Fall 2024  |  POL 3282 Section 001: Black Political Thought: Conceptions of Freedom (32366)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person
Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
09/03/2024 - 12/11/2024
Tue, Thu 01:00PM - 02:15PM
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 220
Enrollment Status:
Open (23 of 25 seats filled)
Also Offered:
Course Catalog Description:
On January 21, 1964, Ella Baker, one of the most important Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement stood in front of a large crowd in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and said: "Even if segregation is gone, we will still need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free. Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind." With these words, Baker held before the crowd a political vision that went beyond the immediate goals of social struggle and defined one of the central impulses of Black political thought: to articulate a large and expansive conception of freedom. In this course, our main objective is to enter an intellectual terrain of rich and vibrant debates between African American political thinkers over the meaning of Black freedom. We will explore questions about 1) the geographical reach of their visions of freedom 2) their strategies for agitating for and achieving freedom 3) their different understandings of the nature of domination and how this informs their conception of freedom and 4) their emphasis on political affect in the struggle for freedom. Our orientation will be historical and theoretical. To this end, we reconstruct theoretical debates from four important periods of African American history. 1) pre-Civil War debates about the abolition of slavery (1830-1860) 2) Turn of the century debates about racial progress (1880-1910) 3) Civil rights era debates about integration and separatism (1950-1970) and 4) contemporary debates about law enforcement, police killings, mass incarceration, and political disenfranchisement (1990-present).
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?POL3282+Fall2024
Class Description:

This course turns to the tradition of Black political thought (which developed through interaction and tension with Western political thought) to consider how thinkers within this tradition develop novel conceptions of freedom that emerged from their efforts to theorize and transform conditions of racial domination in the form of slavery, apartheid, and colonialism - regimes of racial domination that inaugurated and constituted the modern world in deeply formative ways. We turn to this tradition of political thought to ask: How do the conceptions of freedom that were born from the underside of modernity redefine and weigh in on the central political issues that animate society?
Who Should Take This Class?:
Any student is welcome to take this class. This course invites students to think critically about the foundations of political life by turning to a wide range of texts from the tradition of Black political thought. Students interested in questions of race and racism; gender and race; colonialism and slavery and its afterlife should take this class.
Learning Objectives:
- to expose students to think about modern politics and its institutions from a new perspective that is traditionally marginalized in political science
- to learn new ways of thinking about society from the position of exclusion, marginalization, domination, and exploitation
- to use the historical knowledge that they acquire about evolving conceptions of the freedom in Black political thought to wrestle with how race, power, and justice interact to constitute the United States as a diverse nation.
- to think about which strategies of social struggle from the past are viable today and what new methods are required to address power hierarchies and promote social justice in the contemporary moment.

Grading:
A combination of essays, exams and attendance.
Workload:
approximately 50 pages of reading per week.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/32366/1249
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
1 November 2023

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