Spring 2024 Class Descriptions
Spring 2024 course descriptions
210-0-20 – Introduction to African American Literature
This class will explore the first half of the African American literary tradition, beginning with the 1773 publication of Phillis Wheatley’s first volume of poetry, through the turn of the 20th century. We will read and consider fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose (slave narratives,) and speeches with the goal of developing an understanding of what the major political, social, and aesthetic concerns were for African Americans who had access to writing, and those who used the spoken word. Central to this course, and to understanding and engaging the literature will be a critical appreciation of the historical moments that surround the writing. We will look closely at how 18th- and 19th-century African American writers fashioned themselves in the world and how such fashioning reflected their conceptualization of their selfhood and identity—specifically in the ways in which they identified via race, class, and gender in antebellum society and beyond. Ultimately, by the end of the quarter, you will have a deeper understanding of how these early years of African American literary production informed and nurtured the centuries of cultural production that followed.
212-1-20 – Introduction to African American History 1: Key Concepts From 1700-1861
African origins, the slave trade, origins of slavery and racism in the United States, life under slavery in the North and the South. AF_AM_ST 212-1 and HISTORY 212-1 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses.
262-0-20 – Introduction to Black Religions
Introduces students to the variety of Black religions that developed during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to the present. Explores these traditions as continuities/changes of West African religious cosmologies. Examines the interplay between religion, politics, and the constructions of racial identities within various forms of Christianity, Islam, and other expressive cultures.
380-0-20 - Feeling Black Music
This is a course about idioms of Black Feeling in different 20th century genres of Black Popular Music. The distinctive sonic and vocal characteristics of Black popular music emerged and developed during the early to late 20th century. What we understand as Black music was composed and improvised as serial expressions of structurally repressed Black feeling in different genres and traditions in relation to, alongside, against and beyond the life-worlds of Black populations, marked by slavery, colonialism, white supremacy, and racism. Black feeling describes the sensibilities, moods, dispositions, orientations, reflections, anticipations, shared by Black communities that circulate within the sounds, narratives, and movements of Black music, particularly between performers and audience, in the making and sharing of Black community. Consequently, this is not a course in musicology or even ethnomusicology, it is rather more in dialogue with analyses drawn from Black cultural studies, Black cultural politics, and Black political thought. Students will discuss in particular the affects of Black political feeling and Black loving feeling in the following 20th century forms of Black Music: The Blues, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Afrobeat, Black Rock. Students will be expected to engage with these ideas of Black Feeling in terms drawn from Affect Studies. The idea of affect enables us to understand that Black feeling in Black music has complex dynamics, influences and orientations in the realm of emotional and bodily intensities that emerge as recognizable and unrecognizable feelings, that is, affects, in personal, social, and cultural intimacies, relationships and estrangements. The recommended reading is intended for students to immerse themselves in some of the histories of Black music as these affects of Black feeling.
380-0-21 - Black Music Studies: Rebellious Women of Gospel Music
This course looks at the lives of notable and historic women of Black gospel music in the United States. Icons like Mahalia Jackson and Chicago resident Sister Rosetta Tharpe developed and employed their talent and unique character for stellar performances. They simultaneously navigated personal and professional challenges met at the intersection of race and patriarchy. Through video footage, audio recordings, readings, and live performance demonstrations, students will explore each artist intimately and give critical thought to the complexities of her message.
380-0-22 – Black Feminist Theory
Course Description: This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. But rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will, in this course, be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.
380-0-23 – Black Vernacular as Theory
Course Description: This course will take as fundamental that black vernacular—the dialects and slang and folk language and indeed robust language found in black communities—is a form of theory and theorizing. This theory, though different from the capital-T Theory of notable philosophers, will be shown to also possess intellectual sophistication, simply in, as Barbara Christian has said, “the form of the hieroglyph.” If we assume, rightly, that black people have always theorized, only in different and alternative ways, how might we examine the nuances of that theory? What does it look like? Where, and in what forms, can it be found? The course will examine literature, hip hop, everyday conversations, and more.
380-0-24 – Black Speculative Fiction
In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary black speculative fiction, including works by Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin, to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to investigate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about black life, worlds, and futures. The course argues that speculative works—both narrative fiction and theoretical writing—invite readers to think beyond the boundaries of known realities to see new modes of being in the world. Our study will concern texts written in the contemporary, but students will be invited to consider how contemporary manifestations of the speculative and radical necessarily speak across time and space into both past and future manifestations/imaginaries of black experiences, embodiments, and identities.
380-0-25 – The Black Novel
In this course, students will consider the role the novel plays in the development of Black literature and life. Through our engagement with three key works—James Baldwin’s Another Country, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Colson Whitehead’s, The Intuitionist—student’s will exmaine how long-form narrative articulates ideas about Black freedom and struggle during and after the Civil Rights Movement. In addition to fiction, students will also read theories of narrative written by black and non-black authors to better understand how narrative works.
380-0-26 - Afrofuturism: Race, Technology and Liberation
Explores AfroFuturism, a literary and cultural aesthetic demonstrating/imagining how people of color project ourselves into narratives of the future. Investigation of speculative fiction, fantasy literature, sound cultures, artworks, music videos, and dance to trace the concept of an AfroFuturist point of view. Creation of AfroFuturist media and performances. Artists considered include writers Samuel R. Delany and Andrea Hairston; musicians Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra; filmmaker Hype Williams; performers Janelle Monae and Flying Lotus.
