ASRC 6290

Epibiosi: The Biopolitics of Booker T. Washington

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

"Epibiosi:" to survive, to survive in the face of not only the everyday demands of life, but to command a strategy to be in the world in the face of considerable odds. A biopolitical project that takes as its object of thought the ways in which Booker T. contrived a mode of being in a world inordinately hostile not only to the Negro, but to the lived realities of Negroes being educated in their very midst. That is, in the South; that is, in Alabama, the very heart of Dixie. Biopolitics as the strategy for survival. To survive in the face of a hostile/inhospitable "host" community; to find ways to survive in the face not only of white antipathy but also Negro opposition — from DuBois to every other Northern inclining toward any mode of compromise with the Southern plantocracy — most memorably rendered as Booker T's famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. A biopolitics that thinks life-as-survival from the hostile ground up.

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