Winter 2024 Class Descriptions
WINTER 2024 course descriptions
101-8-20– Black Feminism
What is black feminism? What is black feminist thought and theory? How have black women and girls articulated their responses to the civil rights movement, white feminism, and popular culture? How do we study and write about black women and girls? How do the experiences and beliefs of a school age black girl, Cece McDonald, Megan the Stallion, and Toni Cade Bambara coincide or diverge? In this course, we will survey black feminist writing, art, and poetry and seek to answer these questions. Students will be able to understand black feminism as a field of study, lived practice, and intellectual tradition.
The goal of the course is to introduce the breadth and history of black feminist thought and explore key concepts, theories, and methodologies. Students will be able to understand black feminism as a field of study, lived practice, and intellectual tradition. We will not only examine representations of black women and girl’s sexuality and political activism, but also explore the tools black women have created to critique and map sexuality, gender, class, age, and geography.
212-2-22 – Introduction to African American History: Emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement
This course offers a general introduction to the history of African Americans in the United States from emancipation through the Reconstruction Era, Age of Jim Crow, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, and Long Civil Rights Movement and Black Power. With an acute eye toward human agency, students will explore the myriad ways in which African Americans mobilized their collective resources to demand the recognition of their rights as citizens, women and men, and, more broadly, human beings. This course, thus, explores the myriad ways in which historical actors at the center of dramas challenged racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination—structural features endemic to U.S. society. In the process, students will engage a problem central to United States history: How do we figure African Americans relationship to the ideologies and institutions at the center of American political development from marginal and subordinate positions? And in what ways do the histories of African Americans demand a rethinking of those ideals embedded in the nation's highest documents?
236-0-2 – Introduction to African American Studies
This course surveys major concepts, methodologies and issues of academic debate that have shaped the field of Black Studies in the U.S academy. The course is comprised of three modules. In the first module students will be introduced to the history of the development of the field of Black Studies and its connections to longstanding struggles for self-possessed Black educational spaces, diasporic and transnational movements shaped by Black intellectuals interrogating structures of power and disempowerment, as well as pedagogic practices regarding education as a political resource for social change. With a grounding in some of the broad historical currents shaping the history of the field and people of African descent in the Americas and across the African Diaspora, in Module II, students will be introduced to foundational concepts and intellectual frameworks that have shaped the field and continue to animate critical debates in Black Studies. In the final module, students will actively engage a host of contemporary issues shaping cutting-edge research in the field including work on environmental and climate justice, abolitionist world-making, social-movement building in the digital age, queer Black life on screen, and race and medicine. In doing so, students will encounter the complexities of Black life and its discontents and the dynamic nature of the histories and cultures of populations of the Black Diaspora.
245-0-20 – Black Diaspora and Transnationality
What can exploring Black life and the formation of Black constituencies in Europe tell us about the making of the African Diaspora? How can a consideration of Europe’s Black histories challenge how we think about what makes a nation or who counts as a citizen? With a primary focus on Britain, France and Germany, this course will explore how people of African descent and ideas about Blackness have fundamentally shaped European histories cultures and society. Moreover, this course will provide students with an opportunity to engage a variety of historical issues with contemporary implications that have shaped the making of the modern African Diaspora and transnational Black cultural politics in Europe including slavery, colonialism, anti-colonialism, the pursuit of citizenship, migration as well as the production of racial identifications and the articulation of racisms.
259-0-20 – Introduction to African American Drama
The course begins with the premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and concludes with contemporary black theatre and performance. The class examines the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st century in black theatre and performance, and analyzes trends and differences in dramatic expression over time. Playwrights included on the syllabus include Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Suzan Lori Parks, Anna Deveare Smith, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and others. The course will provide an overview of African American theatrical traditions in the 20th and 21st century in order to give students a comprehensive view of the development of Black theatrical expression. We will combine readings of the plays with film screenings and readings of historical and theoretical texts for context.
327-0-20 – New Black Music in Chicago: Artists’ Reflections on Music, Race, and Entrepreneurship
This newly developed class offers students a hands-on experience learning from and working with a renowned group of jazz musicians who reflect the vibrant contributions of the city of Chicago to recent jazz music. In addition to in-person and zoom weekly visits by jazz musicians, artist and tour managers, record label owners, and jazz journalists and authors, students will experience workshops led by these artists. The class will culminate in a panel and free and open to the public concert featuring these artists that students will help host at the Galvin Recital Hall (capacity 400). This one-of-a-kind opportunity will give Northwestern students direct exposure to artists working at the highest level of artistry. We will learn how they develop their craft, navigate decisions about forming their businesses, and learn about the infrastructure of touring musicians from managers, agents, label owners, and the artists. Additionally, music journalists and authors will provide the historical context of this city’s impact on the development of jazz, locating recent developments within the city’s dynamic culture. The class includes readings and a discography selected by the artists and other invited speakers, whose selections may feature interviews, historical essays, websites, or listening to albums. Overall, students and invited speakers will be asked about the role Chicago plays in the development of their music and as home to some of the most innovative jazz artists for decades.
