The End of Supplication Online Lectures

Course Description

Based on his forthcoming book The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon (Bloomsbury, 2025), this course puts the state into question and re-reads the dominant discourse on Black struggle from a Black anti-colonial perspective. From Marronage to Civil Rights to the society of the anti-Black spectacle and the ritual of “peaceful protest,” it shows how Black revolt was displaced by colonial “hope” — how a maroon war against the colonies was reduced to supplication, to waiting with doffed cap on a white supremacist state to become enlightened and equitable. The course plots an escape from both fascist power and liberal mythology.

Each lecture runs 40–60 minutes, with on-demand access to all four sessions. The course also includes a curated list for further reading, expanding on the themes covered in each lecture.

This is not a course to “interrogate colonial power.” It is built with a view to its end.

About Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall

Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall holds a PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University, an MA in African American Studies, and a BA in Political Science and Caribbean Studies from the University of Toronto. He has taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts as Faculty in Contemporary Black Thought, as well as at liberal arts colleges such as Knox College and Colby College.

In April, he left the United States — and his faculty post at CalArts — not for another position, but in protest against the repression of anti-colonial thought and the silencing of Black Studies under an emboldened white supremacist order. That exile gave him the freedom to say what U.S. academia works to contain: that Black life is lived inside white supremacist totalitarianism, and that revolt has been traded for performances of obedience and gratitude.

Now based in East Africa, Dr. Marshall delivers his signature talk Message from Exile at universities across Europe and Canada. His work speaks to those living under the tightening grip of fascism and searching for ways to think, fight, and imagine outside the institution.