Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| AFAM (W26) | 40B AFRICAN AMERICAN II | MURILLO, J. |
| This lecture course is an introductory investigation into the question of race and the earthshattering impact this invention has had on Black life and death in the antiblack world. Our journey winds through poetry, literature, historical analysis, and critical theory in order to piece together a vision of the mechanics, stakes, and consequences of the invention of Blackness in the modern world. In doing so, we contend with the rudimentary and oft-deployed remark that “race is man-made” or “race is invented,” most often issued as reasons to take race, and more specifically Blackness, less seriously—i.e. they are “made-up,” so we merely need look away, or disbelieve, or think and imagine ‘otherwise.’ Our investigation begins and moves based on the premise that, in fact, this “made-up” or “conjured” quality of this invention make it more malleable, more unwieldy, and deadlier, and, instead demands that we take its fictions far more seriously than we do, for in them writhe the truths of the modern world as we know it. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 118 RACE MEETS RELIGION | CARTER, J. |
| Is religion a form of race? Is race religion by another means? With an eye toward both the U.S. and global contexts, this class takes up these questions. We will consider how race and religion are inseparable and how racial formation is, in fact, a type of “political theology” that yet shapes the present. Specifically, we will examine how separating humans into groups like white, black, brown, Asian, indigenous, etc., emerged with anthropological ideas of the savage and the heathen and secular-political ideas about property, citizenship, freedom and slavery. Finally, we will consider how these new ways of understanding the human extend classical religious ideas about “the saved” and “the damned” and about (the) god(s) and myths of the origins. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 137 AFRICAN DIASPORA | MILLER, R. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 155 ABOLITIONIST WORLDS | HARVEY, S. |
| This course traces the emergence of race and gender as technologies of surveillance within the U.S. context. We focus on the emergence of blackness and its gender formations. Students will examine the institutions of chattel slavery, prisons, capitalism, and the law as key institutions in the development of surveillance regimes. Further, we will examine the ways that surveillance and imprisonment are productive—that is, in its performance it produces different sorts of binaries including humans/nonhumans, cisgender/transgender people, good workers/surplus laborers, and the ways these subjects respond. Finally, we ask: “What is to be done?” | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 159 PRISONS AND PUB ED | SOJOYNER, D. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 162W BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. |
| This course will introduce students to the rhetorical problems, constraints, and possibilities of the Black protest tradition. Our guiding questions are What does it mean to suffer? and What does it mean to be free? from the vantage point of the Slave. We will try to understand the dissonance, or rhetorical gaps between, on the one hand, what various kinds of Black protest discourses describe as the goals of a protest and struggle, and what, on the other hand, is the paradigmatic condition of Black suffering in America. We will take a cultural studies approach to expository and creative texts that emerged from Black struggles. The texts we will read and screen (i.e., films) are there to assist us in understanding the forces that position (place) Blacks as accumulated and fungible1 objects in a world of living subjects. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where people are positioned within the American paradigm) of Blacks in relation to the positionality of other races in America. We will be concerned only secondarily with the individually affirming and often identity aggrandizing “cultural voices” of Blacks. In other words, the course seeks to clarify the difference between a politics of culture and a culture of politics. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | RAMOS, C. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||