This seminar roots ecological catastrophe in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. We will read a number of works that illuminate the specific relationship between environmental degradation and the world that slavery made. We will be also interested in tracing how race, gender, and poverty are being mobilized as weapons of dispossession and extraction on the frontiers of capitalist exploitation today.

What is the relationship between work and freedom? This question lies at the heart of Black American liberation struggles, and at the heart of this course, which centers Black labor in the long arc of American history. Throughout the semester, we will explore the experiences of Black workers in a range of workplaces?from cotton fields to battlefields, from kitchens to factory floors, from schools to prisons.

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