Diaspora and Transnational Studies: Topic Courses

What does it mean to be Black in a global context? How is Blackness articulated differently in countries like Mexico, South Africa, Iran, Ghana, Canada, and the Caribbean? What, if anything, connects Blackness across these diverse geo-histories? What does it mean to occupy a Black body and how have critical understandings of Blackness shifted across time and space? What is the relationship between Blackness, Africanness, and diaspora? To study Blackness is to study how race suffuses social, cultural, political, economic, and legal parameters. Moreover, critical arguments about the ways gender, sexuality, class, diaspora and nationality fracture race, have questioned unitary notions of blackness. We use the term ‘global Blackness’ to signal our investment in exploring the multiplicity of Black experience, intellectual traditions, and perspectives as well as modes of Black theory.  In this seminar students will delve into these questions, and together, we will study the manner in which the Middle Passage (transatlantic slavery), colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, neoliberal economic policies, and the gendered racial terror that defined these systems of power and exploitation—the effects of which are still felt across the Americas, Europe, and Africa—constructed and continues to construct Blackness as a racial category. We will study the making and unmaking of Blackness within the Atlantic world, the Indian Ocean world, and the Mediterranean.  Students will be introduced to different critical approaches (theories, methods, philosophies) to the study of Blackness that includes Diaspora and Transnational studies, Anthropology, Black Feminist Thought, Cultural Studies, for instance. We will study scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, incarceration, segregation, other forms of racialized violence, and, on the other hand, texts that imagine future forms of blackness.