124081 VK BEd 08a.3: VK Literature and Language Education (2023S)

The video of George Floyd's death and his repeated and unheard appeal - "I can't breathe" - is probably the best known of recent icons of African-American oppression by US law enforcement. The aim of this course is to fill in some of the history that reaches back to the days of slavery with a specific view of equipping future teachers for educating their pupils. Roughly 200 years ago legislators in both Britain (1807) and the United States (1808) made their citizens' participation in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade illegal. Although this did not put an end to slavery itself, it marked a dramatic change in public opinion, economic/political reasoning and philosophical conception of humanity and its fundamental rights. Part of this course will be dedicated to understanding the historical background of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and getting to know its main locations in Britain (especially Liverpool), West Africa, the Middle Passage and the Caribbean. Then we are going to look at how the trade was discussed in 18th economic, political, legal and abolitionist discourses, and analyse three contemporary literary representations to abolitionism, one by a black man (Equiano), one by a white woman (Moore) and one by a white man (Cowper). But we are also going to spend a lot of time to late 18th and 19th century icons of oppression proper - taken from visual culture (the Brooke, the Wedgwood cameo, Turner's The Slave Ship) and litigation history (the Somerset case; the Zong case). Finally, we are going to analyse 20th/21st century literary texts (Dabydeen, Philip), a critical autobiography (Hartmann) and two films (Spielberg; Asante), which all react to and reflect on the slave trade through iconic events and locations.

All writing tasks are geared towards helping you write your BEd-thesis or term paper.