Courses
Letters in Liberation II_Course 201
Letters in Liberation II
Slave Leviathan: The Rhode Island Slave Industry and Formations of Black Resistance
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Date: Spring/Summer/Fall
Location: Bidon Community Print & Design Studio, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
Beginning in the eighteenth century, the small colony of Rhode Island would become a slave-trading monolith with no serious competitors on either side of the American Revolution. At its peak, Rhode Island-based merchants commanded an astounding 90 percent of the trade.
Rhode Islanders have been reluctant to acknowledge their foremost role in the North American trans-Atlantic slave trade. With the exception of a handful of thoughtful and committed educators, attempts at a broader public reckoning have been thoroughly insufficient.
What was the nature and extent of Rhode Island’s leadership in the trans-Atlantic slave trade? How did the lived resistance of black people, both enslaved and free, shape concepts of freedom and the evolution of democratic processes in Rhode Island?
Rooted in Black Studies and the art of offset and letterpress print design, this summer course will critically examine three central components of Rhode Island’s control of the slave trading industry: commerce, antiblack institution-building, and black formations of resistance.
As tactile print design and documentation are fundamental to this course, students will engage hands-on with the rich history of offset lithography and letterpress printing. Each student will develop an original print through close literary and visual design analysis. Ultimately, this course aims to raise consciousness around conceptualizations of freedom and liberation in a modern society.
African Americans and the Legal System_Course 201
Date: Spring/Summer/Fall
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Bidon Community Print & Design Studio, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
Using the colonial period as its point of departure this seminar focuses on the legal and social configurations white settler society designed to circumscribe the political status of African-Americans throughout United States history.
Course Goals
● Learn key terminology, concepts, moments, movements, and individuals who shaped the Black American relationship to legal, political, and economic dynamics in the U.S.
● Discuss the critical erasure of African American attempts to radically redirect the linearity of race codification.
● Apply historical knowledge to contemporary conceptions of antiblackness in institutional practices.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, each participant will be able to:
Use foundational terminology and concepts necessary for the study of African-Americans history and the U.S. legal system.
Identify pivotal moments in the historical chronology of Blackness as a [non]human de jure category.
Explain ways in which African Americans have fundamentally defined the theoretical mechanisms of the legal system.
Analyze the relational dynamics between private prejudice and institutional racism.
Evaluate mechanisms by which American institutions reinforce the social contours of race.
Develop a critical analysis of race within a legal framework.
[All required reading provided]
Letters in Liberation_Course 101
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Date: Spring/Summer/Fall
Location: Bidon Community Print & Design Studio, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
How might an analysis of a black radical literary and print tradition shape the ways in which we understand American civil society and, more broadly, settler culture? What is the relationship between concepts of political power and the black archive, as the blueprint for resistance?
How can we use ideas of liberation found in the edifice of black letters to narrate through the medium of offset and letterpress print design?
Rooted in Black Studies and master offset and letterpress print design craft, this course, as part of a series, will examine the critical nature of the black radical text. A core course objective is to elucidate the nature of silences around the ideology of white supremacy and its aggregation of antiblack phenomena.
Central to Black Studies is a critique of the West. Here, we will immerse ourselves in a close reading of three primary source documents:
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Montgomery Women’s Political Council correspondence letter to the mayor
Steve Biko writing on Black Consciousness
As tactile print design and documentation are fundamental to the course, in the shop students will engage hands-on with the history of offset litho and letterpress printing. Each student will build individual print portfolios through a close literary and visual design analysis. An emphasis is placed on consciousness building around the ways in which contested counter formations of black literary inform concepts of freedom and liberation.
Critical Intro to African American History_Course 120
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Date: Fall 2024
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This PBSS course is designed to build the capacity of participants to engage with complex topics in Black American history both before, during and after the Civil War. Centered in Black agency, actions, and achievements, this seminar will apprise participants on key influencers, prominent organizations, critical movements, and radical ideas which have not only shaped the Black experience in the U.S. but fundamentally defined the legal, political, and cultural contours of American society.
[All reading material is provided with registration.]
Providence Black History Walking Tour
In this celebrated tour, participants traverse parts of Providence's oldest black community. We begin at the site of the historic Olney Street Baptist Church, an important site of Black institution-building and resistance. Moving through the gentrified crossroads of Providence's East Side/College Hill area, we explore how legal systems and socio-economic power sought to circumscribe the lives of black Rhode Islanders. As we walk through the city, we'll learn about histories of resistance to white settler hegemony in Rhode Island's capital city.
Tour fee: $1,500
Introduction to the Modern Civil Rights Movement
Date: Spring/Summer/Fall
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This engaging course guides participants through an intensive exploration into the political technologies of foundational moments in the southern Black freedom struggle, or what we now call the modern Civil Rights Movement. Here participants will use a collection of primary source documentation to examine resistance theory, organizing praxis, and cooperative economic thought. The class considers key players, strategies, and outcomes which gave political form and function to contemporary African American life and helped define the boundaries of freedom for all Americans.
Slave Patrols
and
Black Codes
and
Black Codes
Date: Spring/Summer/Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
This class provides an investigation of slave codes, black codes and the construction of the US slave patrol system as a prototype for Jim Crow segregation and modern-day antiblack racial profiling theory.
We Want Freedom: Black Technologies of Resistance
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Course Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This class contemplates cultural and social history as essential technologies of Black resistance theory and/as praxis of radical organizing (ex. cooperative economic thought and practice, blues theory, self-preservation defense). Beginning with the memory of Fannie Lou Hamer, and centered in the south, this course examines key players, strategies, and radical continuities which gave political form and function to Black life. From education policy to police reforms, from voting rights to environmental justice, governmental policies were either shaped in, or significantly informed by Black radical movements. Using archival media and historic documentation we will look anew on the southern Black Freedom Struggle.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Course Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
Focusing on Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail this course intensive considers the power of nonviolent direct action as an instrument to abolish unjust laws. The class invites students to reflect on the concept of nonviolence as an instrument of social change. Students will be provided the opportunity to analyze primary source documents and discuss principles of social justice transformation in the past and present.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Built It
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Course Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This class departs from the antiquated narrative of Rosa Parks as a tired seamstress seeking instead to reposition her within the broader context of a complex movement of black women struggling for freedom. The class aims to critically engage students with the key players of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as well as the daring and sophisticated organizing necessary for victory.
#AssataTaughtMe: An Essential Study
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This course engages an intensive examination of Assata Shakur’s intellectual life and the ideological framework informing her political thought. Particularly, our focus is centered in the development of Shakur’s philosophy on liberation for Black people and what she sees as the conditions necessary to achieve it.
[Required Text: Assata: An Autobiography]
Kikuyu Women and the Mau Mau Rebellion
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This robust course examines the central role played by women from Kenya's largest ethnic group, Kikuyu, in one of the most influential decolonial struggles of the 20th century -- the Mau Mau Rebellion.
Blackface Minstrelsy and Racial Portrayal
Date: Fall 2024
Instructors: Prof. Marco McWilliams and Jacques Bidon
Location: Providence Black Studies Syllabus, 3 Acorn St., Providence, RI 02903
Fee: $240 (Limited to 12 students per cohort, all course materials provided)
Contact: lettersinliberation@gmail.com
Course Description
This class interrogates the historical origins of blackface minstrelsy beginning in the 1830s and contextualizes the racist ideologies that emanated from that period forward. We will provide participants with an introduction to the first truly American art form and help them understand how white civil society used minstrelsy to satirized and denigrate Black Americans for comedic relief and camaraderie.