/10 Baldwin’s existentialism
Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (short selection)
Baldwin:
“My Dungeon Shook”
“The American Dream and the American Negro”
Perhaps: 1963 debate with Malcolm X (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTsWBaEz6KY))

Th 11/12
“Report from Occupied Territory”
Other Baldwin essays TBA

Week 11 Generations of Black Queer Thought: Baldwin to Lorde (and beyond)
T 11/17 Baldwin to Lorde
Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, Essence, 1984

Th 11/19 Lorde I
Sister Outsider (selections)

Week 12 Lorde and her Legacies
T 11/24 Lorde II: Sister Outsider (selections)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Sounds to Me Like A Promise: On Survival” (2012)

Th 11/26: NO CLASS, THANKSGIVING RECESS

Week 13 Afrofutures
T 12/1 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (pages TBA)
Mary Hansen and Walidah Imarisha, Science Fiction and the Post-Ferguson World: “There Are as Many Ways to Exist as We Can Imagine,” YES! Magazine, 12/3/14

**Weds 12/2 COMPARATIVE APPRECIATION PAPER DUE at 5 pm on Moodle

Th 12/3 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (pages TBA)

Week 14
T 12/8 Butler, Parable of the Sower (pages TBA); Course wrap-up

Final reflection due: TBA