Literature and Politics: Black Radicalism and the Archive

This seminar will focus on theorizing the particular contours of radical knowledge production among African diasporic intellectuals in the twentieth century. We will read key works of African, Caribbean, and African American cultural and political movements, with particular attention to the relations between politics and poesis, and the ways that the exigencies of anticolonialism, civil rights, and Pan-Africanism have provoked methodological innovation in interdisciplinary work. We will focus especially on the implications of black radicalism for theories of the archive; to this end, we will not only read current scholarship on the issue, but also take advantage of recent acquisitions of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, including the papers of C.L.R. James, Hubert Harrison, Alexander Gumby, and Amiri Baraka. Participants will be expected to pursue original archival research in their work for the seminar. This is to say that the seminar will offer both an introduction to the methods and standards of archival practice (with an eye to the particular issues raised by African diasporic history), and a practicum in archival research using the holdings of RBML. Readings may include work by W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, C.L.R. James, Amiri Baraka, Ronald Hobbs, Grace Lee Boggs, Howard “Stretch” Johnson, and Alexander Gumby; and secondary scholarship by David Scott, Robert Hill, Arjun Appadurai, Stuart Hall, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Cedric Robinson, Achille Mbembe, Carolyn Steedman, Saidiya Hartman, and Ann Stoler.