Instructor: Alirio Karina

This course surveys histories of slavery and unfreedom so as to elaborate the problems of discourse, evidence, definition, and politics that surround the various mechanisms and modalities of historical unfreedom, considered alone and in comparison. Over six sessions, we will explore various histories in which we can see the coalescence of specific facets of unfreedom into models for unfreedom—the child, the wife, the serf, the slave, the worker—and consider what is at stake when these models are forced, by reality, to intersect or reach their limits.