| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 40A | AFRICAN AMERICAN I | KIM, K | An undergraduate survey course. Students will be introduced to the main contours of the African-American experience, from the importation of Africans to the Americas to the mid-twentieth century. This course will discuss the unique history of African American people with a particular focus on strategies of resistance and survival. This course is the first in a three-part series for the Program in African American Studies. |
| AFAM 112B | TONI MORRISON AND DEREK WALCOTT: AMERICAN MASTERS | KEIZER, A | In an interview from the early 1980s, Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison states that “narrative remains the best way to learn anything … so I continue with narrative form.” The Nobel-Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott has said, “I have a belief that a poet is instinctively closer to the theatre than a novelist or fiction writer because, structurally, the feel of the poem is the feel of a play[;] … they both have the same kind of chording.” The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's and Walcott’s uses of poetic and narrative form and figurative language in a range of genres: lyric and epic poetry, novels, short fiction, and drama. We will also read Morrison's and Walcott’s literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels, poems, and plays are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the literature and criticism together is the question of how literary works might function as forms of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's and Walcott’s work in the African American, Caribbean, and hemispheric American literary traditions. Students will complete a book review, an in-class midterm, and a take-home final.
Same as COM LIT 105 |
| AFAM 112B | BLKS W/BOOKS & GUNS | WILDERSON, F. | This course will embark upon a rhetorical analysis of memoirs and autobiographies written by Black activists of the 1960s and 70s. We will examine the political evolution of pacifist protest and armed struggle through the lens of a literary genre that is commonly thought of as a "personal"--rather than political--narrative. We will be led by our investigation of what Margo V. Perkins calls "expectations" of the activist memoir or autobiography; in an attempt to clarify the differences between the "traditional" memoir and the Black activist memoir.
Same as COM LIT 130 |
| AFAM 128 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | SEXTON, J. | "No industrialized nation has so large a percentage of its population in prison as does the United States. And no such nation is producing so many mixed race people. These two facts about the United States...bear mention together because of the antithetical implications these two realities have for a "post-ethnic America." - David Hollinger, Postethnic America
This course explores the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States from the antebellum period to the post-civil rights era, paying specific attention to interracial sexuality as a fulcrum of power relations shaped by racial slavery and historical capitalism. We will address the emergence of the multiracial identity movement since the 1990s and discuss its relation to the legacies of white supremacy and the black freedom struggle. We will read for quality not quantity, with a premium on engaged class participation. Several short writing assignments, a midterm and a final exam are required.
Same as GEN&SEX 139 |
| AFAM 128 | QUEER LIVES&KNOWLDG | SCHEPER, J | This course examines the production of non-normative sexual and gender identities, bodies, practices, and communities from the 19th century to the present. In the first half of the course, students will learn about the historical links between slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the regulation of gender and sexuality in Europe and the U.S. Looking at silent film representations, scientific and legal case studies, and colonial spectacles, the course explores how nineteenth century categories for non-normative genders and sexualities emerged within changing legal-medical and popular discourses that linked sexual pathologization to scientific racism. In the twentieth century, mass media, popular culture, and war played a significant role in shaping public discourses about transsexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism. Building on these historical contexts, in the second half of the course, students will examine contemporary transnational queer cultural uses of the idea of a “queer past” to inform and shape ideas of a queer present and future. Students will explore how earlier ways of knowing, seeing, and regulating bodies and identities continue to shape twenty-first century debates, characterized by provocative headlines such as “Gay is the New Black.” Students will examine the uses of memory and history in activism responding to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s; international debates about gay gentrification, “pink dollars,” and tourism; and in envisioning intersectional movements for social justice such as the immigrant and LGBT rights movement "UndocuQueer."
Same as GEN&SEX 157B |
| AFAM 152 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | STAFF | Examines politics of African Americans in order to gain a broader perspective of the American political process. Major developments in African American politics (including the civil rights movement, Black presidential bids), continuing problem of racism, responsiveness of key governing institutions.
Same as POL SCI 124E |
| AFAM 154 | HIP HOP CULTURE | DAULATZAI, S | With Nas’s landmark 1994 album Illmatic as our guide, this course will utilize film, video, documentary and music to explore the ways in which hip-hop culture has become a powerful tool to probe the larger American landscape. In doing so, we will use Illmatic as a lens to better understand hip-hop and not only the history that made it, but also the history that it made. So that while this course is about exploring hip-hop through Illmatic, it’s also about exploring America through Illmatic, offering us the possibility to explore the fertile ground and volatile minefield that surround it: the post-Civil Rights and Black Power era, the shifting sands of race and the emergence of the global economy, the guerilla artistry around media so central to hip-hop, the changing marketplace and hypercommodification of the culture, questions around gender and sexuality, art and aesthetics, and also hip-hop’s enduring ability to speak truth to power. This course is open to all students. Please contact Prof. Daulatzai at sdaulatz@uci.edu for an authorization code for this course.
Same as FLM&MDA 112 |
| AFAM 154 | BLACK NATIONALISM | JAMES, W | The course investigates the roots and explores the main currents and expressions of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism in the US and wider Atlantic world. Beginning with the challenge of the Haitian Revolution, the course chronologically explores black dreams of emancipation as expressed in the writings and political exertions of the movement’s main protagonists, such as David Walker, John Brown Russwurm, Martin Delaney, Robert Campbell, Edward Wilmot Blyden in the nineteenth century, through to Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, and Malcom X and the Nation of Islam in the twentieth century. The course documents the various ideological strands of the movement, making note of their similarities and differences, their achievements and failings.
Same as HISTORY 144G |