What Makes Political Community? We will explore different ways to think political community. Many contemporary political challenges are not just thorny problems but transform the very institutions, engagements, and concepts through which we understand what the activity of politics is and might be. Other societies and thinkers have faced drastically new challenges to their politics. So, we propose a course that would explore how political actors make and remake community. Our first unit, Colonial Encounters, studies the contact between Europeans and AmerIndians in the West Indies and North America, to think about the forging of new concepts of "human" and political order. Second, Revolution Reimagined, will analyze the movements of ideas, trades, and people back and forth across the Black Atlantic, with special attention to the Haitian Revolution. Third, Reparative Futures, treats the presence of the past as it thinks about the historical legacies of slavery for Africans and Americans. This course speaks to humanist concerns of how humans forge meanings and communities even from conditions of injustice and inequality.