Freedom and Captivity

How has freedom been conceptualized and practiced across time and space? How have forms of captivity challenged and constrained pursuits of liberation? In this interdisciplinary first-year seminar, students will examine a broad range of texts, including activist manifestoes, audio podcasts, graphic novels, memoirs and letters, moving-image media, and works of political theory. We will study processes of industrial change, political revolution, and social upheaval, and we will analyze freedom and captivity from the vantage point of the colony and the liberated territory, the factory and the office, the home and the school, the farm and the prison, the dinner party and the moving train. We will consider works by the Attica Liberation Faction, Héctor Babenco, Simone de Beauvoir, Bong Joon-ho, Luis Buñuel, Aimé Césaire, the Combahee River Collective, Critical Resistance, Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Rebecca Hall, George Jackson, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Laleh Khalili, Andreas Malm, Karl Marx, the New York City Black Panther 21, Kwame Nkrumah, Jacques Rancière, Joe Sacco, Ousmane Sembène, Baruch Spinoza, Sunaura Taylor, Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba, Lea Ypi, and others.