Course Details

This course explores the emergence of #BlackLivesMatter as a critical development in a long history of Black resistance to anti-Black racism and state violence. While the recent movement has organized campaigns against police murders, mass incarceration and other iterations of racial marginalization, #BlackLivesMatter also conjures specific intellectual and activist traditions in African American history. In this course, students will examine the origins of #BlackLivesMatter, as an ideological intervention, alongside the historical events, organizations and leaders who have given it inspiration. Course material will engage the political thought of Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and Ella Baker—all of whom figure prominently in #BlackLivesMatter historical frames. Students will also engage an ever-growing body of intellectual interventions (both academic and public scholarship) that interrogate the social, cultural, and economic contexts of racial violence in the United States and beyond.