Winter Course 09: Humanities 102 / Humanities 211 “Black Freedom, African Justice” Instructors: Sherwin Bryant (African American Studies), Yarí Pérez Marín (Spanish and Portuguese), and David Schoenbrun (History).

A map of Congo, 1718

Sherwin Bryant Professor Sherwin Bryant specializes in colonial Latin American History with a particular emphasis upon slavery, race, and the early modern African Diaspora. His first book project, Rivers of Gold, Sweet Valleys, and Sordid Cities: Slavery and the Struggle for Autonomy and Rights in the Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1810, offers the first comprehensive analysis of slavery and slave life in the north Andes. A Fulbright recipient and Ford Foundation Fellow, Bryant is also the co-editor with Rachel O’Toole and Ben Vinson of Africans to Spanish America (forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press).

Yarí Pérez Marín Professor Yarí Pérez Marín specializes in colonial Latin American literature and culture. Her research interests include Caribbean literature, history of science and women's writing. She has received awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In her upcoming book project, Evolving Epistemologies and New World Medical Writings, 1565-1592, she examines texts written in Spain and colonial Mexico in which American nature takes center stage in the ongoing feud between Renaissance humanism and experiential modes of knowledge-production. Her analysis makes a case for the incorporation of scientific writing into current discussions on early modern historiography and literature.

David Schoenbrun Professor David Schoenbrun specializes in African history before the 16th century and in non-traditional sources for writing history. He has received awards from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. His first book, The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions appeared in 1997. His second book, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century, was named a 1999 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. With Professor Kearsley Stewart (Anthropology), he is producing a documentary film, A Bead in Time: Beauty and Wealth in Ghana, on the value of glass trade beads in Ghana.

From Debret, a Brazil coronation

Students in this coordinated lecture and seminar course explore how African peoples and enslaved blacks advanced competing visions of good governance and the good life in Africa and the Americas. We examine art, film, literary texts, legal codices, medical tracts, and travelers' accounts, dating from the colonial era to the present day—many drawn from Northwestern's world-renowned Africana Collection.

What happens to our understanding of the "good society" when we consider Africans as political and economic actors? How did ideas of the good society developed on the African continent inform Africans' aspirations as they crossed the Atlantic, or complicate their descendants' negotiations with slave holders?

Any attempt to imagine how a society should govern itself raises questions about the relationship between its system of labor and personal liberty. In the period known for the Atlantic slave trade, these questions emerged in the starkest possible form—and in the process gave rise to new ideas about our common humanity. This courses looks at both sides of this Altantic world. It examines how Africans were drawn into the circulation of goods in ways that fueled the Industrial Revolutions in Asia, Europe, and North America, and also the notion that people could be valued like things and exchanged for them— most notoriously, as slaves on the middle passage. We ask: what notions of moral responsibility, justice and good governance held sway in these settings? In the Americas, we examine how ethnic Africans and their Afro-Creole descendants shaped political and economic life in the New World, asking: What impact did African notions of justice and good government have upon the Haitian Revolution, or the development of Quilombos or Palenques (runaway slave settlements) in Brazil and Colombia.

Adrián Sánchez Galeque, Zambo Chieftains of Esmeraldas (1599). Museo de América, Madrid.

The course weaves together threads of African and African Diaspora history to show how African-descended people’s struggle for freedom and justice informed and shaped western liberal democracies. We will read primary source materials from illustrative case studies on both sides of the Atlantic. We will make a behind-the-scenes visit to the Field Museum, Chicago’s famous natural history museum. And we will make use of video materials, including a film, currently in development, that examines how goods circulate between Europe, Africa, and America.

Some primary texts (all to be read in English):
King Affonso of Congo, Letters to the Crown of Portugal, (1526)
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdoms of this World, (1949)
Carlos Diegues, Quilombo, (1984)
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616)
Tomás Gutierrez Alea, La última cena (The Last Supper) (1976).
Alonso de Sandoval, Un tratado sobre esclavitud (A Treatise on Slavery) (1627)

Some secondary texts:
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
Jane Landers and Barry Robinson (eds.), Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America
John Thornton, A Kongolese Saint Anthony

A map of the Gold Coast from Issini to Alampi, 1729