Critical Social Thought 249AS - Necropolitics/Age of Slavery

Slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries partook of white abolitionist discourse, rhetoric, and genres even as authors made space for their own ideas about freedom, captivity, sovereignty, power, gender, sexuality, and the nature of being. This course will read narratives by Cugoano, Equiano, Sanchez, Prince, Brent, and Craft alongside current critical theories about necropolitics (i.e., sovereignty as the right to kill), Afro-pessimism, Afro-futurism, and Afro- feminism, by theorists such as Mbembe, Wilderson, Moten, Sharpe, and Wynter, to consider what thoughts these authors can offer to us on ways of being, living, and surviving Western, racial imperialisms.

Course limited to sophomores, juniors and seniors