HSTCMP 356A: Black Freedom Movements in the 19th Century, sln: 21686
Prof. Bianca Dang (bd53@uw.edu), Spring 2023
T/Th 2:30-4:20
This course focuses on the trajectories and legacies of Black freedom movements that took place in Africa, North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Oceania across the long nineteenth century. In this course, students will take both a social history and an intellectual history approach to studying Black freedom movements. By engaging with the transnational dimensions of Black liberation movements, this course will explore both the local and global impacts and reverberations of distinct – yet connected – movements for Black freedom across the period. The course begins with the 1772 court case of an enslaved man named James Somerset that established the free soil principle in England and ends with Haitian and Dominican resistance to the U.S. occupation of Hispaniola in the 1910s.
Each class will highlight an individual movement for Black freedom during the century, ranging from the efforts that formerly enslaved people took to assert their right to natural resources in post-abolition Colombia to Ethiopians’ struggles against colonial encroachment that culminated in the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Students will be assigned readings by Black scholars and activists on the history and legacies of these and other liberation movements, including works by Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Audre Lorde, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Andaiye, Cedric Robinson, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Claudia Jones amongst others.