HIST 2352 - [Paul Robeson and the Revolutionary Imagination]

(crosslisted) AMST 2352, ASRC 2352
(HA-AS)

Spring. Next Offered 2018-2019. 4 credits. Student option grading.

R. Rickford.

Radical activist and artist Paul Robeson was one of the most beloved and persecuted black men in American history. His life, writing, artistic production, and iconic image helped shape political and artistic movements in the U.S. and beyond from the 1930s to the 1950s. Robeson was not only the first black man to play Othello on Broadway, he was also a key figure in black freedom movements, anticolonial movements, and labor movements in the first half of the twentieth century. From the Popular Front era of the 1930s through the arid political climate of the 1950s, Robeson’s activism inspired, propelled, and expanded freedom movements in the U.S. and abroad. This course will examine Robeson’s life as a way of understanding those movements.