We will focus our attention throughout the semester on narrative texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and travel journals), considering these as ethnographic offerings which we will contextualize with anthropological and historical material. During the break after the semester, we will enact our own “return” by traveling to South Africa and St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic to which “liberated Africans” from intercepted slaveships were redirected after Britain abolished the slave trade. Students in the class will join their counterparts in Cape Town (taught by my colleague Kelly Gillespie at University of the Western Cape) to think together about the legacies of these histories for all of us.
Faculty: Deborah Thomas