This course explores the Black Atlantic through the words and experiences of diaspora members. Starting in the 16th century, European slave ships displaced millions of Africans who contributed to the creation of new societies on the African continent, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. Today, we continue to live in the world forged by the “most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history” (DuBois) and the Black resistance to it. To understand this world, this course focuses on the experiences of members of the Black diaspora in their own words. To this end we will be studying primary texts such as diaries, essay collections, satires, autobiographies, first person accounts, and novelistic retelling of true events to seek the voice of people of African-origin who lived in the Black Atlantic. Their experience is too often under-documented and therefore neglected by Western scholars. The course will focus on the intellectual, spiritual, creative and political traditions of Africans, Afro-Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans as they address and participate in the creation of the modern world. Major course themes that provide an entry point to the Black Atlantic Studies include the Revolution in Haiti, perspectives of Afro-Pessimism, Black feminist histories, and childhood experience under Apartheid.