AAAS 88.22 Black Womanhood and The Meaning of Freedom
This course centers gender in its inquiry into the social traditions and political strategies that defined Black women’s lives in the western hemisphere between the 17th and early 20th centuries. By examining the conditions of Black women’s unfreedom and their shifting survival strategies, we discover how Black women have imagined, pursued, and experienced freedom. The beginning of the course focuses on Black women’s labors during slavery, highlighting important interventions made by feminist scholars about gendered division of labor, reproduction, and precarity. The latter part of the course investigates women’s life-sustaining community formations and resistance to statesanctioned domination, including the construction of rival geographies, women’s inspired use of eroticism, and their persistent efforts to exercise discursive resistance. Harnessing critical scholarship across disciplines, this course offers a broad perspective on Black women’s subjectivity, theories of freedom, and their importance to the history of the modern world. This discussion-based seminar is organized thematically and spans a wide range of temporalities and terrains; we explore the gendered and racialized histories of the United States, Cuba, Barbados, Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. While different countries have distinct histories, this course encourages a comparative, cross-cultural, and transnational analytic approach to examining how race, gender, and class have circumscribed women’s lives in the western hemisphere and shaped their understanding of freedom.