The purpose of this course is to critically interrogate the idea that Hegel’s account of the dialectic of Master and Slave in his Phenomenology of Spirit was adopted by later thinkers in order to interrogate the basic structures and mechanisms of chattel slavery, racial domination, colonial domination, class domination, gender difference and domination, and, finally, the overall structure of the capitalist domination of the environment today – in the Anthropocene. One way of unifying this claim would be to say that racism, the domination of labor by capital, colonialism, and patriarchy in the modern world are all a part of the aftermath of slavery, its continuance by other means. Among the texts we will read (mostly in part) are: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Karl Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; and his Black Skin, White Masks; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction.

The purpose of this course is to critically interrogate the idea that Hegel’s account of the dialectic of Master and Slave in his Phenomenology of Spirit was adopted by later thinkers in order to interrogate the basic structures and mechanisms of chattel slavery, racial domination, colonial domination, class domination, gender difference and domination, and, finally, the overall structure of the capitalist domination of the environment today – in the Anthropocene. One way of unifying this claim would be to say that racism, the domination of labor by capital, colonialism, and patriarchy in the modern world are all a part of the aftermath of slavery, its continuance by other means. Among the texts we will read (mostly in part) are: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Karl Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; and his Black Skin, White Masks; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction.