The seminar will address the ways in which the history of colonialism and transatlantic slavery anticipated contemporary struggles over identity, place, and politics. Texts and discussions will explore how promises of modernity—specifically freedom embodied and articulated as reason, progress, liberal democracy, civility—are underwritten by particular racial-sexual unfreedoms that, paradoxically, bolster facile feminist, queer, and anti-racist emancipatory projects that thrive on accumulation, authenticity and practices of violence and exclusion. Central to and amidst the paradoxes of modernity, exclusion, emancipation, will be texts and discussions that draw attention to the creative, intellectual, and alternative emancipatory strategies of subaltern communities.