ASRC 6211 - Rebel Blacks and the Atlantic(s)

Spring. 4 credits.

Co-meets with ASRC 4211.

R. Wilson.

This course will read the historical archive as literature alongside contemporary and canonical theoretical texts that attempt to negotiate ideas of being and blackness. We will interrogate the position of the rebellious slave as it relates to discourses of “modernity” throughout the New World, paying special attention to the contexts of the United States and Mexico. The course will be guided by the following questions: How are we to take into account the multiple historicities and epistemologies that create a black subject across the Americas? When are regional or national borders productive in understanding the black subject’s relation to thought and when are they seen to be a hindrance? Finally, what are the broader theoretical implications of connections and divergences amongst various hemispheric articulations of black subjectivity?