HSTCMP 356 A: Black Freedom Movements in the Nineteenth-Century

HSTCMP 356 – Black Freedom Movements in the Nineteenth Century

Spring 2023, University of Washington

T/Th 2:30-4:20, CMU 228

Instructor: Dr. Bianca Dang, Smith 104B

Office Hours:  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:30-5:30pm

Course Description:

This lecture course focuses on the trajectories and legacies of Black freedom movements that took place in Africa, North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Oceania across the long nineteenth century.

In this class, students will take both a social history and an intellectual history approach to studying Black freedom movements. By engaging with the transnational dimensions of Black liberation movements, this course will explore both the local and global impacts and reverberations of distinct – yet connected – movements for Black freedom across the period. The course begins with the 1772 court case of an enslaved man named James Somerset that established the free soil principle in England and ends with Haitian and Dominican resistance to the U.S. occupation of Hispaniola in the 1910s. Each class will highlight an individual movement for Black freedom during the century, ranging from the efforts that formerly enslaved people took to assert their right to natural resources in post-abolition Colombia to Ethiopians’ struggles against colonial encroachment that culminated in the First Italo-Ethiopian War. Students will be assigned readings by Black scholars and activists on the history and legacies of these and other liberation movements, including works by Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Audre Lorde, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, Andaiye, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Claudia Jones amongst others. 

By engaging with the history of Black liberation movements, this course will explore both the local and global impacts and reverberations of distinct – yet connected – movements for Black freedom during the nineteenth century. Covering an era associated with abolition movements, this course will focus on Black-led antislavery activity during the period, highlighting the monumental effects such actions had on the trajectory of global abolition. It will also address movements for Black liberation that occurred outside of the context of slavery and abolition, including movements against colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. As a UW Diversity Credit-granting course, this lecture class highlights the transnational dimensions of nineteenth-century Black freedom movements and emphasizes how these movements often questioned, critiqued, and transcended national borders. Further, this course examines processes of solidarity-building within these movements and the challenges to such solidarity-building that arose at different moments in time.

Some of the major aims of this course are:

• To understand the central goals and strategies of a number of nineteenth-century movements for Black freedom across the globe.
• To consider how different freedom movements converged, diverged, and influenced each

other, with particular focus on the transnational dynamics and connections of these movements.

• To examine how solidarities were formed and challenged in the wake of immense

changes (political, social, economic) during this period – to consider especially (re)configurations of solidarity in relation to shifting ideas of race, nation, gender, and empire across the nineteenth-century world.

Required Texts and Reading Questions:

Each week has a number of chapters and speeches assigned. All the required readings will be uploaded as PDFs on Canvas. The chapters and articles are posted under the "Files" tab, organized by week and then by the class we will be discussing them in (i.e. Week 1, Tuesday Class).

Course Format:

The first half of each class will be dedicated to a lecture typically focused on 2 case studies related to that week’s broad theme. The second half of each class will be focused on discussing the assigned readings for that day’s class.

NOTE: We will not be having in-person class on Tuesday, May 2nd or Thursday, May 8th. Please see the syllabus for additional details. 

Assignments and Grading Breakdown:

1. 5 Hypothesis Annotations (35%) - For 5 of the 10 weeks, you will be asked to submit annotations (via Hypothesis) of one of the readings from that week. You will also have to respond to your classmates' annotations. Additional information can be found here: Hypothesis Annotation Assignment-1.pdf 
2. Participation in class discussions (15%)
3. Reflection Paper 1 (10%) - For this paper, due in Week 4, you will be asked to write a 2–3-page reflection paper on your major takeaways from the course lectures and readings through Week 3.
4. Reflection Paper 2 (10%) - For this paper, due in Week 8, you will be asked to write a 2–3-page reflection paper on your major takeaways from the course lectures and readings from Week 4 – Week 7.
5. Final Paper on Modern Black Freedom Movements in Relation to 19^th-Century Black Freedom Movements (30%) - For the final paper, you will be asked to write a 6–8-page paper about a late 20^th- or 21^st-century Black liberation movement. Using at least 3 peer-reviewed secondary sources (I will describe what this means in more detail during class), you will be asked to give a brief overview of the movement you have chosen and then reflect on that movement in relation to our class lectures, discussions, and readings.

HSTCMP 356 Spring 2023 - Final.docx