Course Recap and
Religion and Protest
AS/HUMA 1300 9.0
Faculty of Arts
1.Explaining How Remediation Works
2.Reviewing First Term
3.Identifying Religion as Black Protest
 Rastafari as Black Self-Definition
 Nation of Islam and the Recovery of the
Black Body
Lecture Outline
Wednesdays 2:30-3:30
Fridays 2:30-3:30 (fall term)
Thursdays 2:30-3:30 (winter term)
Centre for Research on Latin America and
the Caribbean (CERLAC), 240G York Lanes
Office Hours
1. Readings originally scheduled for November
5th and January 7th have been dropped;
2. Lectures on “Caribbean Diasporic
Communities in the United States,” originally
March 4 and 11, have now been condensed
into one week, April 22;
3.The novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge
Danticat has been dropped from that week’s
readings;
Changes to Course Outline
Essay One:
In-Class Quiz:
Essay Two
Online Quizzes
Oral Report
Participation
Take-Home Exam
15%
20%
20%
February 11
March 4
April 22
15%
10%
20%
May 27
Evaluation: an in-class quiz and
take-home exam replace the
textual analysis and final exam
Town Hall Meeting with President Shoukri
Moot Court, Osgoode Law School
4-5:30 pm, February 4
Post Strike Stress-Busting Tune-Up Groups
Tuesdays, 1-2:30, N204B
Wednesdays, 10:30-12, N102
Thursdays, 11-12, N204B
Fridays, 3-4:30, N204B
First Days Back, VH, 10am-3pm, Feb. 2-5
Student Support Activities
“ ‘Race’ is first and foremost an unequal
relationship between social aggregates,
characterized by dominant and
subordinate forms of social interaction,
and reinforced by the intricate patterns
of public discourse, power, ownership
and privilege within the economic,
social and political institutions of
society” (Beyond Black and White186).
Course Recap: Contesting “Race”
“…identity is not only a story, a narrative which we
tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which
change with historical circumstances. And identity
shifts with the way in which we think and hear
them and experience them. Far from only coming
from the still small point of truth inside us,
identities actually come from outside, they are the
way in which we are recognized and then come to
step into the place of the recognitions which others
give us. Without the others there is no self, there
is no self-recognition” (“Negotiating Caribbean
Identity” 8).
Course Recap: Contesting “Race”
“…the normalizing gaze [is] a surveillance that
makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to
punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility
through which one differentiates and judges them”
(Discipline and Punish 25).
Course Recap: Contesting “Race”
The social imaginary is a discursive space
in which communities are already
constructed, imagined, positioned and
created by hegemonic discourses and
dominant groups.
Course Recap: Contesting “Race”
“Our ability to transcend racial chauvinism
and inter-ethnic hatred and the old
definitions of “race,” to recognize the class
commonalities and joint social-justice
interests of all groups in the restructuring
of this nation’s economy and social order,
Will be key to constructing a nonracist
democracy, transcending ancient walls of
white violence, corporate power and class”
(Beyond Black and White 201).
Course Recap: Contesting “Race”
“In diaspora experience …. Linear history is
broken, the present constantly shadowed
by a past that is also a desired, but
obstructed future: a renewed painful
yearning.” (Routes 264)
Course Recap: African Diaspora
and Slavery
“For black Atlantic diaspora consciousness,
the recurring break where time stops and
restarts is the Middle Passage. Enslavement
and its aftermaths—displaced, repeated
structures of racialization and exploitation—
constitute a pattern of black experiences
inextricably woven in the fabric of
hegemonic modernity.” (Routes 264)
Course Recap: African Diaspora
and Slavery
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Sambo/Quashie/Uncle Tom
Mammy
Buck/Black Brute/Nat
Jezebel
Coon
Sapphire
Course Recap: African Diaspora
and Slavery
In the Americas, slave resistance was the
sum of all the tools and strategies used to
openly challenge and defy the system of
slavery, as well as the more subtle
responses of survival that characterized the
daily lives of slaves and helped keep their
spirits alive.
Course Recap: African Diaspora
and Slavery
Humanism, generally speaking, refers to the
ethical understanding that all human beings have
the capacity to appeal to universal values and
are therefore equal. The fundamental assumption
of all slave narratives is that black people ought
to be included in an understanding of humanity
and thus these texts served to critique theories
of being which ontologized racism by declaring
blackness outside of the human.
Course Recap: Slave Narratives
“Africana Thought…refers to an area of thought that focuses
on theoretical questions raised by struggles over ideas in
African cultures . . . . African Thought also refers to the set
of questions raised by the historical project of conquest
and colonization that has emerged since 1492 and the
subsequent struggles for emancipation that continue to this
day. .. They are marked by the contrast between how the
modern is often characterized in Western academy—
through, say, philosophical treatment of ideas, from Rene
Descartes to Immanuel Kant, or perhaps Michel Foucault’s
locating of modernity in nineteenth-century European
thought—and how it has been lived by those on its
periphery.”
Course Recap: Slave Narratives
Tragic Redemptive Narrative:
Marcus Garvey—Malcolm X—Black Panthers
Progressive Narrative:
Frederick Douglas—DuBois—Martin Luther
King, Jr.—Barack Obama
Course Recap: Black TwentiethCentury Thought
1. Acceptance of Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari) as
living God and black Messiah;
2.Commitment to African cultures and traditions;
3.Commitment to liberation of blacks globally;
4.Socio-economic and political response to
oppression—rejection of Babylon;
5.Belief in the empowerment of black family and
community through black men.
Rastafarianism
1.Founded in 1930s by Farad Muhammad;
2. God is a black man and African Americans are
“original men”;
3. Challenges racism in the United States and
offers a counter-narrative to the discourse of
slavery;
4. Offers tools for the recovery of the black body;
5. Powerful, organized economic force;
6. Male-centered religious tradition.
Nation of Islam
“In the case of the Nation of Islam,
working-class African Americans created a
religious culture that, like the black
working-class youth culture of the
postwar era, identifies the black body as a
locus of social protest. But rather than
negating traditional black Christian
middle-class ideals, members
appropriated them within a new Islamic
matrix” (“Islamizing the Black Body” 178)
Edward E. Curtis IV