The course is arranged around disciplinary rhetorics of sound, literature, performance, and visual cultures. Together we will read several texts together and consider their contents and contexts. Creative exercises or writing exercises will be spread throughout the semester. At least one of these exercises should be executed in a small group, as demonstration of an ensemble of collective action and shared study. As a final offering, students will produce either a research paper of 15-20 pages length, or a performance/media object of significant complexity as a final outcome of coursework.
381-0-20 - Black Feminisms in Francophone Contexts
What is the meaning of “Black Feminism” out of its US experience and initial theorization? How did women of African descent in continental France, the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique), the Indian Ocean (La Réunion, Mayotte and the Comoros) and Africa (Senegal, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo), whose cultures and political experiences were – at least partly – impacted by French colonial legacy, forge their critiques of patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, racism? How did they also develop their own imagination of social justice, autonomy, and emancipation?
Based on a wide range of materials and references driven from social sciences scholarship, but also from literature and cinema, the course aims to introduce undergraduate students to a non-US centered and a transnational perspective on black feminisms. The historical period covered will span from 1945-1946 to the contemporary era without intending to be exhaustive. Depending on the needs of very specific topics addressed in the class, some comparative insights with the Caribbean and/or English-speaking Africa might be included.
The pedagogical and intellectual stake of the course is twofold. First, it calls students to reflect on the varying ways in which the very notion of “blackness” (which has no rigorous equivalent in French), and norms of gender and sexuality make sense or not in specific cultural, historical, but also religious and linguistic contexts. Second, the exploration of those different experiences and expressions of black feminisms and/or womanisms is an invitation to critically approach the concepts of “subjugated knowledges” and of “black feminist epistemologies”.
480-0-20 – Theorizing Blackness and Diaspora
This course aims to enhance understanding of how Blackness and Black diaspora have been theorized by scholars in Black Studies. This course is also a part of the Core Curriculum in the Ph.D. Program of Study in the Black Studies Department at NU. Accordingly, the seminar’s themes and assigned readings correspond with a core reading list designed by the Black Studies Department’s faculty for Ph.D. students. Most of the readings assigned for this course are texts that (by all accounts) many of our current Black Studies Ph.D. Students have yet to fully engage in their coursework. For students in other graduate programs, this seminar will provide an extensive training in the ways that Blackness, Black politics, and Black culture have been theorized and specifically in the Americas.
480-0-21 – Toni Morrison
This class will explore the first half of the African American literary tradition, beginning with the 1773 publication of Phillis Wheatley’s first volume of poetry, through the turn of the 20th century. We will read and consider fiction, poetry, non-fiction prose (slave narratives,) and speeches with the goal of developing an understanding of what the major political, social, and aesthetic concerns were for African Americans who had access to writing, and those who used the spoken word. Central to this course, and to understanding and engaging the literature will be a critical appreciation of the historical moments that surround the writing. We will look closely at how 18th- and 19th-century African American writers fashioned themselves in the world and how such fashioning reflected their conceptualization of their selfhood and identity—specifically in the ways in which they identified via race, class, and gender in antebellum society and beyond. Ultimately, by the end of the quarter, you will have a deeper understanding of how these early years of African American literary production informed and nurtured the centuries of cultural production that followed.
480-0-22 – Afrofeminists. Black Women Challenging Colorblindness in Europe
"Afrofeminism" is the label forged by a new generation of Afrodescendant women (mostly in their twenties and early thirties), born in Europe (often non-English-speaking), to define their black feminism in order to not only affirm their multiple African heritages while they live in Europe, but also to distinguish themselves from US Black Feminism. This triple gesture – linguistic, political and cultural – calls for taking seriously the original formation and expressions of Black feminisms in diasporic and global contexts. It also implies using an intersectional approach to analyze the enduring consequences of colonialism of former European empires on the very soil of their metropoles.
The course will therefore pay particular attention to the historical and social conditions of the emergence of black feminist struggles against patriarchy, racist minoritization and social inequality in a social and political context of white hegemony, where systemic racism is generally considered as "a notion imported from the United States”.
The reflections and readings will more specifically focus on France, a country which is paradigmatic of institutionalized race denial in Europe. Formerly a slave-owning colonial empire which has been marked by massive immigration of workers from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean from the 1960s to the 1990s, France still maintains ambiguous political and economic ties with these territories, while it actively excludes any reference to race from its official legislation and has made colorblindness the bedrock of its national republican ideology.
How do Afrofeminists in France, daughters of parents from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Madagascar, Martinique or Guyana, challenge a national "racism without race”? To what extent are they crucially redefining the horizons of feminism, antiracism, emancipation and social justice in a context of structural denial? More broadly, what are the possible links between US Black Feminism, African Feminisms, Diasporic Feminisms, Pan-Africanism and Afrofeminism?
To better understand the forms and significance of Afrofeminism in a postcolonial and global context, the French case will be contrasted with the situation of other Afrofeminists in Europe (Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany notably). To a wide extent, materials and data will be drawn from history, sociology, political theory (feminist studies and black feminist theory), but also literature and film.