Adv. Critical Race Feminisms

This course examines the praxis of two key revolutionary philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century: Grace Lee Boggs and Angela Y Davis. As radical philosophers and activist theoreticians, their writings reflect ever-shifting notions of freedom, forged through their work within militant labor movements, the civil rights movement, Black power, feminism, environmental justice, and more, for nearly the span of a century. As such, their writings reflect profound understandings of revolution as continuous and “freedom [as]… a constant struggle” (Davis 2016). 

We will begin the term studying Boggs’s and Davis’s autobiographies, working to contextualize  their ideas historically, and in relation to “freedom dreams” central to what Robin Kelley calls “the Black radical imagination” (Kelley 2002). Secondly, we will explore several core philosophical concepts that run through their writings—and namely dialectics, freedom, and revolution—with attention to their shifting understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class, and imperialism over time. Lastly, we will trace their reverberations in current radical movements, examining their influence upon contemporary Black queer activists in an era of Black Lives Matter and their abiding influence within movements for prison abolition and transformative justice more broadly.