32116

WiSe 19/20: Formations of Blackness: The Cultures of Slaves & Free Blacks in Eighteenth-Century America

Herman Bennett

Kommentar

This course addresses the relationship between the cultures of the enslaved, racial formation and political modernity’s most notable concept: freedom. Posed as a question, one might ask what are the historical dynamics between the emergence of black cultural formations, the formation of polities throughout the Atlantic world and freedom? Asked differently, how might slavery and the cultures of the enslaved engendered freedom in the eighteenth century? In what ways did freedom enable the emergence of black and African cultures in the wake of European imperial expansion and what are the implications for our understanding of individualism, sovereignty, the public sphere, liberalism, nationalism, republicanism, and the nation state? Such questions flow obviously from recent scholarship on late eighteenth-century free blacks who left various destinations in the Americas or England for Sierra Leone and Liberia, or for that matter the thousands of emancipated Africans from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa who joined previous arrivals in the fledgling ‘black’ colonies in West Africa in the nineteenth century. Armed with a newly acquired but ill-defined freedom, blacks—from the Americas and England—along with ethnic Africans—forged new social selves and polities that shaped the modern political histories of Atlantic Africa. But similar conclusions should be drawn for the sizeable pockets of free blacks throughout the Americas and England who did not return to Africa. Indeed, the vast settlements of free blacks in Latin America had a profound but largely overlooked political impact on New World societies, decisively shaping the expressions of political modernity (individualism, sovereignty, nationalism) throughout the Atlantic world. These free blacks were also criollos (creoles). Overlooked beyond the field of Latin America history until Benedict Anderson ascribed them a leading role in the origins of nationalism, scholars have narrowly associated criollos with whites—ignoring the fact that blacks, especially free blacks, carried that label and constituted the majority of that population. ----- In one sense, this course concerns itself with the problem of freedom before, during, and after the Enlightenment thereby seeking to disrupt the singular teleology that characterizes modern liberty. Freedom—much like conversion—has been rendered a singular event. But freedom, like other concepts that comprise the lexicon of political modernity, has a genealogy that precedes an ascendant consumer society and bourgeois subjectivity all the while embodying a vast array of different and conflicting experiences. The focus on earlier and distinct incarnations of freedom directs our attention to a series of neglected histories. Rather than labeling these narratives as exceptions, we should ponder in what ways do they bring into relief the distinct genealogies and pluralities of freedoms. ----- For the first day of class, participants are asked to read Fred Moten’s “Knowledge of Freedom” CR: The New Centennial Review 4.2 (Fall 2004): 269-310. Schließen

16 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Di, 12:00 - 14:00 16 Termine

Di, 15.10.2019 12:00 - 14:00

Dozenten:
Prof. Herman Bennett