| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| AFAM 40C | AFRICAN AMERICAN 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.
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| AFAM 110 | SLAVERY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD | ZISSOS, P | This course will examine the institution of slavery in the ancient world, with a particular emphasis on Roman slavery. We will examine the vast range of slave experience, from the brutality of rural \'chain-gangs\' and gladiatorial combat to the often comfortable existence of the urban domestic slave. An important goal will be to explore the social and economic basis of ancient slavery, as well as some of the ways in which it differs from more recent forms (e.g., ancient slavery was not race-based, and was sometimes voluntary). Grading will be based on in-class tests and a short paper. This course satisfies Breadth Requirement VII-B |
| AFAM 110 | RACE RIOTS | SEXTON, J. | This course examines the history of urban race riots across the 20th century United States, from Atlanta 1906 to Los Angeles 1992. We will discuss the complex social, political and economic factors underlying the eruption of mass destruction and collective violence; the role of the state in sanctioning or intervening on such developments; and the competing approaches of print and televisual media in constructing the significance of related events. We will attempt to understand how and why the major dynamics of race rioting inverted after the Second World War (from groups of whites attacking blacks to groups of blacks confronting police), what impact such rioting had on matters of public policy, and whether rioting can be linked to more recognized forms of organized political protest; especially the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. We will read for quality rather than quantity and will screen a number of videos in class. Participation and engaged discussion is emphasized. A midterm, final exam, and several short writing assignments will round out requirements. |
| AFAM 111B | AFAM ART: 1900-PRESENT | WILSON, J.A. | By the end of the 19th-century, African-Americans had mastered the techniques of Western high art and begun using them to combat widespread racial stereotypes. During the 20th century, they would attack the problem of developing stylistic languages of their own. The course will survey African-American activity in such fields as architecture, comic strips, graphic design, photography, film, video, and computer-generated imagery, as well painting and sculpture. |
| AFAM 130 | RACIAL BLACKNESS | BARRETT, L. | This course will survey some of the economic, geographic, and psychic principles conscripting African-derived persons for the purposes of the emergent "New World," in which African-derived persons are husbanded under the condition of enslavement and the rubric of "racial blackness." The course considers the way in which this dispersal of African-derived persons is fundamental to the emergence of Western "modernity," by entertaining such fundamental formations of "modernity" as autobiography, the slave trade, the triangular trade, and the emergent nation-state (as exemplified by the U. S.). The course will emphasize, ultimately, the discursive self-construction of African-derived persons in these emergent terms of modernity. Readings will include: William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano; Robert Harms, The Diligent; Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean; Sidney Mintz, Sugar and Power; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade. |
| AFAM 130 | BLACK/NOIR PARIS | NOLAND, C. | The period between the two World Wars is one in which a large number of Africans, Caribbeans, and African-Americans arrived in France either to visit or reside permanently. Paris was especially central to the literary imagination of francophone and anglophone Blacks; and Blacks were an important part of the French re-imagining of Europe and its place in the world. We will read texts written in French and English (in translation or original--depending on the choice of the individual student) about this unique period in the history of the African diaspora.
We will begin by reading the first major novel by a Black colonial subject (winner of the coveted Prix Goncourt), --Batouala-- by René Maran. We will then proceed to a study of the French "jazz age" (Claude McKay, --Banjo-- and Josephine Baker's film, --Zouzou--), a selection of poems by Africans and Caribbeans living in Paris (Césaire, Senghor, Damas), move toward a conclusion with a meditation on life in Paris by Langston Hughes (--The Big Sea-- and selected poems), and end with a film about the continuation of race conflicts in France during the 1960s, Melvin van Peebles' "Story of a Three Day Pass."
The course will be of particular interest to students in French, African American Studies, and Global Studies, as well as any students of Comparative Literature or English intrigued by modernism and questions of race and national identity. |
| AFAM 130 | AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA | WILDERSON, F. | The Off-Broadway collective known as The Negro Ensemble and the L.A. School of Black Independent filmmakers will be the lenses through which we examine how Black theater and Independent Black cinema of the 1960s and 1970s articulated the institutional and ideological positionality of Black Americans during the most turbulent and revolutionary period in American history since the era of 19th century slave revolts. The plays and screenplays we will read, and the films we will screen, will assist us in understanding the forces that position (place) Blacks as accumulated and fungible (owned and traded) objects in a world of living subjects; as well as the push/pull of creative tension between an aesthetic engagement with this positioning and a collective uprising against it. Put another way, we will be concerned primarily with film and theater’s reflection upon, and/or disavowal of, the 20th century’s transposition of slavery’s “technologies,” and concerned only secondarily with the individually affirming and often identity aggrandizing “cultural voices” of Blackness. Through an analysis of the “discussion” between theatrical and cinematic practice, on the one hand, and Black urban unrest, on the other, this course seeks to clarify the difference between a politics of culture and a culture of politics. |
| 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.
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| AFAM 150 | AFRO-AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY | 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 160 | HIP HOP CINEMA | DAULATZAI. S. | This course will explore what might be called hip-hop cinema, including but not limited to the ways in which hip-hop has been represented within film, hip-hop’s influence on cinema and aesthetics, and cinema’s influence on hip-hop culture. Films may include Wild Style, Passing Through, Basquiat, 8 Mile, Scarface, Hate, Hustle and Flow, Menace II Society, American Me, Belly and others. |
| AFAM 160 | ISSUES IN AFRO-FUTURISM II | JENKINS, U. | This course will explore various African-American artistic engagements with cultural and philosophical traditions that have evolved into the development of an Afro-futurist aesthetic. An examination of how linkage to ancient African belief systems and science and technology has 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 | BLACK 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. |
| AFAM 160 | BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS | WILSON, J.A. | From anonymous slave craftswomen to contemporary film and video makers, African-American women have a long, but largely undocumented, history as visual artists. This course will examine the lives of individual artists, trace patterns of group activity, and consider recurrent themes in art made by U.S. women of African descent, in order to show how the competing claims of race and gender yield something distinct from art made by either black men or white women. |
| AFAM 160 | RACE & REPRESENTATION | DAULATZAI, S. | This course will explore issues of race and its manifestations within visual culture. In doing so, the course will examine how representation serves as a site with which to explore how power and politics get reflected and refracted through race and its intersection with gender, class, sexuality and nationhood. Films may include The Spook Who Sat by the Door, The Siege, Lone Star, Crash, The Godfather, Mississippi Masala, Traffic, The Searchers, and others. |