Afterlives of Slavery

This course will explore how chattel slavery has been treated in a variety of contemporary texts. It will examine not only how these texts (re)conceptualize and (re)historicize the experience of slavery, but also how the racial, sexual, gender and economic dynamics set in place by slavery have been commented on and (re)configured in and by contemporary culture. At the center of the course are thus questions about how texts advance arguments about historical continuity (and/or discontinuity), and how they in turn enable meditation on changing racial formations and regimes of economic exploitation, and on historically contingent concepts such as property, class, consciousness, humanness, and freedom. Necessarily related issues that we will take up include human commodification, the power of various styles, forms, and genres to (re)narrate the history of commodification, and the different roles of the social sciences, literary fiction, and theory in the creation of historical memory and in the production of cultural critique. Over the quarter we will read a selection of contemporary fictional works (possible authors include O. Butler, F. Goldman, C. Johnson, E. P. Jones, V. Martin, T. Morrison, Perkins-Valdez, and I. Reed) and a range of theoretical and historiographical works on slavery and dehumanization (with focus on W. E. B. Du Bois, O. Patterson, and W. Johnson). We may also examine one or two films, depending on the interests of course participants.