RELG 293 - Religion and Abolition: from Slavery to the Prison-Industrial-Complex

FC ARHU CD

4 credits
This course explores the complex relationship between religion and abolitionist practice in the United States in relation to two main topics: the enslavement and emancipation of people of African descent in British North America and the antebellum South, and the evolution of mass incarceration. Drawing from historical, theoretical, and literary sources, we will examine ideologies of Christian slavery and the emergence of religious abolitionism, how people of African descent adapted or abandoned Christianity in pursuit of emancipation, the roots of mass incarceration in religious reformism, and the salience of religious thought and practice to contemporary movements for prison abolition. In the process, we will have occasion to reflect on what connects these two iterations of abolitionism beyond the term alone, and thus why prison abolition stands at the center of emancipatory politics in the present.