Professor: George Barganier

4.00 credits

CRN 16420: Friday, 10:00-12:50pm @ Online Synchronous

Graduation Requirement:  This class will fulfill an Arts and Letters Colloquium and the HC 444H: US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.  If a student already has completed an Arts and Letters Colloquium, this course will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, and Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.

This is an intensive seminar on the Black Radical Tradition. This course takes a decolonial, transdisciplinary approach to the study of knowledge and power and considers possible modes of intervention to confront the problems around inequality in society. Our understanding of inequality inherently depends upon our understanding of the entangled social production of global social hierarchies such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. And this question, in turn, raises broader questions about the nature of society, economics, and politics. Accordingly, this class is intended to introduce you to a number of ways of understanding the intersection of knowledge production and structures of power. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, we will ultimately seek to open space for articulating new possibilities for decolonizing knowledge and power. Thus, our interrogation of inequality in society centers around questions of justice, ethics, and human suffering. This course covers the seminal methodological and theoretical issues related to questions of racial inequality posed by the Black Radical Tradition. We will consider the politics of knowledge generation, who generates which knowledge and for what purpose, and its relationship to practices of domination and resistance. We will interrogate the historical origins of these practices and their function in society and ponder the role race plays in larger structures of domination and resistance in our search to imagine more humane forms of social life.