Global Black Resistance

Module Title: Global Black Resistance

Module Leader: Dr Ola Osman

Overview:

This course surveys African and Diasporic resistance movements in their global-historical context, focusing on their emergence as responses to the structures of hierarchy and domination generated by, and constitutive to, the project of Western civilization. Beginning in the 15th century and extending into the 20th, we examine how shifting configurations of power, violence, and expropriation were met with radical intellectual traditions as well as organized social, cultural, and political upheavals across the Black Atlantic world.

The course gives students the opportunity to understand the politics of runaway slaves who established societies in swamps and other uninhabitable domains, African empires and kingdoms that resisted slave raiders and traders, and the ideologies that shaped Black and African liberation movements, such as Decolonization and Black Power. It also pays critical attention to the transnational actors and structural forces—including the CIA—who spied on and sought to contain and subdue such radical movements. Scholarly texts are placed in conversation with oral histories, archival records, the autobiographies of political prisoners, literature, film, and documentary.