| 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 50 | AFAM WOMENS HIST | MILLWARD, J. | This course introduces students to the significant themes and events shaping the experiences of African American women from slavery to the present. The topics we will explore include: slavery, anti-lynching campaigns, politics and suffrage, urbanization, the Civil Rights Movement, Black radicalism, housing and welfare reform, physical and sexual abuse, family resistance, war, citizenship and contemporary media representations of black women. Black women’s voices in narratives, autobiographies, biographies, testimonies, speeches, letters, and other written material serve as the basis for the course reading material.
The primary objective of this course is to expose students to a variety of themes relating to the African American woman’s experience in the United States. The second objective of this course is to study the development of Black Women’s History as a field of inquiry. To this end, we will be consciously focused on reading historical works about and produced by African American women. Assignments for this course include examinations, papers, and oral participation in section. Students should leave this course with a concrete understanding of the Black woman’s role, status, and place in constructing four hundred years of American history.
Prior enrollment in courses focusing on African American Studies or Gender and Women is encouraged.
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| AFAM 115 | CINEMA OF POLICING | SEXTON, J. | Same as Film & Media 130. This course provides a critical survey of on-screen 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 124 | RACE AND GENDER | KIM, K. | This course examines the intersections of race and gender in the formation of feminist theory and practice. It looks closely at the ways that prevailing notions of both race and gender are mutually transformed by an intersectional approach and highlights the particularly rich and dynamic contributions of black feminist theorizing for a range of critical topics and issues. To that end, the course pays special attention to the political framing of three major contemporary fronts of feminist movement – domestic violence, sexual assault, reproductive justice – and to the form and substance of the divergent collective efforts that women have organized under these overlapping banners. |
| AFAM 128 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | SEXTON, J. | Same as Womn St 189. This course will explore the history and politics of race, gender, and sexuality from the antebellum period to the post-civil rights era, paying specific attention to the ways that interracial sexuality has functioned as a fulcrum of power relations associated with racial slavery, patriarchy, and capitalism. We will address the emergence of the recent multiracial identity movement and discuss its relation to both the legacies of white supremacy and the black freedom struggle. Texts will include readings in critical theory, history, and literature as well as examples of film and media. |
| AFAM 154 | CARIB HISTORY I | JAMES, W. | Exploration of the history of the archipelago from pre-Columbian times to the end of slavery; examining the impact of European colonization, decimation of the indigenous populations. African slavery, resistance, and emancipation; the unity and diversity of experience in region. |
| AFAM 154 | BLK WEALTH POVERTY | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This African American Studies and Black Politics course will take up the racial wealth divide and consider the politics of uplift, self-reliance, welfare reform, personal responsibility, the invisible hand and other tropes about the market that are predominant in US economic history. Two key texts will focus in detail on particular cities to provide cases of critical policy urgency. Similarly, all key texts will take up questions of race, class, geography and space, gender, and the role of aspirations toward heteronormative masculinity that are often linked to the meanings that we associate with class and status as well as achievement and aspiration. Using historically significant popular fiction written to provide mass and popular education about the values of capitalism and wealth in U.S. society, we shall contextualize and assess the psychic and ethical impact of the racialization of poverty in the past and in the present. |
| AFAM 158 | IMMIGRATION & BLKS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This course examines advanced African American Studies scholarship and political science scholarship in the area of political theory and critical social thought. Our focus shall be on the idea of the immigrant and the citizen and the function of racial spectacle and vigilantism in delineating which residents are regarded as immigrants and which as citizens. We consider the normative, ethical, and epistemological implications for the contemporary debates, policies, and laws on immigration—linking them to the history of debates, policies and laws that reinforced and constituted second class and non-citizenship for Blacks in the United States. Is migration both a process that is a recipe for economic opportunity, educational advancement, and social death? Or is it a process that is ultimately a guarantee of social death? Indeed, how can we talk about “new” racialized subjects in the context of a national identity in which “the black” is identified with the slave unremunerated worker who lacks right to protect her life or define dignity for herself), the non-citizen (despite exceptional cases and historical shifts, members of this class have contingent access to political membership) and never with the worker (whose toil in a meritocracy will be rewarded with financial gain, economic opportunity, and political representation)? We shall study the complex dynamics of the exclusionary practices and institutions—popular and elite—that shape American citizenship. Finally we
discuss the nature of attempts to configure blackness as a bound social and historical identity in which black migration, mobility, and immigration are rendered invisible and as social problems.
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| AFAM 158 | RACE & ETHNICITY I | HUIE, K. | 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, and an opportunity for course participants to explore cultural identity and the various issues of power and privilege that exist within society. |