Teaching Fellow under Professor Cornel West

The aim of this course is to engage critically classical and significant texts in the Afro-American intellectual tradition. We begin with three towering figures—Du Bois, Baldwin, and Hansberry—who set the scene and stage for interpreting the human condition through an Afro-American lens. We then move carefully through canonical works of black scholars and writers who wrestle with the forms of death, dogma, and domination that circumscribe black human flourishing. Our fundamental assumption is that black life is as precious as any...