Fall 2024 Class Descriptions
Fall 2024 course descriptions
101-7-20 - First-Year College Seminar: The Craft of Description
Skilled writers paint lively pictures with words, as do thinkers whose expert writing compels us to reimagine the world. Description is a practice of evoking the observable properties of a thing, event, text, or cultural phenomena for a reader that may not experience it firsthand. This course introduces students to the craft of thick description of cultural artefacts and happenings, and its application in a range of academic and creative pursuits at/beyond the university. Students will also learn to mobilize description as evidence in academic writing, theory making, and as a means for forging persuasive arguments about the world around them. Course activities include a combination of critical ethnography assignments; close reading of objects; events and ephemera; classroom readings; peer feedback; and, crucially, the patient art of revising. The craft of description should prepare students for a multitude of disciplines and intellectual curiosities.
210-0-20 Introduction to African Am Lit
In this survey of African American literature, students will read across four centuries of literary and cultural production to understand the relationship between Black culture and freedom struggle. Students will engage topics in Black study—including questions of freedom, fugitivity, nationalism, and racial justice—as well as literary and cultural history to analyze and explain the development of Black letters in the U.S. Our course will move quickly through four periods in black literature and cultural production: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the 21st century. Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to understand the ideas and imaginaries that inhere in Black literature. We will also listen to Black music, including, the Blues, jazz, and Hip Hop and view television and films that have been important entries in the cultural history of Black life.
213-0-20 – History of the Black World
This course brings a global lens to the study of Black history. It aims to explore the various worlds and historical contexts that have shaped Black life, and it examines Black world-making over time and space. The course begins on the African continent in the period that would set the stage for the forced migrations of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas and moves into an exploration of how enslaved and unfree African labor became fundamental to the project of building European empires in the modern period with a focus on Britain and France. It will look comparatively at enslaving societies and processes of emancipation in the Caribbean and Latin America and devote significant attention to the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The final weeks of the course will give students an opportunity to think about how Black populations outside of the U.S. have engaged in struggles for racial justice, citizenship and forms of Black liberation throughout the twentieth century and into the present.
236-0-20 – Introduction to Black Studies
This course will introduce students to the field of Black Studies. We will investigate how Black studies came to be a discipline in the academy and the shape(s) it took in its initial formulations. We will explore the ways various community members, activists, students, teachers, scholars, artists, musicians, poets, and filmmakers have contributed to thinking about the Black experience both historically and contemporarily. Finally, we will consider current Black struggles for freedom, for justice, and for humanity.
247-0-20 – 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.
315-0-20 – Religion in the Black Atlantic
Obeah. Santeria. Vodou. These African traditional religions were forged in the political and economic cauldron of the Caribbean, because of the transatlantic slave trade. Going beyond the tropes of reggae and beaches--this course offers a critical introduction to central themes in Caribbean Studies. We will survey the history, culture, and religious traditions of the Caribbean region with attention to the following questions: What are the major themes in studying religious traditions in the Caribbean? What are the cosmological and embodied expressions that characterize religious practices in the Caribbean? How was religion mobilized by enslaved and free Caribbean subjects and to what ends? How have historical and contemporary actors characterized religion and culture in the Caribbean? What kind of insights do we gain by engaging the history, politics, and culture of the Caribbean through the lens of religious studies? We will approach these questions through scholarly texts, film, literature, and music. Themes such as belonging, migration, colonialism, race, gender, and class will guide our understanding of what makes these religious expressions uniquely Caribbean.
325-0-20 – Education for Black Liberation
This class considers what it means to conceptualize, articulate, and actualize a liberatory Black educational project within U.S. public schools structured by anti-Black solidarity. In the first section of the course, we explore the fight to desegregate public schools and the ways the historic Brown v. Board of Education case transformed schooling for Black children and their communities. In considering the impact of the Brown decision on the experiences of Black students in U.S. public schools, we interrogate the rebukes of Brown including the various educational projects (community control, Panther freedom schools, the Black independent school movement etc.) advanced in Brown’s aftermath. In the second section of the course, we explore the myriad ways Black students experience antiblackness and anti-Black racism in U.S. public schools contemporarily, as well as the ways Black students, educators, administrators, community and family members, and scholars have articulated what the notion of liberation may mean in the face of antiblackness. In the final section of the course, we consider the tensions and possibilities in the desire to “get free” within the confines of U.S. public schools.
