Slavery in the Black Atlantic

Instructors: Lynne Feeley and Jonathan Square
Meeting time: Wednesday, 10-1
Syllabus: Canvas site

This course examines the concept of the Black Atlantic in the literature and scholarship of slavery. Each week, we will read a primary source written by an author who witnessed slavery first-hand, including texts by Ottabah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Hannah Crafts. Alongside these primary sources, we will read scholarship by historians and literary critics of slavery that represents a specific, ongoing discussion about how to conceptualize the Middle Passage and the transatlantic movement of people. We will ask what evolving story this scholarship tells about the history of slavery and the changing ways in which scholars think and write about it.