| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| AFAM 40A | AFRICAN AMERICAN I | COOKS CUMBO, B. | 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 113 | CINEMA OF POLICING | SEXTON, J. | This course provides a critical survey of onscreen constructions of the police in the post-civil rights era, approaching the topic from a number of perspectives: legal, political, and economic; sociological, psychological, philosophical, and historical. The aim is to challenge the received wisdom and to interrogate the terms of present debates about the powers of the state, the reach of law, and the permanently vexed issue of civil rights and liberties. We will survey the scholarship that has developed around the cinematic representation of law, including the police, in attempts to understand the ways in which such representations have shifted over the period between the 1960s and the present: from the release of In the Heat of the Night (1967), The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971), and Blade Runner (1981) to Lethal Weapon (1987), L.A. Confidential (1997), Training Day (2001) and Minority Report (2002). We will be particularly interested to examine the ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality that revolve around these various portrayals of the police.
To provide context, we will revisit the history of policing in the US: from its antecedents in the slave patrols of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to the formation of modern police departments in the aftermath of the Civil War to the development of a nationally coordinated and federally funded police force since the social movements of the 1960s to the consolidation of a virtually unchecked prison-industrial complex in the economic turmoil and political conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s. The United States now holds the dubious title as the world’s leading incarcerator, both per capita and in raw numbers; one-in-four prisoners globally is warehoused in the US, a fact that has prompted some scholars to term the US the first genuine prison society in history. What this alarming fact forces us to consider is the possibility that policing actually sits at the heart of US society as a whole. Our task is to develop a conceptual framework and a working vocabulary that enable us to discuss adequately how and why this state of affairs has become the status quo and what role the cinema has played therein, either accommodating or critical. We will read for quality not quantity and with a premium on engaged class participation and well-informed discussion. Several short writing assignments will round out the engagement with course materials. This course has a non-refundable Lab Fee.
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| AFAM 113 | MINORITY US CINEMA | MIMURA, G. | By the late 1960s, people of color began to appropriate and transform media practices in response to historically persistent patterns of racism. Inspired by decolonial struggles in the Third World and radical antiracist movements in the United States, these artists and activists made interventions that were collaborative, self-sustaining and historically unprecedented in their diversity of content and form. Alongside the production of creative and documentary works, they established media collectives and centers that continue to function as vital institutions for training, funding, distribution and exhibition. The course examines this historical emergence and development of independent cinemas by people of color, their theoretical stakes and cultural-political significance. It focuses on African American, Asian American and Chicano/Latino film and video production since the late 1960s, as well as their struggles to establish and maintain grassroots and institutional resources. |
| AFAM 116 | BLACK SOUTH AFR 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.
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| AFAM 118 | DEMOCRACY & MIN DIS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Is democracy the best game in town? Why and why not? Is it both the symptom and cure of our times? What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and democracy; between citizen rights and democracy? How are liberalism, the rule of the law, and democracy triangulated? Is democracy thinkable without the normativity of the nation state? What can we say about the linkages between democracy and identity politics, between democracy and the politics of representation, between democracy and multiculturalism, between democracy and the politics of recognition? How does democracy mediate between the need for distributive justice and the clamor for difference and heterogeneity? What are the different traditions of democracy and how do they mark and define “the political?” How is democratic hegemony different from other forms of control and organization? How do modernity and the democratic form of government constitute each other? How does democracy govern the relationship between East and West, between the so-called “First and Third” worlds; and how does it bear the symptomatic burden of a world that is structured in dominance? How does democracy name the human being as citizen and unpack her in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality? Is democracy an ideology or is it a pure and neutral procedure? How do capitalism and democracy constitute each other? Most significantly, is democracy possible without an Us-Them divide, or a majority-minority divide? What is the tacit relationship among democracy, violence, and terror? These are a few of the questions that we will be raising in this course by way of readings in political theory, philosophy, literature, sociology, critical theory, feminist theories and theories of gender and sexuality. |
| AFAM 128 | TRNSNTL: RACE/GEND | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | The purpose of this seminar is to lay bare the semantics of the prefix, “trans.” How is transnationalism different from multi-nationalism and inter-nationalism? Are there elite transnationalisms and subaltern transnationalisms? Is nationalism transcended or naturalized through transnationalism? What are the relationships among transnationalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism and diasporas? Who are the peoples of transnationalism and who are its heads of state? How is cultural transnationalism related to political and economic transnationalisms? How does transnationalism rearticulate the relationship between people and place, space and place, place and location, living and telling, knowing and acting, being and thinking? How are race, gender, and sexuality re-territorialized by the discourse of transnationalism? We will be paying particular attention to the concept of “scattered hegemonies” as developed by postmodern feminists in their complex endeavors to conceptualize transnationalism in conjunction with the emancipatory performances of gender and sexuality. We will also be focusing on the powerful contributions made by ethnic and critical race theorists to our understanding of the formation of contemporary subjectivity. Theories of space-articulations of location and subject-positionality, “post-ality”: how do these discourses function conjuncturally in the production of the “transnational being?” Is transnationalism an ideology; and if so, what sorts of political practices does it enable? Who are its subjects and agents? Who are the “we” under transnationalism?
These are the questions that constitute our agenda as we traverse a wide range of interdisciplinary readings drawn from feminist theories, theories of gender and sexuality, postmodernism-poststructuralism-postmarxism-and-postcoloniality, cultural studies, political theory, literature, and psychoanalysis. |
| AFAM 143 | AF AM MUSIC (AKA GLOBAL BOB MARLEY) | ROBINSON, J. | Since the 1970’s, Jamaican popular music has been a dominant musical voice in the Caribbean and beyond. The 1972 partnership of Island Records, the British-based record label, and reggae icon Bob Marley, signaled a new and important presence in the international pop music world and a rising voice of Third World consciousness. The commercial viability of reggae led to the globalization of a music and culture with a complex semiotics and particularity to Jamaican society. Musically and sociologically, the influence of ska, reggae, Jamaican DJ culture, and Rastafarianism has been a significant factor in multiple continents, creating a web of relationships between communities in Jamaica, the United States, Great Britain and many countries in Africa.
This course will utilize the music and life of Bob Marley to generate a number of questions about the role of popular music in the globalization of culture. Throughout this process, we will explore the roots and development of Jamaican popular music, its leading figures and styles, and its enduring influence throughout the world. Attention will be given to the African and Jamaican diasporas, Jamaican immigrant communities in the United States and Great Britain, pan-African/pan-West Indian identity, the intersection of culture and politics, the complex matrix of race and class, the trans-national popular music industry, and in its most general sense, the role of music in identity. This course seeks to view music as a social formation that speaks to many dominant issues of the post/neo-colonial world. |
| AFAM 144 | ISS AFROFUTURISM | STAFF | This course will explore various African-American artistic engagement with cultural and philosophical traditions that have evolved into the development of an Afrofuturist aesthetic. An examination of how linkage to ancient African belief systems and science and technology have emerged into an artistic expression of freedom. The course will examine a variety disciplines in the arts: literature, music and the visual arts; with major consideration based upon the social implications of "outer space" as a trope for black existential freedom and intergalactic travel.
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| AFAM 154 | BLK CULTURE HIPHOP | WRIGHT, K. | This course will examine various ways in which hip hop culture continues the legacy of black protest and resistance in black art forms and culture. The course will look at the following particularly: Hip Hop elements and expressions as protest; Hip Hop Entrepeneurialism; Hip Hop Media, Hip Hop Political Organizations; and Hip Hop Education.
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| AFAM 162W | 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. |