lectures
Course description
We are living in the ruins of protest.
From police reform commissions to diversity pledges, the state has absorbed, distorted, and neutralized the language of any dissent that is not riotous. But what if that wasn’t backlash — what if it was the plan? What if the dominant forms of Black protest were never meant to succeed?
Taught live from political exile in Berlin by scholar and writer Yannick Giovanni Marshall, this four-session lecture draws from his forthcoming book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon (Bloomsbury, 2025).
We’ll trace how a tradition of radical Black resistance — grounded in maroonage, defiance, and anti-colonial clarity — was replaced by a politics of pleading. We’ll examine how liberal institutions and Black elites collaborated to turn protest into performance, dissent into spectacle, and visibility into a substitute for power.
This course is for those seeking political clarity, not performative outrage — and for those ready to confront how even our most celebrated resistance can serve the very systems it claims to oppose.
🧱 Weekly Breakdown:
Week 1 – A Certain Negro Man Named Adam
• Black anti-colonial life in a white supremacist colony
• What Adam’s story reveals about state power and uncompromising Black life
Week 2 – Killing the Maroon, Birthing the Supplicant
• The replacement of fugitive Blackness and anti-colonial revolt with white abolitionism
• Why today’s “resistance” movements so often play by the rules of the state
Week 3 – The Muzzle of Civil Rights
• How civil rights became a containment strategy
• The rise of the Black political elite as enforcers of state legibility
Week 4 – Supplication in the Spectacle
• BLM, liberal media, and opposition as performativity
• Why visibility politics neutralize actual power
format
- 4 pre-recorded lectures, 45 minutes each
- Low-waged?/student? Contact about sliding scale.
about the professor
Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall is a faculty member teaching Contemporary Black Thought in the School of Critical Studies, CalArts (on indefinite leave) and author of The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon (Bloomsbury, 2025). His essays and interviews have appeared in Al Jazeera (including the influential “Black liberal, Your Time is Up”), Current Affairs, Black Agenda Report, and other international platforms for abolitionist and anti-colonial thought. He holds a PhD in African Studies from Columbia University’s MESAAS department and an MA in African American Studies from the same institution. He brings nearly a decade of university-level teaching experience, with classes that unfold less like lectures and more like literary events—immersive, poetic, and rooted in Black radical tradition.
what former students say
“It’s not often in academia that I feel heard and given a call to action that is both practical and authentic. This course introduced me to marronage as a foundation towards anti-colonialism. Through an analytical lens of the ‘long-movement’, Yannick manages to challenge popularized ideals of liberal thought with sharp criticism, wit and humor. The course is structured around readings, but its essence is serious critique delivered through sharp humor and honest conversation.”
— Reina Akkouche Halabi, The End of Supplication, Graphic Designer, Graduate Student
“Yannick changed everything I thought I knew about radical pedagogy. His courses consistently challenged students to see differently, read differently, and act differently. As both a teaching assistant and student, I found Yannick’s classroom to be a space of generative, provocative, and courageous questioning.”
— Jacob Blumberg, Filmmaker and Graduate Student, Black Crime in Lynch Mob Society, CalArts
“Yannick’s course stands out as one of the most transformative educational experiences I’ve had. Through probing questions and dialogue, he challenged widely accepted constructs that empires use to self-legitimize and that liberal discourses rely on to stifle resistance.
Yannick creates a uniquely candid space for students to push beyond the rigid boundaries of academia. He expanded my perspective and equipped me with sharper tools to debate and resist.”
— Tara, Educator and Graduate Student, Deconstructing the Police CalArts
Yannick Giovanni Marshall 