HI 490: Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Time and Space

Spring 2025 – Ronald Richardson

This course comparatively explores how artists, writers, and activists of African descent and those of Asian descent have struggled against the political-economic, spiritual, psychological and cultural aggressions of global white supremacy and imagined and invented new modes of human liberation. Also offered as CAS AA 490.

Additional Course Materials

Extended Course Description: From about the middle of the 19^th century, western Europe and the United States began constructing a white supremacist global order that aggressively sought to ensnare the entire world in its web, seeking to shape not only global political economy, but indigenous cultures and psychologies to accord with radical western notions of individual and collective being, spirituality, and “civilization”.  From the beginning peoples of African descent and peoples of Asian descent fought fiercely against white supremacist impositions. These liberationist acts, the most spectacular of which were warfare and insurgencies, included confrontations with the debilitating psychological, spiritual and cultural impositions of white supremacy, on the artistic, literary and cultural fronts. Within the historical context of freedom fighting, this course brings together Asian descent and African descent peoples in comparative global perspective to explore the ways in which they combated white supremacy’s conscious and unconscious aggressions, and imagined and constructed ways of being and acting to counter global white supremacy, and to create worlds of their own. Our overarching transracial, transethnic, transcultural and transnational goal will be to foster and support contemporary movement directed to dismantling white supremacy and replacing it with alternate ways of being that foster, encourage, defend, and support humanity.

Instructor:

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  Ronald K. Richardson

  Associate Professor of History