DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

In “Feminist Afro-Futurisms,” our class will explore the long history of black feminist speculative production, beginning with the turn of the twentieth-century. We will explore black feminine subjectivity in the 1903 novel by Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood, along with later twentieth-century works by Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson. By situating these works side-by-side, along additional literary works and black feminist literary theory and criticism, this course bridges more recent writing and concerns of black women feminists with the lesser known works of nineteenth century Black New Women. We will also interrogate the legacy of black feminine creative production spanning the century.  These issues include but are not limited to the position of black women as mothers and family members, concerns of sexual violence, hypersexuality and hypervisibility, questions of canonicity, and the ongoing marginality of black women’s works within the academic classroom. This is a reading and discussion-based class, and regular class participation is a must. Come prepared to tackle issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Assignments will include leading in-class discussion, two small papers, and a multi-media group final.

Examination of events, movements, theories, and texts that have shaped the development of the African diaspora. Topics include slavery; abolitionism; Pan-Africanism; the culture/politics nexus; hip-hop; AIDS; linkages among gender, sexuality, and diasporic sensibilities.

A study of Black religions, from the time of slavery to the present, in the context of American social, political, and religious history. The course pushes students to take a panoramic view of Black Religions in America. Consideration will be given to debates concerning the roots of Black American Religion, the Black Social Gospel, the Centrality (or lack there of) of Black Churches, Black Islam, Blacl Catholiciam, African Indigenous Religions, Black Atheism, the Religiousity of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Theology, Womanist Theology, Black Televangelism, and the present battle for Black Rights. *Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religion studies major concentration.

This course introduces students to a variety of works by black writers of the long nineteenth century. In this class, we will concentrate on the poetry and fiction of this period and explore the central themes, styles, commonalities, and differences within these works. For instance, we will consider how dialect and geography change our understanding of the subject matter. We will confront our preconceived expectations of what "black literature" means in the nineteenth century and consider the implications of this process throughout the semester. The course is reading and writing intensive, and every class will require preparation of a primary text and supplementary reading through which we will explore central issues in the assigned reading, including issues of class and citizenship, identity formation, and gender. Texts will include works by Florence Hall, Harriet E. Wilson, Mary Prince, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and others, in addition to companion critical and theoretical articles.

This graduate level course introduces students to a survey of cultural, social, historical, and theoretical approaches to understanding the meaning and applications of Blackness, discussing a range of approaches involved in developing a global analytics of blackness. The Middle Passage, transatlantic racial slavery, the plantation system, and the gendered racial terror erected on them were not one time events, spanning almost 500 years from the early 15th century to well into 19th century, and their effects are still felt not only in Americas but in many places around the globe, including continental Africa.

As an analytic Blackness emphasizes how Black people are positioned in relationship to this abstract force differently than other groups (e.g. whites, Latin@, Native, Asian American, etc.) and internally differentiated depending on gender, sexuality, class, phenotype, nationality, etc. Thus, blackness - just as whiteness - is not primarily about cataloging the existence of racial groups but addresses a spectrum of power along which all racial groups are unequally positioned.

Drawing on theoretical discourses from the social sciences and humanities, the course surveys blackness as a global category of critical analysis for both historical and contemporary social formations in the African Diaspora. In addition, by considering the different manifestations of Blackness as well as other forms of racialized identity across the globe from historical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, it also considers how gender, class, sexuality, and nationality shape the territory of blackness.

We will study scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, incarceration, segregation, other forms of racialized violence, and, on the other hand, texts that imagine Blackness as a pathway alternative forms of being human.

The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race; Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks; Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Fred Moten, In the Break, Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness;Joao Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities; Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Nahum Chandler, X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle;Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies;Sylvia Wynter, "On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom," Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness; Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People; Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture; Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora

This seminar is designed to explore neoliberalism as a particular “conjuncture” (Hall) within a broader genealogy of “racial capitalism” (Robinson). It is comprised of two components. The first scrutinizes neoliberalism as “late global capitalism” (Jameson) or as a post-war global class project identified as post-Fordism or Post-Taylorism. In the global north, this has been manifested in de-industrialization, attacks on labor unions, intensified policing/surveillance, persecution of immigrants, gentrification, mass incarceration, growing class division, and the “prison industrial complex” (Davis). In the global south, this has been manifested in dispossession, war, indigenous genocide, poverty, imperialism, Islamophobia, border militarization, ecological degradation, and forced migration. Key authors for this part of the seminar will include: David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alex Callinicos, Samir Amin, Angela Davis, Antonio Negri, Manning Marable and others. The second component scrutinizes neoliberalism as a corresponding ethic or mode of biopolitical governance. This part of the seminar will explore the (post-Keynsian) transition from a welfare state to a carceral state as a defining element of post-Cold War racial statecraft. In the global north, this has been manifested in domestic warfare against insurgent anti-racist struggles (political assassinations, incarceration, psy-ops, and COINTELPRO); the appropriation of such struggles as race/ethnic studies curricula; a growing divide between academe and grassroots organizing; fabricated moral panics (wars on gangs, crime, or drugs) as a rationale for racialized policing and imprisonment; a growing emphasis on therapeutic adjustment (multiculturalism, diversity, safe space) over insurgent critiques of power; the pathologization of working class Black and Brown communities (the Moynihan report); and a resurgence of white supremacist nationalism in the form of patriotism. Key authors for this part of the seminar will include: Dylan Rodríguez, Joy James, Gustavo Esteva, Jodi Melamed, Junaid Rana, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Mumia Abu Jamal, Lester Spence, Fred Moten, Robin Kelley, Roderick Ferguson, Sarah Ahmed and others.