Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard will be teaching AfAm 137, History of the African Diaspora. Tues/Thurs 8:00-9:20, Donald Bren Hall 1427.
Course Description
This lecture course examines the causes and consequences of the multiple diasporas of African peoples since the sixteenth century in the Atlantic world, especially the Americas and Europe. In it we shall focus on representations and key debates about diaspora in the era of the triangular slave trade, massive urban migration and industrialization, and the era of contemporary globalization. As decisive turns were/are made in the world economy that could not have occurred without the transfer of technically skilled and philosophically sophisticated peoples as laborers, reproducers of a labor force, and (re)producers of aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical institutions we shall consider the complicated, contradictory, and yet coherent productions of blackness and black identities. We begin with the life of a freedman in the shipping industry that was the backbone of the modern world economy, turn our attention to the African origins of commercial agriculture in the colonial United States and then continue forward to contemporary Africans in the Americas and debates on “diaspora” as a concept. |