“To Do the World’s Work”:  Capitalism and Slavery in The Birth of a Nation (2016)

Compiled by Amanda K. Bennett
B.A., African American Studies and English (minor in German), University of Alabama, 2016
M.A., Women’s Studies, University of Alabama, May 2017

Abstract

In this syllabus, I have included texts and media that examine white utilizations of capitalism against black bodies and the lingering effects of existing within a capitalist environment on the modern black psyche. My intent is to indicate that capitalism is a mutually toxic and exploitative system that did little substantive good for either masters or slaves (beyond the acquisition of capital). Additionally, I have included pieces from both before and after formal emancipation in 1865 in order to establish the idea that the fundamental principle of American chattel slavery- the purchase and sale of black bodies for capitalistic gain- remains among us in a myriad of forms today. I argue that within the context of the American social and economic milieu, black Americans exist within a constant state of commodification, forced into the liminal space between being bought and sold. Thus, black rejections of this perpetual commodification (in the form of protest, activism, and economic and social autonomy) have been and always will be greeted with institutional pushback, violence, and surveillance. These texts illuminate issues stemming from the intersections of slavery and capitalism in Birth of a Nation by interrogating the eternal paradox of the “black American citizen.”

Primary and Secondary Sources

Books
  • John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
  • Derrick Bell,  “The Space Traders,” Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
  • Sven Beckert,  Empire of Cotton (London: Macmillan, 2014).
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russel & Russel, 1935).
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
  • Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
  • Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984).
  • Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Samuel Moore, Capital (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955).
  • Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887).
  • William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006).
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762).
 
Scholarly Articles
  •  Cheryl I Harris, "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-1756.
 
Op-Eds and Editorials
Speeches  
Films  
Music