380-0-20 – Topics in African American Studies: Black Feminist Theory
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. 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 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.
380-0-21 – Topics in African American Studies: The Metropolis and Contemporary African American Culture
Throughout the twentieth century, the terms “urban” and “black America” became so intimately connected that they are often used as synonyms. By tracing different representations of urban life, this course examines the signification of the metropolis in African American cultural production. Although our focus will primarily center on cultural texts, we will address a number of the “push and pull” factors that prompted the Great Migration and the social forces that have subsequently kept many African Americans in the city. In focusing on a set of cultural texts, we will consider the ways in which African Americans have imagined both the allure and dangers of life in the city. Literature may include work by Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones; artists may include the photographers Wayne Miller and Camilo José Vergara as well as the painter Jacob Lawrence; film media may include Coolie High and Good Times; music may include hip hop artists from Public Enemy to Common. Critics may include W.E.B. DuBois, St. Clare Drake, Raymond Williams, Mike Davis, and Mary Pattillo.
381-0-20 – Topics in Transnational Black Studies: Black Europe
What are the historical underpinnings of ‘Black Europe’ in the modern era? How have people of African descent shaped and fundamentally transformed European histories, cultures and societies? What are some of the themes, experiences and ideas which have constituted ‘Blackness’ and being ‘Black’ in a European context historically and how have people of African descent defined and negotiated this terrain? The history of Europe is intimately connected to the history of the African Diaspora. This course provides students with an opportunity to explore the many facets of the European dimensions of the African Diaspora. This course will provide students with an opportunity to engage a range of themes which have shaped Black life and ideas about Blackness in Europe including slavery, colonialism, empire, anti-colonialism, citizenship, migration as well as the production of racial identifications and the articulation of racisms.
460-0-20 – Race, Politics, Society, and Culture
How have the notions of “race” and “Blackness” functioned across time and space? How do these categories reflect, inflect and inscribe inequality as well as group consciousness, struggle, and everyday life? What are the mechanisms that maintain racial inequalities? How have Black populations questioned, practiced, analyzed, embraced, and struggled with and against these categories and their effects. These questions guide our reading of texts from the fields of political science, history, law, anthropology, and sociology, among others. The readings address the topics of race and Blackness, politics, culture, class, place, social movements, gender, sexuality, and inequality. Emphasis will be on empirical explorations of Black communities and the societies in which they are embedded, both inside and outside of the U.S. Each class session will involve brief introductory comments by the professor, and then in-depth discussion lead by assigned facilitators.
475-0-20 – Genealogy of Racism as a Concept: Deconstruction & Governmentality
The aim of this course is to interrogate the histories and logics of race and racism as concepts, beginning with the interrogation of the use of each concept in two different texts. In considering the significance of race and racism as a concepts, it critiques the discursive traditions in which they been traditionally narrated as historically self-evident objects. The course turns attention to the contested social construction of race within the concept of racism, revealing the suppression of the colonial formation of race as a political object of contestation, which in turn facilitates the privileging of race as a natural object of scientific investigation. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and the exception in western sovereignty, to the constitutive logics of convention and regime in contemporary western liberal democracies. Seeking to establish a reformulated concept of race and racism in the material and discursive terms of governance and histories of practices rather than ideology and histories of ideas, the course draws upon historical theoretical method of genealogy.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics in African American Studies: Black Internationalism
This graduate seminar examines international solidarity struggles in the wake of the Black liberation movement. Spanning the late 1960s through the early 1990s, it focuses on US-based solidarity movements with southern Africa, including the struggles against Portuguese colonialism and apartheid South Africa. Key questions: Why did the early 1970s see a resurgence of a Black American left strongly rooted in internationalist concerns? What was the Tricontinental and why was Cuba so involved in southern Africa? What role did the Sino-Soviet split play in African decolonization and international solidarity efforts? Why was the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania such a flashpoint for a Black Nationalist/Left schism? What was its aftermath? How did the rise of Black feminism shape US solidarity struggles? How did race and racism shape US solidarity campaigns with the Angolan and Mozambican liberation movements and the antiapartheid movement? What were sources of leadership in the solidarity movements and what role did churches, unions, students play? How did southern African freedom struggles, and allied international solidarity campaigns, collide with a resurgent/persistent anticommunist white supremacist political leadership in the US, particularly in the Reagan era? What was the aftermath of this collision? How did solidarity work evolve in the wake of formal political independence? How did activists build an independent (pre-internet) media/information network?