| AFAM 137 | AFRICAN DIASPORA | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This mixed lecture (60%) and seminar (40%) course examines key debates about the African diaspora especially through the vantage point of black women. There have been massive shifts in the study of black people in the world and black identities as world-making. From Pan-Africanist movements that sought to link the battle against Jim Crow and U.S. apartheid to independence movements in colonized Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean to the cultural turn evidenced by Negritude and Afrocentricity to the insistence that different colonial/slave/and emancipation histories produced different kinds of black political realities to false debates over whether struggles in the U.S. get too much attention compared to struggles in the global South, to the question of the relationships between bondage, enslavement, and waged work, the role of blackness as a global phenomenon is being taken up. We begin with black women’s roles in knowledge systems in the triangular slave trade and the meanings which they brought to their reproductive (affective, cultural, and economic) labor, shift to black women’s radical politics in the 1930s, turn to mid-century political movements against restrictions on black women, return to the radical movements of the 1960s, and end with writings by black women both political essays and a novel. These sources provide us with a potent assessment of diasporic and internationalist frameworks. |