AAAS 88.11 Atlantic Slavery/Atlantic Freedom
When does slavery find itself chiasmatically mirrored in freedom? From the recent Hollywood blockbuster 12 Years a Slave (2013) to the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the legacies of slavery and racial violence continue to cast their shadow over horizons of emancipationist history even as America commemorates the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War. In this course we will revisit the literatures of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world from the eighteenth century to the present. Our novels and stories imagine episodes of slavery, slave rebellion, and fugitive flights to freedom across two centuries: from early transatlantic crossings of slaves and servants to the New World; to Tacky’s Revolt and its place in what Vincent Brown has recently called the “Coromantee Archipelago” in eighteenth century slave rebellion; to the spectacular soundings of the Haiti Revolution in the Age of Revolutions; to the messianic prophecies of Nat Turner in the early nineteenth century; to slave rebellions at sea; and finally to fugitive slave fictions in the abolitionist decade leading up to the Civil War.
Cross Listed Courses
ENGL 62.22