| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 40C | AFRICAN AMERICN III | DAULATZAI, S. | 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 | CARIB:EMNCPTN-INDEP | JAMES, W. | The course explores and analyses the main currents in the post-emancipation history of the British Caribbean from the 1830s to the 1960s. Although it focuses upon the British Caribbean, the analysis will be placed in the widest regional and international contexts. (The great and increasing divergence of the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Caribbean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be brought to the attention of the students from the outset. Indeed, the profound differences between these two areas in their rhythm and pattern of transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led me to focus upon one colonial system in the region, namely the British.) The course aims at providing students with an understanding of the key economic, social and political forces and processes that have shaped the modern Caribbean. The transition to free labor, the growth and struggle of the black peasantry, the extraordinary role of immigration and emigration in the regions formation, and the early twentieth century social and political strife and change which ended with independence, form key components of the course. A critical examination of the colonial legacy, the role of the United States in the region, and the limitations of political independence mark the end of the course. |
| 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 111B | AFAM ART: 1930-PRES | COOKS CUMBO, B. | This course investigates the history and aesthetics of African American Art with an emphasis on the politics of cultural representation. Students will use course readings and class discussions as the primary means of investigating the ideas discussed. |
| AFAM 121 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | TATE, K. | In this course, students examine the politics and strategic vision of African Americans in order to gain a broader perspective of the American political process. Topics can vary, and include a review of the major developments in African American politics, including the civil rights movement and Black presidential bids, the continuing problem of racism, as well as the responsiveness of key governing institutions, such as the U.S. Congress. |
| 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 150 | RACE ÐNICITY 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 | RACE/SPORT/MEDIA | JOHNSON, V. | 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 | FIRE MUSIC BLK JAZZ | ROBINSON, J. | This course will explore the crossroads of jazz and the Black Arts movement (BAM) of the 1960s. The interaction between African-American jazz musicians and BAM writers demonstrates varied strategies of racial representation through musical expression. In search of new forms of artistic expression, many writers looked to music as a site of authentic "blackness." The search for a "Black Aesthetic" prompted varied responses from musicians, most of which challenged straight-forward, monological understandings of the relationship between race and artistic expression. Moreover, standard histories of jazz in the 1960s often fail to identify the larger cultural, political, and social formations that informed the rise of the jazz avant-garde.
This course will begin with an overview of the jazz avant-garde, situating its key figures in the historical continuum of the jazz tradition. In order to develop a contextual understanding of the views of Black Arts Movement writers on music, we will look at ways important earlier Harlem Renaissance theorists viewed jazz and Black classical music. Influential community formations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis that centered on African-American musical expression will be studied. Key tenets of the Black Arts Movement and collaborations between writers and the jazz avant-garde will be a central focus throughout the quarter. Special attention will be given to the iconoclastic music writings of Amiri Baraka (Blues People and the more recent anthology of his music criticism Black Music), as well as other Black Arts Movement writers such as Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Jr., Hoyt Fuller, Ishmael Reed, James Stewart, and others.
Core readings for the course will consist of important music writings of the Black Arts Movement, standard and marginalized histories of jazz and the avant-garde of the 1960s, biographies of musicians, interviews with musicians, and mainstream critical responses to the music (specifically in Downbeat and Metronome). |
| AFAM 160 | ISS AFROFUTURISM II | JENKINS JR., 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 | BLK 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 170 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | SEXTON, J. | 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 170 | ASNAM & AFAM LIT | SMITH, C. | What are the similarities and differences between Asian American and African American writers? How can literature represent voices that illuminate what it means to be American? This course explores Asian American and African American literature and culture after the Civil Rights Movement. It provides an overview of race and gender relations in the United States embedded within the broader structure of culture and social institutions. This course is a comparative literary study of Asian American and African American writers and the historical contexts in which they produced their works. It utilizes the framework of identity, labor, family, love, race, and gender politics as a means to discuss major movements and themes in twentieth century multiethnic literatures. Though we will discuss specific ethnic and racial groups at times, the overall focus will be the ample context connecting each of those groups to a shared history with present day relevance. Finally, this course challenges us to understand the function of "literature" and "culture" and they ways in which they form communities and spaces of conflict and mutual understanding. |