The class will be visited (on zoom or in person) by folks including: Junius Paul (bass), Brandee Younger (harpist), Ayana Contreras (author, radio personality), Ashley Kahn (author, journalist), Jeff Parker (guitar, DJ), Makaya McCraven (drums, producer), Scott McNiece (International Anthem record label cofounder), Dennis de Groot (tour manager), Tina Priceman and Chris Weller (booking agents), and more. The March 4th show will feature: Brandee Younger (harp), Jeff Parker (guitar), Junius Paul (bass), Marquis Hill (trumpet), Greg Ward (sax), De’Sean Jones (sax), Makaya McCraven (drums).
Class assignments will include: being responsible for hosting and asking questions of our guest artists, providing written reflections on the reading materials, and their final project will include their work on helping to develop, host, and run the final artist panel and jazz show (March 4).
*Students must be available for the Leon Forrest panel and concert on March 4, 2024.
334-0-20 – Gender and Black Masculinity
This course will take as its focus not only discussing (cisgender) black men but, more rigorously, interrogating gender as a racialized regime and masculinity itself as a subtle form of violence. Students will be invited to think about race and gender as co-constitutive (rather than simply and innocently intersectional), and about what might be possible after the interrogation—and possibly dismantling—of masculinity even when affixed to blackness. Overall, our aim in this course is to establish a robust understanding of gender, of racialized gender, of blackness, and of masculinity as a gendered and racialized mode of imposed existence. To examine these topics, we will explore the writing of scholars and activists and novelists, documentaries on manhood, black feminist critiques of masculinity, and transgender perspectives on gender.
380-0-20 – Topics: What's Tech Got to Do with It?: Race and Resistance in Digital Media
Discussions of race in the digital humanities are often approached through a focus on the digital divide. This course will explore the study of race and technology beyond that introductory narrative. Instead, students will understand how the logics and infrastructure of computer technologies perpetuates racial inequalities in the day to day lives of people of color. Using the methods of queer theory, feminist theory and black studies, a central focus will be interrogating the consequences and affordances of technoculture, and more importantly, the cultural, and epistemological contributions to media and information technology by black and other communities of color. The syllabus is organized by theme and examines foundational texts starting in the 1990s up until our contemporary moment.
380-0-21 – Topics: Africans/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 on 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 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 in Africa after colonialism. We will pose broad questions such as: 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?
380-0-22 – Topics: Music Studies: Black Gospel Music in America
This class explores the evolution of Gospel music from its African roots to today’s abundant subgenres of contemporary Gospel. Through readings, videos, and live performances, students will engage in critical discussions regarding the language, delivery, and social-historical implications of this original American artform. The class also looks at the lives of some of Gospel’s luminaries, including Chicago’s own Professor Thomas A. Dorsey, the “Father of Black Gospel Music.”
380-0-23 – Topics: Studies in African American Literature: African American Writers of the 20th and 21st Century (Post 1830/Identities, Communities, and Social Practice/Race & Ethnicity)
This course introduces major authors and writers of the African American literary canon from the 1900s to the present. Among a diverse range of literary production—sci-fi stories to protest novels, sonnets, film criticism, and personal essay—we will think about what it has meant for black writers to work towards a literature to call their own and how the artistic and conceptual goals of African American literature have changed against the backdrop of evolving rights and attitudes across the 20th century and into our contemporary moment. Possible authors include: Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett.
402-0-20 – Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities
In this course, we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about black women, or black queer (often meaning “gay or lesbian”) people, or black transgender people; we will not be talking, simply or exclusively, about “masculinity” and “femininity” or “sex” as a regime of reproductive coercion sutured to certain anatomical interpretations. This course will be one that concerns, indeed, black genders and sexualities; black genders, which might be to say gender’s fracture and interrogation; black sexualities, which might be to say a questioning of where sexuality is and cannot be located. This course is, in short, the onset—a continued onset—of a reckoning with what genders and sexualities are and mean, in the context of blackness and outside of or adjacent to that context, and how we might undermine, critique, interrogate, depart from, move within, or imagine outside of entirely these categorizations that are ultimately, as this course will show, regimes of whiteness, normativity, and hegemony.
480-0-21 – Topics: African American History since 1865
African American History is currently centered in several conversations about its production and meaning. This winter course returns to the work of academic historians who have and continue to transform what we know about the history of African Americans and the United States. Open to historians and non-historians, this course will center works that use historical methods to uncover US histories of enslaved and free people of African descent and their experiences and shaping of institutions such as slavery, freedom, the US legal system, structures and ideologies of gender and sexuality, political activism against slavery and for the development of racial equality; and others, between the Revolutionary Era (inclusive of the “American” Revolution but also the revolutions in human equality in the Atlantic World); and the American Civil War.