| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 10 | GOSPEL CHOIR | MCCOOL, M. | A performance group that works with the music and culture of the gospel tradition. This is a two-unit class that requires attendance and participation as well as one short music review. |
| AFAM 40C | AFRICAN AMERICN III | SEXTON, J. | This course offers a critical introduction to theories of blackness as social position, historical legacy, and/or cultural identity in the Western hemisphere, with particular emphasis on such developments in the British North American colonies and the United States. We will trace the emergence of blackness as a term of collective identity, a principle of social organization, and banner of political mobilization in the writings of various black intellectuals, activists, and artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, we will discuss the relationship of this critical theoretical activity to the material contexts of racial oppression and movements of resistance.
In this vein, we consider the impact of, first and foremost, the transatlantic enslavement of Africans and the vast system of plantation slavery throughout the Americas, but also, the international abolitionist movement and the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of lynching, and the era of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath in the age of globalization. Though there will be a clear focus on the specificities of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism therein, we will also think comparatively about other regions of racial inequality and always with an eye to the construction of the global racial hierarchy that has come to dominance over this centuries-long period. 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. |
| AFAM 110 | RACE AND MEDICINE | HAYNES, D. | This upper-division lecture course explores the history of African-Americans in medicine through a critical examination of the role of racial-politics in the development of American medicine from 1870 to the 1990. Among the topics covered include: racial subordination and the rise of the American Medical Association, northern philanthropy and the development of historically black medical schools, the National Medical Association and the mobilization of black medicine in the age of world war, racial politics in the making of post-war federal health care policy, and the persistence of health care inequities in the age of AIDS. In addition to a mid-term and final examination, students will be expected to write a 5 to 7 page essay on an assigned topic. |
| AFAM 110 | AFRICAN-AMER ECON | BARKLEY, D. | This course is designed to enable students to apply general economic principles to explain the economic contemporary conditions of African-Americans. In doing so we will explore various elements of African-American society including: residential settlement patterns, employment patterns, affirmative action, and reparations. The course content will draw upon a wide variety of perspectives and academic disciplines. |
| AFAM 150 | AFRO-AMERICAN PSYCH | PARHAM, T.A. | The course will begin with an historical overview of the development of Black psychology and the African American frame of reference and continue with a discussion of topic areas including, but not limited to, personality development, psychological assessment, issues in education, Black family, Black mental health and mental health illness, and the role of the Black psychologist in the community. |
| AFAM 150 | RACE & ETHNICITY III | GONZALEZ, A. | Race and Ethnicity in America III is part of the Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony Program. It is part three 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 | 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. |
| AFAM 160 | ISS AFROFUTURISM II | JENKINS, U. | 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 of disciplines in the arts: literature, music and the visual arts; with an emphasis based upon the social implications African-American Woman. |
| 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.
Lectures will include substantial discussions about the international recording industry, cultural tourism, Pan-African politics, music and sexuality, the translation of cultures, music and spirituality, diasporic identity, the politics of race and class, creolization, intercultural collaboration, and music’s function in struggles against colonial and neo-colonial oppression. We will pay particular attention to how the sonic intersects with the political (indeed, if Marley’s life and music teach us anything it is that culture and politics are inseparable). Finally, we will examine how Marley can help us conceive of globalization not just as a process in which those who control the “Babylon System” homogenize the rest of the world, but as one in which the local and the global intersect in ever-changing ways. |
| AFAM 160 | RACE, SPORT, MEDIA | JOHNSON, V.E. | This course focuses on the nexus of race, sports and media in everyday U.S. popular culture. We will analyze historic and contemporary debates at this intersection, with particular focus on African American representation and U.S. ideology regarding race, sport, nationality, and gender. Attention to current debates (e.g., raced images of team mascots; recent controversies regarding the NBA) will be contextualized and studied through scholarly theories of race and media representation. Course requirements will include but not necessarily be limited to: class participation/active discussion (including noteboard and discussion moderation/group presentation assignments), a critical essay, and a final exam. A course lab fee is required. |
| AFAM 160 | ISSUES IN BLACK ART | O'GRADY, L. | |