Course Details

This course takes the dual phenomena of Indigenous American territorial dispossession and African enslavement in the Americas as its point of departure, and is guided by a growing body of scholarship that understands dispossession and enslavement as closely entwined tools of European colonizing across the hemispheric Americas beginning in the late 15th century. What otherwise obscured dimensions of Indigenous American and African American experience can this approach bring more clearly into view? What shared strategies of resistance and opportunities for coalition and a politics of mutual care are opened up by an understanding of shared Indigenous and African American experiences of settler colonialism? What do present-day (and in some instances local Seattle/PNW) examples of Afro-Indigenous coalition and solidarity teach us about the liberatory possibilities of anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist movement building? To explore these questions, we will engage materials from a wide-ranging interdisciplinary archive, including historical and literary scholarship, fiction, audiovisual content, and music.