AP/HIST 4830 6.00
In Slavery and Freedom: Blacks in Americas
This course examines and compares the responses of Africans and their descendants to the experiences of enslavement, racism, colonialism and imperialism from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century and analyses the impact of the African presence on western ‘civilisation’. The course begins with an examination of sub-Saharan African societies which were the sources of the enslaved population transported to the Americas. The major debates around the Atlantic Slave Trade along with comparative histories of enslavement in the Caribbean, Brazil, Latin America, the United States and Canada will be examined. The experiences of free Blacks who lived in slave societies, as well as the ‘degrees’ of blackness which emerged in those societies will also be examined. The course compares the processes of emancipation of enslaved Africans and ‘creoles’ across the Americas and the level of integration of the freed population into the economic, social and political hierarchies of their societies. The importance of race theories as well as class/race/gender relations will be discussed throughout and various elements of ‘black culture’ in the Americas will be explored in order to determine the degree to which similarities might exist.