Course Descriptions
Spring Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| AFAM (S23) | 153 AF AM PSYCHOLOGY | WILDERSON, F. |
| This is a course in which we study the more psychoanalytically-oriented work of the Black revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. This means that the bulk of the course will be spent reading Black Skin, White Masks and, to a lesser extent, the book that made him famous among activists in the streets, The Wretched of the Earth. We will augment our reading of Fanon’s two famous texts with secondary readings of two Black feminists, Hortense Spillers and Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, as well as by the person whom I believe to be Fanon’s “first reader,” David Marriott. And, we will read Alice Cherki’s biography of Fanon, which centers on his life as a revolutionary. Cherki worked with Fanon in the psychiatric ward of an Algerian hospital—the last “normal” job Fanon had before he and his wife, Josie, join the Algerian revolution. Fanon was a Black person from the Western Hemisphere (Martinique) who fought in Europe as well as in Africa to end oppression for all humankind. What his life experiences taught him, however, and what his writing often unintentionally reflects, is that humankind defines itself in contradistinction to Blackness. We will try to suss out where Fanon’s work alerts us to this traumatic revelation, as well as where his work finds that truth to be too painful to consider, much less accept | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 144 RACE&ART OF WRITING | WILDERSON, F. |
| This is a course in which you will learn the first principles of critical race theory, specifically, Afropessimism—and how it resonates (and is dissonant) with the first principles of Marxism and psychoanalytic-based (non-Black) feminism. With this skill-set you will be able to discern the structural difference between three different structures or forms of narrative. Narrative structure asks a different question than What the story is about? It asks the question, How is the story being told. The three narrative structures that we will learn about (and which will, in some way, inform our own storytelling) are: 1. Bourgeois narrative (typical Hollywood stories or mainstream novels and memoirs: here the causal principle is based on individual psychology and morality). 2. Political narrative (here the causal principle is based on institutional forces rather than individual psychology and is also motivated by ethics rather than morality). 3. Afropessimist anti-narrative (an interrogation of both 1 and 2, above, because neither of the aforementioned causal principles are up to the task of narrating Black suffering). This is a course in which you will also develop as a creative writer and as a critical theorist. The readings will teach you how to tell a traditional bourgeois story (Between the Lines) wherein the protagonist embodies the ethical dilemmas of, for the most part, White-heteronormative characters; how to tell a story wherein the protagonist embodies the ethical dilemmas of non-White and non-Black oppressed people such as working class non-Black gay men (Theorising Video Practice) and/or non-Black women; and how to tell a story of impossible being—the story of Blackness and the long durée of slavery (Clifford’s Blues, The Man Who Cried I Am, and Afropessimism). To this end, we will learn how the three different narrative structures work on the page(s) of creative texts and in cinema. Registered students will turn in a final project: a piece of creative writing in the form of a short story or novel/memoir excerpt. I’m sorry but I can’t critique the written work of auditors. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 40C AFRICAN AMERICN III | HARVEY, S. |
| This class offers an introduction to theories in Black Studies. We begin from the argument that while blackness is a social construct—meaning that there is no biological truth to the idea of race—what it means to be black has very real consequences for those of us that inhabit this identity. Our class also recognizes that not all Black people have the same experiences. That is, blackness is signified and resignified in multiple ways across geographies, histories, politics, and time. Our task in this class is to trace ideas and formations of blackness as they emerge through and traffic amongst various social forces including the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, post-colonialism, neocolonialism, settler-colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and queer antagonisms. There are a lot of “-isms.” Our class also looks at what political struggles emerge out of Black experience with these “-isms.” In order to do this work, we will be studying black thought across the globe. Together, we’ll read a number of Black, African, and Afrodiasporic thinkers and writers, including Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire and Kwame Nkrumah, V. Y. Mudimbe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Stella Nyanzi, Ifi Amadiume, and Keguro Macharia. Ultimately, we—Black thinkers (that’s you!) and our allies/co-conspirators (that’s you) ask quite frankly, “what is it that we want?” If we are to demand, and I believe “we” all do, that Black Lives Matter, then we must think seriously about every word in that phrase: 1) What is “Black”? How has Eurocentric thought given shape to this racial concept in order to support its own cultural, intellectual, and economic “superiority”? In what ways is “blackness” as a concept used to bolster up the so-called civilized world? 2) What do we mean about Black lives? Which Black lives? What does it mean to truly live? In what sorts of spaces and times can Black people live? Oftentimes, these spaces and times look quite different from standard Eurocentric understandings of space and time. What does living mean in contrast to “survival”? 3) Finally, what does it mean to “matter”? To whom? For what purpose? These questions make up the course objectives. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 157 CRITICAL RACE THRY | HAN, S. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S23) | 145 AFAM & PHOTOGRAPHY | COOKS, B. |
| Explores depictions of and by African Americans through photography. Examines the history of photography in relationship to African American culture through a variety of media from early daguerreotype processes to digital imagery | ||