Fall 2007

WGS 393 • BLACK RADICAL TRADITIONS

Course Description

Today, as since at least the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, we live in a time of black genocide. The AIDS/HIV pandemic, early deaths caused by preventable disease in Africa and its diaspora, police brutality, imposed residential segregation, chronic unemployment, environmental racism, the impact caused by and the ensuing official complacency following natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina - this is only a partial list of how systematically oppressed and disproportionately affected Black communities are in the various nation-states under which they barely survive. Blacks also struggle with and are often victimized by patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, class and color discrimination. Oppression, however, necessarily generates resistance. As ubiquitous and appalling as are race/gender/sexuality-based killings of the spirit and body, they necessarily produce instruments of survival. But not only survival. Africans and their descendants have and continue to engineer alternative sociabilities and projects of radical transformation. This course excavates past and future Black radical traditions that have allowed survival, relative empowerment, and utopia in Afrodescended communities. COURSE NUMBER MAY BE REPEATED FOR CREDIT WHEN THE TOPICS VARY. WGS 393 AND W S 393 MAY NOT BOTH BE COUNTED. MEETS WITH ANT 391.

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