Instructors: Michael King and Laura Nelson
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:30pm
How do activists build movements? How can a shared language of liberation unite freedom fighters across time and space? Starting with the explosion of civil rights and anticolonial struggles in the 1950s and concluding with their afterlives in the 1980s, this course will attempt to answer these questions. Using key activist texts as our guide, we will examine local movements for Black Power in the US, Indigenous sovereignty in Canada and Australia, and national independence in the Caribbean as well as African nations like Ghana and Nigeria. Members of these movements built solidarity through shared language found in songs, speeches, films, paintings, and manifestos. Using these sources and others, our class will attempt to learn this liberation language and understand its historical use in a diverse array of contexts.