| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 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 113 | FILM&RACIAL CONFLCT | WILDERSON, F. | Same as Flm&Mda 130. "Film and Racial Conflict" examines how U.S cinema, as an institution within a matrix of other institutions (i.e. families, schools, churches, prisons), positions Whites, Indians, and Blacks. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where subjects are placed by discourse, i.e. film) of the three above races this country has produced through settlerism, genocide, and slavery; and concerned, secondarily, with the culturally affirming, and often identity aggrandizing, "voices" of our three focus groups. Settlerism, genocide, and slavery are the three structural necessities which underwrite U.S. society. Our guiding question is this: In what ways do the formal and narrative properties of 20th and 21st century fiction film disavow and/or acknowledge these structural necessities? Put another way, we will explore how late 20th and early 21st century cinema is suggestive of America’s foundational, triangulated, and unresolved antagonisms: The White demand for mastery and expansion; the Red demand for return of the both the land and a genocided population; and the Black demand for repair and return of, literally, everything (subjectivity in the present and the memory of subjectivity from the past). A basic assumption of course is that the fiction film, even a love story, stands in relation to these unresolved antagonisms; and furthermore, the narrative (the script) of most films tries not to reflect upon this relation. |
| AFAM 115 | CINEMA OF POLICING | SEXTON, J. | Examines film, documentary, fine art, photography, and other visual media to explore the multiple ways in which ideas about race are projected and woven through the visual landscape and the impacts this has on perpetuating social inequalities. According to a 2006 report by Human Rights Watch: "For years, the United States has held the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people and at a higher rate than any other peacetime nation in the world," a fact that has prompted leading scholars to term the U.S. the first genuine “prison society” in modern history. This fact also forces us to consider the possibility that policing sits at the heart of U.S. society as a whole. Our task is to develop a conceptual framework that enables us to discuss adequately how this state of affairs has come to be and what role the cinema has played in accommodating or criticizing these developments. To that end, this course provides a critical survey of popular onscreen depictions of policing in the post-civil rights era. The aim is to question the received wisdom about the powers of the state and the reach of law. We will engage a range of scholarship on the cinematic representation of law in order to understand how such representations have shifted from the late 1960s to the present: from Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967) to Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon (1987) to Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007). We will be particularly interested to examine how ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality have shaped these various portrayals of the police, and how science fiction police films have projected such ideologies into the imagined future. |
| AFAM 118 | AF:TRADE-COLONIALSM | BORUCKI, A. | |
| AFAM 138 | SLAVE REBELLIONS | MILLWARD, J. | |
| AFAM 143 | BLACK POPULAR MUSIC | MUTERE, M. | Examines African American musical forms and traditions, such as blues, jazz, and reggae, in performance and/or critical and theoretical contexts. |
| AFAM 156 | S AFRCN SOCIAL IDS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | Same as GSS 184. Political thought in post-apartheid South Africa must reconcile with the legacy of racism. But, reconciling with the legacy of racism has become increasingly challenging when cultural theorists insist that there is no truth with a capital T to be found in grand narratives about the past. How do we talk about accountability, ethics, reparations, or social justice at a period in which many people believe that we are in a "post-racial period"? How do we talk about social justice in a period of ever expanding global apartheid and deepening criminalization of and genocide against the poor? One answer was provided in the late1990s when a group of scholars began to research and talk about the new politics of identity construction in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. They were concerned with discussing the legacy of racism and "new" identity formations and transnational identities. This course will look at the collected materials that emerged from these scholars. This is a Comparative Political Thought course that will pay close attention to concepts such as: intersectionality, LGBT politics, the South African Gender Commission, history and memory, economic justice, youth culture, demilitarization, affirmative action, the new "black middle class," African Renaissance, The Rainbow Nation, the legacies of displacement, and the so-called Colored and Indian communities, HIV/ AIDS. |