Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| AFAM (W25) | 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 (W25) | 138 BLK WOMXN VIOLENCE | MILLWARD, J. |
| This class focuses on the long history of violence against African American women and their bodies in the United States. For African American women questions about the rights to their own bodies did not end with the abolition of slavery. Rather African American women endured acts of intimate violence during their long journey to “freedom.” Often, relying on only themselves and other women in their communities, African American women faced down these forms of oppression. In doing so, they forged a legacy and developed strategies that were often radical and liberatory. This class investigates this complicated history by using the words, actions, and change brought on by Black women from slavery to the present. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 144 90S BLACK POP CULTU | PAYTON, P. |
| This course is a survey of the shifting signs of blackness through the lens of popular culture from the late 1980s to the millennium. Focusing on politics, film, television, and music, we will discuss the interrelated evolution of these forms in order to understand the persistent impact of racial capitalism on culture. Before arriving into the nineties, we will begin with a summary of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the implications of his term on low-income Black communities. From here we will assess the many socio-cultural responses that gained mainstream traction in the late eighties and early nineties, as seen particularly, in film and music. Often glossed over and under-studied, this course will largely focus on how Bill Clinton’s presidency and policies conflicted with mainstream and marginalized perceptions of his overall cultural impact. Overall, we will focus on the ways in which politics and Black cultural production in the nineties merged to produce a unique assemblage of material that continues to resonate in today’s media. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 154 CAPITALISM&BLK/FEM | HARVEY, S. |
| This course will offer students a working knowledge of black feminist thought and criticisms of capitalism. We’ll read from and about authors/activists including Lucy Parsons, Claudia Jones, Esther Cooper Jackson, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective. In doing so we ask how black feminist theory and activism draws connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, imperialism and the life of black peoples in Africa and throughout the diaspora. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 155 BLACK INDIGENOUS | HARVEY, S. |
| In this course we explore the histories, politics, and imaginaries of black indigeneity in both the Americas and Africa. We examine colonialism, chattel slavery, and imperialism as forces that shape who counts as indigenous and why. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 159 PRISONS AND PUB ED | SOJOYNER, D. |
| The aim of Prisons and Public Education is to analyze, deconstruct social relations and posit new realities with respect to interlocking violence that is levied against Black people in the form of public education and the prison regime. The course is built within an interdisciplinary framework that utilizes a wide array of sources in an effort to develop a multifaceted comprehension as to the inner workings of state violence, public education and the prison regime. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 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 fungible 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 (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | RAMOS, C. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W25) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||