Slavery and Historical Memory

This course considers some of the ways that scholars, artists, and activists have attempted to address key problems in the study of Black life and slavery in the early Americas, especially the early United States. Namely, how can one begin to tell the story and the legacy of a people whose lives have been so severely distorted and erased by primary historical records—records which were primarily composed by people invested in maintaining and reproducing Black enslavement? And to what extent should one trust those primary documents in telling the story of even the most powerful people and institutions in these societies? The course is organized around key phenomena and themes in the history of slavery and early Black Atlantic history, including: the transatlantic slave trade; Black self-determination and revolt; slavery and the formations of race, gender, and sexuality in the West; slavery, capitalism, and liberalism; and abolitionism and emancipation. We pay particular attention to how artists, activists, and scholars have informed one another in their approaches to studying these phenomena and how they have challenged, drawn from, and changed traditional scholarly historical methodology. In addition to the political and cultural documents produced out of—and contemporaneous to—slavery's historical milieu, sources may include writings from Martin Delaney, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and James McBride, and scholarship from C.L.R. James, Stephanie Smallwood, Vincent Brown, Walter Johnson, and Saidiya Hartman.