AFRC586 - BLACK AMER POL THOUGHT

This course has two objectives. On the one hand, we will explore the character and evolution of the strategic political discourse of black Americans. We will examine central debates among black American intellectuals and activists with focus on: 1. identifying issues considered and positions taken; 2. locating those debates in relation to American political and intellectual history and the changing situation of the black population; 3. analyzing characteristic principles that have undergirded political discourse among civically attentive black Americans; 4. examining the connections of social theory and political behavior among black Americans and, perhaps most important, 5. trying to establish links between debates in the past and the present political and ideological configuration in ways that can inform strategic thinking. On the other hand, we will pursue a more formalistic objective as well. The study of black American thought as an academic field by and large has avoided concerns about the practice of interpretation in the history of political thought or the history of ideologies. (The fact that this subfield has retained its interpretive naivet¿ is itself an intellectually and ideologically significant circumstance, as we shall see.)


Our second objective, therefore, will be to work toward establishing a foundation for a more historically careful scholarly discourse about Afro-American thought. Toward that end, we shall give substantial consideration to interpretive issues -- keeping the integrity of historical contextualization uppermost -- in the early weeks, when we discuss methodological questions directly. Those early discussions should set the stage for, and structure engagement with, subsequent assignments. The course is organized chronologically. Although systematic expression of political ideas by civically attentive black individuals and within discourse communities is evident at least as early as the Second Party System, the discursive and ideological origins of what we might call modern black thought took shape in the late 19th and early 20th century period defined most consequentially by disfranchisement, the consolidation of the segregationist regime in the South, and the emergence of an elite stratum within the black population who were inclined to articulate programs and agendas for the race. We will begin with examining that fin-de-siecle context and reconstruct the trajectory of black political debate to the present.