This seminar explores critical Black feminist thought — radical, intersectional, and global. We study a breadth of work produced by and about Black women who too often lose their rightful place as leaders of social struggle, and we examine how Black women’s assertions of humanity, community, family, and liberation did not merely critique capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy but challenged them at the root.
We move through four movements — the Flesh, the Table, the Collective, the Future — asking throughout: what frameworks of analysis do these thinkers give us? How do we use them to make sense of this moment, including the ending of the college around us? And what does freedom ask of us now? Rather than survey every thinker, we hold a few deeply, and we practice the freedom we study — building, together, a living altar around a single question: what do we want to be free from?
We move through four movements — the Flesh, the Table, the Collective, the Future — asking throughout: what frameworks of analysis do these thinkers give us? How do we use them to make sense of this moment, including the ending of the college around us? And what does freedom ask of us now? Rather than survey every thinker, we hold a few deeply, and we practice the freedom we study — building, together, a living altar around a single question: what do we want to be free from?
- Instructor: Shylah Hamilton