The second half of the course will look at black travel and its representations by intellectuals and artists like W.E.B.

By analyzing historical sites, museum exhibits, slave narratives, literature, and art in Paris, this course analyzes the use of movement, immobility, captivity, and forced dislocations from family and culture from a myriad of viewpoints: slaves like Sally Hemings, who accompanied master Thomas Jefferson to Paris, slave traders like John Newton who wrote “Amazing Grace,” and abolitionist writers who were all traveling between Paris, London, and the United States. This course examines (and then requires students to digitally archive) the artistic and institutional representations of the forced and elective migration of African American life, freedom fighters, artists, and intellectuals in Paris from slavery to Beyoncé and Barack Obama. “I was leaving the South/ To fling myself into the unknown…/ I was taking a part of the South/ To transplant in alien soil, / To See if I could grow differently/ If I could drink of new and cool rains/ Bend in strange winds/ Respond to the warmth of other suns./ And, perhaps, to bloom.” Richard Wright, famed author of Native Son hand-wrote a poem reflecting his own motivations for leaving Rucker’s Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, for Chicago, New York, and ultimately, like many black revolutionaries and artists, for Paris. They are also central to the creation, rise, and circulation of black popular culture globally to articulate revolutionary thought and communicate competing visions for a racially equal and just future historical actors and artists tried to will into being during slavery and Jim Crow eras. They left.” Migration, movement, captivity, and travel are central to the history of the African Diaspora in the black Atlantic and conceptions of “freedom” and protest in the United States.

Journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote that the 6 million African Americans who migrated from the Jim Crow South to the urban North, West, and Europe after emancipation “did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done.

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