In her foundational 2007 book, Lose Your Mother, literary theorist Saidiya Hartman argues that "[i]f slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is . . . because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This," she continues, "is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment." As Hartman points out, even in the wake of emancipation, descendants of enslaved Africans have continued to navigate the perils of transatlantic slavery, and to shoulder its lingering effects upon the shape of black being. Motivated by these instructive observations, this course turns to a diverse archive of black artistic and cultural production to critically analyze the structural conditions that animate and enable the afterlives of slavery, whether juridical and legislative maneuvers or environmental and housing policies. At the same time, it also considers the broad range of aesthetic and political strategies that black people have mobilized to pressure and unsettle the vibrant legacies of transatlantic slavery. Moving across the long twentieth century, we will study works by artists like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Henry Dumas, Amiri Baraka, Gayle Jones, Essex Hemphill, Natasha Trethewey, Claudia Rankine, and Kiese Laymon. We will pair these with recent scholarship in black studies, literary theory, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, environmental studies, and affect theory, for instance, in order to critically analyze the fabric of slavery's afterlives in the wake of U.S. emancipation.
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