The Religions and Cultures of Enslaved People in America

More than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery--its histories and legacies--remains the subject of heated debate among the institution's descendants and the millions of others who live in its wake. As a global institution predicated upon the exchange of human bodies, slavery helped to forge political and economic empires, divided nations, and crystallized racialized caste hierarchies that persist into the present. Yet, the politically and emotionally charged nature of conversations about slavery has obscured the lives of the women, men, and children who bore the legal status of "slave." In this course, we will explore the meanings of enslavement from the perspectives of those who experienced it, and in doing so, interrogate broader questions of the relationship between slavery and the construction of racialized group identities. Using autobiographical narratives, eyewitness accounts, slaveholder diaries, images, and archeological evidence from the United States, we will examine the religious, philosophical, and experiential orientations that grounded the enslaved psyche and found expression in bondspeople's music, movement, foodways, dress, and institutions. Although the United States South will be our primary region for interrogation, we will analyze the thought and culture formations of U.S. bondspeople in light of the discursive and aesthetic productions of African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. In this way, we will endeavor to know the people who helped birth American culture.