This course aims to examine and discuss some of the most relevant classical writings from authors of the Americas and Africa on slavery, slave revolutions and the slave trade to deepen the understanding about non-European perspectives and narratives in Global History. The course, therefore, starts with the Caribbean Marxist writers Cyril James ('The Black Jacobins'), Eric Williams ('Capitalism and Slavery') and Pan-Africanist and Marxist Walter Rodney ('How Europe underdeveloped Africa', 'The Russian Revolution'), as well as William Edward Du Bois (“Black Reconstruction in America”; “Along the Color Line”). Thereupon, the courses focuses on the Négritude movement, that is French Caribbean Aimé Césaire (Discours sur le colonialisme; 'Discours sur la Négritude'), Léon-Gontran Damas ('Retour de Guyane', 'Veillées noires') and Frantz Fanon ('Black Skins, White Masks'), as well as Senegalese Leopold Sédar Senghor ('Liberté: Négritude et humanisme', Deux textes sur la négritude'). Finally, the course moves to the Annals School by focussing on the “Latin American moment” of Fernand Braudel in Sao Paulo ('La Méditerranée', 'La longue durée', 'La dynamique du capitalisme'), as well as on the approach of Argentinian Raúl Prebisch ('Capitalismo periferico', 'Die lateinamerikanische Peripherie im globalen System des Kapitalismus') as precursor of the world system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. As such, the course draws on various topics, such as capitalism, slavery and the slave trade, the Haitian Revolution, blackness and racism, and political aspects of economic development from the American and African perspective.
- Trainer/in: Constanze Weiske