| 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 112B | BLKS W/BOOKS & GUNS | WILDERSON, F. | This course will embark upon a rhetorical analysis of books, pamphlets, visual media, and newspaper articles written by and about Black university students between 1956 and 1976. While history, sociology, and political science are important disciplines informing the pursuits of the course, we will examine the political evolution of Black student activism (from the Sit-ins and Freedom Summer to the armed and unarmed university takeovers of the late 60s and 70s) through a textual analysis of the literature which Black student unrest elaborated. |
| AFAM 112B | AFAM LIT 1900-1930 | STAFF | This course examines how African American literature at the beginning of the twentieth century addressed vast changes in the social experience of African Americans during the era. In particular, we will use the theoretical framework of space to examine how landmark modernist texts engage such issues as the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the northern cities and the centrality of African American culture to modernity and urbanization. Through this rubric of space, we will also interrogate how African American writers, intellectuals, and political leaders articulated forms of national and racial identifications in their texts, and how an emergent cosmopolitan and diasporic imagination complicated such claims. The course will provide cultural-historical background for interpreting the literary texts we are reading, focusing, in particular, on the Harlem Renaissance and critical and historical accounts of it. |
| AFAM 116 | AFRICAN LITERATURE | MASILELA, N. | This course attempts to understand the grave and great consequences of European modernity's forceful entrance into African history. This resulted in the historic conflict between European modernities and African traditions. This contradiction between European history and African history forced and compelled the newly forged Christanized African intellectuals to construct their own particular African modernities and perspectives in opposition to European modernities. This simultaneous process of appropriating and rejecting of European expressive literary forms and European intellectual traditions by African writers, intellectual and artists is an expression of the paradoxes and complexities that constitute Africa. The classic example of this paradox is the appropriation of the generic form of the novel which is an 'invention' of European history by African writers in an attempt to articulate and project African history against the imperatives of European history. This complicated process of re-invention was the consequence of European history having 'defeated' African history during the era of colonial and imperial domination. |
| AFAM 118 | AFRICAN AMER POETRY | ADLER, B. | This course will focus on a survey and sustained analysis of African Americans poetry. We will read signal texts and works by key contributors to this particular American literary tradition. We will study poetry from major periods of American literature and we will explore the category, history, and development of African-American poetry from Phillis Wheatley to the present.
The African American literary tradition, begun in slavery, offers poetry of witness, testimony, protest, beauty, and mastery. The range of songs, lyrics, and poems in this course will allow us to study transformations and trace a trajectory of poetry through historical periods and modes. We will discuss the influence of oral and musical traditions, dominant literary styles of each period, and political and social concerns.
The continual revision and rewriting within this poetic tradition demonstrates how writers work to adopt, adapt, and challenge literary representation, practice, and heritage. Our examination of poems by black Americans will trace these formal connections. And we will examine the ways in which African American poets have struggled with social and linguistic constraints. We will also consider the effects of gender, sexualities, and racial identifications on the poetry we read.
In our study of African-American poetry, we will return to the large questions such as: What is American? How is a tradition created? Are there identifiable recurrent attributes of African American poetry? What are the collateral and overlapping traditions? What are some of the ways writers of African descent appropriate, vary, and challenge hegemonic literary traditions for alternative ends?
As we work to understand the cultural trends, historical influences, and literary history, we will also work to develop sophisticated literary analysis skills, utilize secondary sources, and locate our responses within critical conversations about the poetic texts.
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| AFAM 138 | RACE AND SPORTS | DEMAS, L. | Examines popular sport and its usefulness in exploring dominant themes in African American history. Emphasizes how multiple disciplines have appropriated sport as a lens to examine race, identity, nationalism, socio-economic class, technology/media, and gender/masculinity. Students will also identify and explore specific links between the popular culture of sport and the dominant historiography of twentieth-century African American history, including the modern Civil Rights Movement. |
| AFAM 143 | AFRO DIASPORA MUSIC | ROBINSON, J. | This course explores the tremendous global impact of African and African-diasporic popular music. Topics include chimurenga music and political activism in Zimbabwe, Afro-pop in Senegal and Mali, samba reggae and Afro-Brazilian identity, Afro-Cuban folkoric and popular music, the global reggae nation, rhythm and blues and jazz in the United States, and more. We will focus on the ways that these kaleidoscopic music cultures embody and activate nuanced understandings of diasporic belonging and continuity and how globally dispersed communities use music as a means of building new identities. These strategies speak to larger issues of globalization, urban and economic pressures that lead to cultural fragmentation, and forms of interculturalism that seek to (re)establish transnational racial and cultural formations. |
| AFAM 154 | BLK POLITCL THOUGHT | WRIGHT, K. | This course is designed to introduce students to African American
political and social issues through the examination and critical analysis
of prominent African-American thinkers and writings. The political and
social ideas of these thinkers and their writings offer not only an
invaluable perspective to African American struggle and resistance and the
legacy of white supremacy, but to larger worldly ideas as well. Finally,
we will examine the ideological perspectives that informed these works,
from the reformist to the radical. |
| AFAM 162W | BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WRIGHT, K. | Students will be introduced to the history and discourse of the black protest tradition, from the earliest slave revolts to the Los Angeles uprising. This course will race the emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities during the twentieth century. Some of the texts students will be required to analyze include the protest literature of Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X., Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and James Baldwin. A special emphasis will be placed on the role of music in black protest tradition, examining negro spirituals, the blues, reggae, and hip hop specifically. Writing assignments will consist of three short papers (approximately 5 pages each) as well as a midterm and a final project. This class will serve as the upper division writing requirement for the major in African-American Studies. Prerequisite: satifactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement. |
| AFAM 163 | RACE/COLOR AMERICAS | JAMES, W. | The course will begin with an examination of the conspicuous paradox that surrounds the concept of “race”: the latter's scientific poverty and simultaneous politico-ideological potency and longevity. The increasingly value-laden idea of “race” during the period of European expansionism along with its political mobilization during the execution of conquest will be explored. The course will focus primarily, but not exclusively, upon the black/white (African/European) dichotomy in Europe's systematic creation of its Other. It will explore the coincidence of the rise of European global power and the concept of race. The course will examine concretely the role of the ideology of race in the conquest and colonization of the Americas and in the enslavement of Africans in the New World. The variations in the mobilization of the idea of race and the practices of racism and colorism will be explored. The regional focus here will be on the USA, Brazil – homes of the most numerous contingent of the African diaspora in the world – as well as on the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Caribbean. The ideological and political responses on the part of the victims of racism will be delineated. |