Radical Black Freedom & Its Discontents

The struggle for Black freedom is as old as Black
oppression. The battle took place on plantations,
in burning towns and hosed-down public streets, in
prisons, but it has also taken place in newspaper
editorials, in scholarship and in art. This course
is a survey of the intellectual practices of
freedom while Black - as can be read in Black
texts, in Black freedom as recorded by freedom's
enemies- and the use of the idea of freedom
deployed by colonial power. Here, we will explore
and reveal patterns of fugitive Blackness within
anti-Black colonialism.

This course is also a close reading of the other
side of freedom - the discursive universe that
radical Black freedom finds itself thrust up
against. We look at writings against abolition,
scientific writing, contemporary right-wing
journalism, social media posts etc., that argue -
whether measuredly or aggressively - against
expressions of African liberation.

We will ask: are there through lines in arguments
against Black liberation? How do we understand
liberal white supremacy? Or the white supremacist
capturing of "woke"?

How are anti-Black impulses masked in "objective"
language? Has anti-Blackness re-invented itself
rhetorically to survive in spaces putatively
hostile to it? Are we, today, witnessing a sea
change in the permissibility of anti-Black speech
or something new?