| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| AFAM 40A | AFRICAN AMERICAN I | ROSALES, S. | An undergraduate survey course. Students will be introduced to the main contours of the African-American experience, from the importation of Africans into the Americas to the present. This course will focus on the unique expressions of African-American society and culture. Some of the required reading will include Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, W.E.B. DuBois Souls of Black Folks, the poems of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brookes, the speeches and writings of Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, black feminist manifestoes, and the novels of Toni Morrison. Students will also be required to take a midterm and a final examination. This course is the first in a three-part series for the Program in African-American Studies.
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| AFAM 110 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | TATE, K. | In this course, students examine the politics and strategic vision of African Americans in order to gain a broader perspective of the American political process. Topics can vary, and include a review of the major developments in African American politics, including the civil rights movement and Black presidential bids, the continuing problem of racism, as well as the responsiveness of key governing institutions, such as the U.S. Congress. |
| AFAM 130 | SLAVE NARRATIVES | BARRETT, L. | This course will examine primarily the "classic" U.S. Slave Narrative (1836 - 1965) and consider issues of authorial control of the narrative, as well as the strategies by which the texts challenge the regulatory mechanisms of race, gender, and sexuality. Texts which include: "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass", "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", " The Fugitive Blacksmith" and others. Course work will include a mid-term, final and one paper.
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| AFAM 130 | ASIANAM/AFAM NOVELS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | This course will be an attempt to understand and appreciate the common and the different ways in which concepts such as “race,” “ethnicity,” “hyphenation,” “assimilation,” “minority,” “citizenship,” “color,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “visibility,” “nationality,” “citizenship,” “language and silence,” “America,” “history,” “remembering,” “forgetting,” and “double-consciousness” play themselves out in the context of the African-American novel and the Asian-American novel. With an even balance on fictional and theoretical texts, I hope to focus, with your help of course, on issues such as narrative and subject formation, subjectivity as both aesthetic and political, identity as both individual and collective, the relationship between literature and politics, theory and practice, and the politics of representation and signification. Against the backdrop of history and theoretical thought about these themes, we will analyze a few selected novels and examine how they construct themselves both as literary and as political texts. Some of the questions that we will be exploring are: What is the relationship between literary movements and political movements? What is the role of the intellectual and the artist in political struggle? How do “minority” artists and writers create their own traditions? As “double-conscious” works, how do the novels of African-America and Asian-America intervene between Africa and America, between Asia and America? How is “America” signified into existence in these works? What articulations are possible between nationalisms and diasporas? What is the relationship of these novels to movements such as Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and theories of Gender and Sexuality? |
| AFAM 130 | INTRO AFRICAN LIT | MASILELA, N. | This course attempts to understand the grave and great consequences of European modernity's forceful entrance into African history. This resulted in the historic conflict between European modernities and African traditions. This contradiction between European history and African history forced and compelled the newly forged Christanized African intellectuals to construct their own particular African modernities and perspectives in opposition to European modernities. This simultaneous process of appropriating and rejecting of European expressive literary forms and European intellectual traditions by African writers, intellectual and artists is an expression of the paradoxes and complexities that constitute Africa. The classic example of this paradox is the appropriation of the generic form of the novel which is an 'invention' of European history by African writers in an attempt to articulate and project African history against the imperatives of European history. This complicated process of re-invention was the consequence of European history having 'defeated' African history during the era of colonial and imperial domination. |
| AFAM 139W | BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. | An upper-division undergraduate course. Students will be introduced to the history and discourse of the black protest tradition, from the earliest slave revolts to the Los Angeles uprising. This course will race the emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities during the twentieth century. Some of the texts students will be required to analyze include the protest literature of Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X., Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and James Baldwin. A special emphasis will be placed on the role of music in black protest tradition, examining negro spirituals, the blues, reggae, and hip hop specifically. Writing assignments will consist of three short papers (approximately 5 pages each) as well as a midterm and a final project. This class will serve as the upper division writing requirement for the major in African-American Studies.
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| AFAM 150 | RACE & ETHNICITY I | GONZALEZ, A. | Race and Ethnicity in America I is part of the Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony Program. It is part one of a three - quarter course designed to critically examine the role of diversity and multiculturalism in higher education. The course will examine text focusing on discourse on race, power, and privilege. There will also be historical references that focus on the “building” of the United States as a nation as well as higher education literature that deal with class, ethnicity, and culture.
The Class will be divided into 4 parts: (1) Theories on Race and Ethnicity; (2) Power, Privilege, and Culture (3) Presentation, Facilitation, and Public Speaking Skills (4) Multiculturalism and Higher Education.
In this course, students will engage in intellectual and practical learning of leadership skills and concepts through class discussion, readings, community speakers, lectures, films, exercises, group projects, and community field studies. Through these activities, students will improve upon leadership skills and develop a critical analysis of privilege as it relates to the dimensions of culture and diversity. |
| AFAM 160 | RACE&REPRESENTATION | DAULATZAI, S. | This course will explore issues of race and its manifestations within visual culture. In doing so, the course will examine how representation serves as a site with which to explore how power and politics get reflected and refracted through race and its intersection with gender, class, sexuality and nationhood. Films may include The Spook Who Sat by the Door, The Siege, Lone Star, Crash, The Godfather, Mississippi Masala, Traffic, The Searchers, and others. |
| AFAM 160 | CONTEMP BLACK FILM | SEXTON, J. | Contact the instructor for more information: jcsexton@uci.edu |
| AFAM 160 | GLOBAL BOB MARLEY | ROBINSON, J. | In this course we will use the life and music of Bob Marley to help us generate a set of questions about the globalization of culture. Our principal focus will be the music of Jamaica but we will also consider musics from other nations in the Caribbean (Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico). We will not, however, be viewing the Caribbean simply as a bounded geographical space; our discussions will rest on the premise that the Caribbean is a global formation that cuts across the borders of nation states. In this regard, we will deal extensively with manifestations of Caribbean culture in Brazil, in various countries in Africa, and in Great Britain and the United States. |