Syllabus Ideas: The Black Diaspora

Following Aaron’s example, I thought I’d post some recent ideas for future classes.

Here’s a grad version of the black diaspora. I tilt in very particular ways, and so it might be really predictable. It ends on two lit-crit works because I’d like students to imagine how the “wide” of the black diaspora can be realized in the “narrow” of a lit-crit project.

The Black Diaspora: History, Theory, Culture

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
Melville Herskovitz, Myth of the Negro Past
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Michelle Wright, Becoming Black

Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom
Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods

J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead

Omise’eke Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar
Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory

Had we time:

Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism
Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia
Michelle Stephens, Black Empire
Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail

Anything that is surprisingly absent? The class is, of course, not focused on literary or auto/biographical works.