Course Descriptions
Spring Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| AFAM (S25) | 40C AFRICAN AMERICN III | HARVEY, S. |
| 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 (S25) | 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 (S25) | 144 RACE&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 (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 (Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life) 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 (The Man Who Lived Underground, Season of Migration to the North, and Afropessimism). | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 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 (S25) | 155 MIXED RACE AFAM LIT | GRADY, K. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 156 AFRICAN FEMINISMS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| Introduce students to concepts of gender and feminist activist movements generated and led by and about women and gender outlaws from the African continent and the context in which rebellion, social protest and transformation occurs. We will explore a range of texts: experimental writing, poetry collections, fiction, prison memoirs, social commentaries, films, and cultural and social histories. We will engage heavily (almost exclusively) on South African materials by poet Koleka Putuma; filmmakers Bev Ditsie and Rehad Desai; photographer Zanele Muholi; feminist cultural studies scholars Pumla Gqola & Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden; and freedom fighter and activist sociologist Fatima Meer. Prominent exceptions include Ghanaian classic, Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo; Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s tour de force Black Girl; and British Zimbabwean director and screenwriter, Ingrid Sinclair’s prized Flame. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | MURILLO, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (S25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||