College of Arts & Sciences
Department of Black Studies
Department of Black Studies

2024-2025 Concept Learning

How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future?

Audre Lord

To talk …about international solidarity within the black world, whichever sector of the black world we live in, we have a series of responsibilities. One of the most important of our responsibilities is to define our own situation. A second responsibility is to present that definition to other parts of the black world, indeed to the whole progressive world. A third responsibility…is to help others in a different section of the black world to reflect upon their own specific experience.

Walter Rodney

But, meanwhile, I am moving on an irrepressible wish that all of us will: All of us will build that circle of our common safety that all of us deserve.

June Jordan

Differences….Common battles.…Common safety.…Social Responsibility.  In the 21st century, the words of Lorde, Rodney, and Jordan continue to matter for those who seek to cobble together a livable future while enduring war and genocide, failing democracies, imperialist expansion, loss of bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, grief, and spiritual tribulations. From Negritude and Pan-Africanism to Black Feminism and Black Arts, solidarity has been a vital and relevant political and spiritual tool for developing unified models of self-determination and coalitions, as well as securing freedom and equality in the creation of a just world. Solidarity has been a radical objective of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning, research, and artistic production. During the academic year of 2024-2025, faculty and students will reflect upon and learn about the continued relevance of solidarity to Black Studies intellectual, artist, and activist missions. As we define and revise the function and purpose of solidarity in the 21st century, courses and intellectual life events might engage the following topics and concerns:

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