CSP 15 Slavery's Witnesses, Slavery's Legacies

This course explores how Americans have remembered slavery at three critical junctures in United States racial politics: the era of Jim Crow segregation; the decades of mass Civil Rights and Black Power movements; and our own troubled present from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Black Lives Matter and white backlash. Participants will explore the question of slavery's remembrance while gaining insight into the politics of race and identity in U.S. history. How has the memory of African enslavement continued to play a role in U.S. politics and culture? How has this nation dealt with its accountability for two centuries of chattel slavery and participation in the slave trade? How have certain "communities of memory" attempted to alter this historical amnesia? What are the legacies of American slavery and what are the appropriate forms of commemoration and reparation? We will investigate these questions by analyzing 1930s interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans, Civil Rights and Black Power speeches, the 1970s television phenomenon of Roots, as well as recent memoirs, films such as Twelve Years a Slave, and series like Underground. While improving their skills in expository writing, participants in this seminar will develop skills of respectful dialogue, critical reading, historical analysis, analytical writing, and oral presentation.