Winter 2021 Class Schedule
Winter 2021 class Schedule
Winter 2020 course descriptions
101-6 – First-Year Seminar: Black Life. Trans Life.
This course will introduce students to the parameters and textures of black life, trans life, and black trans life. Popular discourse has either depicted black trans people as glamorous superstars or always and already predisposed to death. This course, then, seeks to usefully complicate these narratives and focus on black and trans life. To that end, the course will task students with gaining an understanding of the nuances of black life via its entanglement with the afterlife of slavery and contemporary radicalism; with trans life via its troubling of the gender binary; and black trans life via the ways that blackness and transness interact and converge.
211-0 – Literatures of the Black World
This course introduces students to a variety of works by Black women writers since Phillis Wheatley. At this moment, the notion of the “Black woman writer” may not seem anomalous or unusual. However, it was only a short time ago in history that to be a Black woman writer meant to be considered an aberration. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Phillis Wheatley’s poems were “beneath the dignity of criticism.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested that Jefferson and a panel of white men held an official trial to interrogate the authenticity of Wheatley’s work. These men would have never imagined that conference sessions, entire books, and countless critical articles would be dedicated to this foundational black woman writer: the very first black author to see their work published in the United States. We mark the beginning of Black published letters in the US with Wheatley; and it is within this tradition that we will consider the similarities and differences in content and forms by the women writers that we will read during this course. In this synchronous class, we will survey a wide range of Anglophone Black Diaspora women authors and primarily concentrate on the United States. Our authors will include Toni Morrison and Phillis Wheatley, as well as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Nella Larsen, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and others. We will read poetry, short stories, essays, and at least one novel by these and other authors. Assignments will include at least regular online discussions, a group presentation, and an individual final project. Students will be evaluated on their performance in these assignments as well as class attendance and participation. This seminar depends on discussion and participation of every member of the class.
212-2 - Introduction to African American History: Emancipation to Civil Rights Movement
The course offers a general introduction to the history of African Americans in the United States from emancipation through the late twentieth century. Students will explore the myriad ways in which African Americans challenged racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination and shaped the history of the American nation. Special topics covered include Reconstruction & Redemption, Jim Crow, The New Negro, black nationalism, the Harlem Renaissance, the long civil rights movement, Black Power, and Black Feminism.
220-0 – Civil Rights and Black Liberation
The Northern and Southern civil rights movements and the rise of black nationalism and feminism, 1945-72.
327-0 – Contemporary Black Popular Music
This course provides an introduction to the history of the global travels of Black popular music since the1960s, focusing on sound cultures from the US, Caribbean, Africa and Western Europe. We will begin by studying Reggae, Disco, and Hip-Hop to discuss how they have shaped the African diaspora. We will then survey these genres as well as the histories of R&B, Afrobeat, House and Techno and some of their many offshoots (Jungle, Reggaeton, Afropop, for instance) have developed over the last 40 years to ask how popular music functions as one of the main channels of communication among the cultures of the African diaspora. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology.
348-0 – Africans in Colonial Latin America
This course explores the lives of Africans, Afro-Iberians, and their descendants in the making of colonial Latin America. Along the way, we will engage the realities of a world built by the transatlantic slavery trade, colonialism, and Black resistance intellectual histories.
350-0 – Theorizing Blackness
What is blackness? Often it is assumed that we can all tell who and what is black simply at a glance, but this course deeply troubles this assumption. In this course, students will interrogate what, when, where, and how blackness—as phenotype, culture, and analytic—is known. Students will encounter black feminist approaches to blackness, nihilistic and pessimistic understandings of blackness, philosophically capacious meditations on blackness, and literary depictions of blackness. In short, this course will complicate the very meaning of blackness and generate, beautifully, more questions rather than answers.
380-0-20 – Topics: Passing
In this course, we explore how people move within and between categories of race and gender in the United States, with particular attention to the role of law in the formation and policing of those boundaries. In addition to conventional legal texts, we will draw upon literature, social theory, and cultural ephemera. Readings will include work by Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Allyson Hobbs, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Talia Mae Bettcher, Toby Beauchamp, and others.
420-0 – Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies
The trope of the talking book that conferred humanity and power upon its owners is one starting point for the study of Afro-diasporic expressive arts. The very term points to an oxymoron, juxtaposing the alleged fixity of the written word against the ephemeral polysemy of the body in performance that artists, critics, and lay people have sought to negotiate and complicate in order to articulate individual subjectivity and collective identity. Using crosscutting thematic, historical, and generic grids, the course will utilize slave narratives, fiction, poetry, music, critical theory, and the visual arts to survey how African-descended writers, artists, and theorists have grappled with the constitution of blackness as it relates to the modern conception of humanity. Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular, mutable and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion into or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism. Since blackness has functioned as one of the key signifiers for apportioning and delimiting which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot, black expressive arts have developed a series of comprehensive conceptual and poetic frameworks—both critical and utopian—in the service of better understanding and dismantling the modern figuration of racialized humanity. Readings might include texts by Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Jackie Kay, Octavia Butler, Akweake Emezi, and Saidiya Hartman.
