CoursesMiddle Passages and Returns (NEW)
ANTH 3100/ANTH5100

Middle Passages and Returns (NEW)

This course will engage students in questions of slavery, indentured labor, migration, and repair through the conceptual frameworks of middle passages and returns. We will collectively investigate the routes and roots through which and from which people have traveled back and forth between African, Asian, and American sites in order to ask complicated questions about travel, conscription, labor, spirituality, and self-narration. How do we think about the complex trajectories that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas?  How do we excavate lesser known inter- and intra-continental circulations? In what ways is return theoretically and methodologically im/possible? How has repair been envisioned?

Instructor(s)
  • Deborah Thomas
Semester

Fall 2025

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We will focus our attention throughout the semester on narrative texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and travel journals), considering these as ethnographic offerings which we will contextualize with anthropological and historical material.  During the break after the semester, we will enact our own “return” by traveling to South Africa and St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic to which “liberated Africans” from intercepted slaveships were redirected after Britain abolished the slave trade.   Students in the class will join their counterparts in Cape Town (taught by my colleague Kelly Gillespie at University of the Western Cape) to think together about the legacies of these histories for all of us.

Faculty: Deborah Thomas

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