Winter 2023 Class Schedule
Winter 2023 class Schedule
Winter 2023 course descriptions
101-6-21 – First-Year Seminar: From Black Power to Black Lives Matter
Given the many gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, what accounts for the rise of #BlackLivesMatter? Why do the police and criminal legal system seem so resistant to reform? What led to ‘mass incarceration’? What has happened to public school systems in the urban North since the Civil Rights Movement? Have electoral politics been responsive to the struggles and challenges in poor Black communities? This seminar examines urban racial conditions since the 1960s and explores the analyses, remedies and solutions that young activists have been formulating to address the challenges of the 21stcentury. Readings include historical and contemporary studies. A major goal of this class is to sharpen your writing skills. We will balance reading assignments with short writing assignments.
211 – Literatures of the Black World
Introductory survey of fiction, poetry, drama, folktales, and other literary forms of Africa and the African diaspora. Texts may span the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and cover central themes, such as memory, trauma, spirituality, struggle, identity, freedom, and humor.
213 – History of the Black World
Introductory survey of the history of Africans and their descendants across the globe. African civilizations prior to European colonialism, encounters between Africa and Europe, movements of "Africans" to the Americas and elsewhere, and development of black communities in and outside Africa.
251 – Introduction to Critical Mixed Race Studies
This course examines the history and major ideas about multiracial people in the United States through the lens of the emerging academic field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. How have laws constructing and regulating race, gender, sexuality, and immigration led to national ideas about who "mixed race" people are? What accounts for the national obsession about inter-racial marriage and multiracial people? And how do people who identify with more than one racial category navigate life in this society? Critical Mixed Race Studies is a field that interrogates these discourses and analyzes them within the context of society.
345 – Politics of Afro-Latin America
What does it mean to be "Black" in Latin America? What happens to our notions of "blackness," black experiences, and race when we imagine Africans and their descendants as political subjects? How do scholars identify and/or define `race' and `racism' in Latin America? When can we locate and examine `race' and `racism' in the history of Latin America? How has `race' mattered in the history of the region? Has `race' always constituted an organizational category throughout Latin America? And, how have the politics of race and sexuality converged in the making of Latin American Nations? For much of the twentieth century, Latin American nations worked to construct the identities of "racial democracies"¿countries where the scourge of racism and prejudice could not take root due to processes of whitening via mestizaje (racial mixing) and Catholic education. Yet, in recent decades, several of these countries have come to recognize the failure of such "projects" even as a growing number of studies have come to highlight the persistent and insidious patterns of racial discrimination and inequality found throughout the region and its history. In this course, students will grapple with these ideas, histories, and themes, developing a deeper understand of the social and political implications of race in Latin America. They will showcase their deepening understanding of these themes in their own words at various points in the course. Students will also be expected to pay close attention to current events affecting African-descended populations in Latin America.
380-0-20 – Africans and African Americans: Cultural Entanglements
The push for African independence in the mid-twentieth century overlapped with the Civil Rights Movement to underscore the galvanizing power of Pan-African solidarity; the social and economic transformations in the U.S. and the African continent since the 1960s have produced a less coherent political project. In this course, students will explore how the afterlives of colonialism and slavery has shaped the contemporary relationships between Africans and African Americans. A host of cultural forms and expressions offer a lens for reading the political zeitgeist, alliances, contact zones, exchanges, tensions, dissonances, and, importantly, modes of solidarity between Africans and African Americans. Students will explore how writers, musicians, performers, and scholars excavate the ongoing intimacies between the continent and the African diaspora, in a post-Civil Rights U.S. and postcolonial Africa. How do migration patterns, racialized economics, global geopolitics, community activism, and technologies of culture redefine these diasporic encounters? What role does the arts play in achieving social change for our communities?
380-0-21 – Politics of Afro-Latin America
W. E. B. Du Bois in his seminal text "The Souls of Black Folks" states, "The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing, a-singing, and a-laughing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people." This course examines how religion becomes the source language and practices for Black artists to express what it means to be Black in the Americas. The primary text for the course is "Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics," by Josef Sorett. Additional materials will come intellectuals and artists such as Paul Taylor, Katherine Dunham, Barbara McTeer, Toni Morrison, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, bell hooks, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, and James Cone, among others. Course will engage literary, visual, dance, musical, and theatrical Black cultures. Course evaluation will be based on weekly Canvas discussion posts, group facilitation of class readings, a short art review, and a final webpage project.
GRADUATE COURSE OFFERINGS
420 – Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies
Utilizes slave narratives, fiction, poetry, music, drama, critical theory, and the visual arts to survey how African-descended writers, artists, and theorists have grappled with such issues as: the relationship to Africa; self-articulation and struggle; performance as a site of knowledge production and contestation; and the global circulation of Black cultural production.
444 – Civil Rights/Black Liberation
Surveys the scholarship on what many historians have termed "the long Civil Rights Movement." Begins with the labor activism of the 1930s and the global wars of the 1940s, and treats the U.S. Black Freedom Movement as part of the broader anti-colonial upheaval of the 20th century.
480-0-20 – Topics: Black Criticism
The goal of this course will be to read and examine the various means of thinking and modes of doing what we might provisionally call “black criticism.” How have black writers and thinkers adopted prose-forms such as the jeremiad, the editorial, the essay, and the monograph in the context of their political, social, and economic situations over the past three centuries? What styles have emerged to meet the unique demands of race writing? And what, ultimately, puts the ”black” in black criticism? Where does, and ought, the discipline reside with respect to institutions such as publishing and the press and academia?