480-0-20 - Topics: Black Caribbean Waters: Decolonizing the Archive
As the “first stop” of the Black Atlantic slave trade, the Caribbean comprises an archipelago of rich sites that tell the history of colonization, syncretism, and resistance. Notably, aesthetic practices from ritual performance to visual culture expand the archive beyond the more recognizable forms due, in part, to the conglomeration of Afro-diasporic subjects (Latinx, Haitian, Jamaican, Bahamian, Trinidadian, etc.) who create black art that speaks to their specific geopolitical concerns. Migrants to the U.S. as well as social and cultural exchanges between U.S. African American and Caribbean communities add another texture to aesthetic practices of the Black diaspora as this ebb-and-flow between the African continent, Caribbean, and U.S. confounds stable notions of “blackness.” This course will engage the various histories of Caribbean art in transnational contexts, cohabitation between African American and Caribbean communities, and the tensions that animate this rich archive. Translation will shape our framework for understanding a cultural geography that includes Anglophone, Spanish, French, and Dutch-speaking black and brown artists and a wide range of aesthetic forms and politico-economic contexts. Guest artists and scholars based in the U.S. and the Caribbean will provide contexts to these histories and practices and reflect on the role of the archive in securing the legacy and future of Black art.
480-0-21 - Topics: Black Mindfulness Literature
In his book of essays, Turning the Wheel, author Charles Johnson says that Jean Toomer’s “Blue Meridian”: “offers us a bridge between the black experience and the profound reflections on selfhood long a part of Vedic literature.” Johnson identifies Toomer’s work as a key text within a longer tradition of Black letters that intersect with Vedic and Buddhist philosophies and practices. Considering the buzz word “mindfulness,” this synchronous graduate course explores the extended tradition of spiritual, contemplative, and ancient practices influencing Black letters since the 18th century. Alluding clear and consistent definition, "mindfulness" is an umbrella term that includes contemplative practices, embodiment, transcendentalism, and many other lines of spiritual and secular strategies for survival and more. In this and at a time when the US negotiates tensions born from the forced fixity of Covid-19 health practices and the various political movements driving particularly young Black people into the streets, this course will consider how stillness, concentration, and focus on interiority provide alternative and complementary strategies for Black survival and thriving. We will read works by Johnson and Toomer, as well as Phillis Wheatley, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Toni Morrison, and Lorraine Hansberry. Additionally, we will consider the theory and criticism of Howard Thurman, Kevin Quashie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others along with Buddhist, Vedic, and West African religious texts and studies to consider the many sides of a Black mindfulness literary tradition. We will contemplate the theory and praxis of meditation, transcendence, tantra, Dharma, ritual, and possession. Additionally, we will create and execute our own mindfulness exercises and consider how they may or may not support various politics of Blackness in our current moment. This course will require active and enthusiastic participation by everyone in the class. A Zoom class, together, we will also devise ways to build and stay engaged within our classroom environment. There will be weekly response papers/discussion board writing, group presentations, journaling, and ongoing experimentation with mindfulness. There will also be a final project due at the end of the course.
480-0-22 - Topics: Intersectionality & New Media
How do sexuality, race, gender, and class shape new media? This course explores the role of intersectional identity in technological transformations in media, focusing on the transition from analog to digital. Students will read historical case studies and theoretical essays on such topics as how social media affect how queer users interact and self-identify and how race influences cable TV distribution. The course is organized into three key areas of inquiry -- culture, organization, and technology -- with the goal of understanding the complex ways they interrelate. It is rooted in black feminism and queer of color critique but introduces a range of epistemologies. It focuses on visual media – art, television, film, games, and social media – at the sacrifice of music and performance/theater.
480-0-23 - Topics: Postcolonial Theory
How do the legacies of slavery and colonization structure the enterprise of critique? This course will provide a survey of the work of key thinkers in the field of anti-colonial and postcolonial theory, paying particular attention to theoretical debates around the colonial origins of modern subjectivity and the figure of the human, the problem of racial difference, and the attendant questions of aesthetic and political representation. We will read the work of theorists including Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Supplementary readings can include the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Assignments will include weekly reading responses throughout the term, and a final essay.