AP/HREQ 4050 6.00
Slavery, Colonialism, and African Communities in the Americas
This course uses a critical human rights approach to examine slavery and post-slavery among African-descendants in the Americas, while also considering the historical origins of anti-black racism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the impact of colonial land appropriation and the enslavement process on Indigenous communities.
The course describes the origin and the historical causal drivers for the colonial and imperial establishment chattel slavery in the Americas. It examines the difference between historical and analytical interpretation versus uninformed explanation of slavery and how it impacted and shaped the lives of enslaved peoples in the Americas. It explores the central problematic and historiographical debates that makeup the field of slavery and African experience in the Americas. It explores the emergence of slavery in British North American colonies, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, and the expansion of slavery in the early modern and modern world, including the plantation agriculture, financial markets, and human migration. The course also assesses the constituent attempts to eliminate enslavement in America, including the various processes of emancipation from the colonial period to the 20th century such as self-liberation, slave resistance, compensated emancipation, the antislavery and abolition movement, and colonization projects. It examines the economic, social, legal, political, and cultural characteristics of American slavery and how slavery grew in the Atlantic world. The course will empower students to better contextualize and conceptualize how African slaves in the Americas exercised agency in creating their world/reality subject to the historical contingency imposed by a white supremacist slave culture.
Course credit exclusion: AP/MIST 4050 6.00
Prerequisites: 78 credits or permission from the Undergraduate Program Director.