| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 40C | AFRICAN AMERICN III | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This course provides an introduction to theories of racial blackness in the modern world, with emphasis on developments in British colonies and the U.S. Traces emergence of blackness as term of collective identity, social organization, and political mobilization. Our attention will be on the black radical tradition, black internationalism, black feminisms. |
| AFAM 113 | BLACK CINEMA | DAULATZAI, S. | Using history and theory, cinema and documentary, commercial and independent film, this course seeks to explore the brilliant complexity that constitutes the contours of Blackness as a site for collective identity, political empowerment, and radical consciousness. With Black visual representation and Black creative impulses from throughout the diaspora as our guide, this course will explore how cinema became a vehicle for situating a multiplicity of Black identities within a broad social, political and cultural field. Films may include Nothing But A Man, A Raisin In the Sun, El Otro Francisco, The Spook Who Sat By The Door, Do the Right Thing, Killer of Sheep, Bush Mama, Precious, The Dutchman, Malcolm X, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasss Song, Daughters of the Dust, Passing Through, Badasss Cinema, The Passion of Remembrance, Handsworth Songs, Xala, Menace II Society, and more. Contact Prof. Daulatzai at sdaulatz@uci.edu for an authorization code for this course. |
| AFAM 118 | AFAM & ASIANAM LIT | HUA, L | This course focuses on a selection of novels written from the perspective of Black and Vietnamese daughters in search of maternal genealogy. With the aid of literary and cultural criticism, we will examine the gendered pressures experienced by mothers and daughters of the diaspora. Novels will include: Unburnable by Marie-Elena John, Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, Grass Roof, Tin Roof by Dao Strom, and Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao. |
| AFAM 128 | POLITICS OF WELFARE | KIM, K. | |
| AFAM 132B | SLAVERY IN THE U S | MILLWARD, J. | This class introduces students to chattel slavery through the memories, words, artistic representations, and thoughts of former bonds people who lived in the United States. We will begin in Africa, specifically, in the slave holding fortress at Cape Coast Ghana and conclude at the American Civil war when “state’s rights” clashed with the reality that fugitive slaves were traveling along the Underground Railroad, and thus, threatening this country’s uneasy balance between a population that was half slave and half free. The ultimate goal of this class is to help students understand that there was not a singular monolithic enslaved experience, yet there was commonality in how enslaved men, women, and children ordered their lives when their labor belonged to someone else. Thus we will contemplate the diversity of the enslaved experience in the northern and well as southern United States.
This course is writing intensive. Prior enrollment in courses focusing on African American Studies or History is encouraged. Same as History 150D. |
| AFAM 134B | CARIB HISTORY II | JAMES, W | (Same as History 164B)
Caribbean History: From Emancipation to Independence (164B)
The course explores and analyses the main currents in the post-emancipation history of the Caribbean from the 1830s to the 1960s. Although it focuses upon the British Caribbean – the largest and historically the most influential regional grouping – the analysis will be placed within the widest regional and international contexts. (The great and increasing divergence of the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Caribbean in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century is an important development, highlighted by the course. Indeed, the profound differences between these two areas in their rhythm and pattern of transformation since the beginning of the nineteenth century led me to focus primarily 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 region’s formation, and the early twentieth-century social and political strife and change which ended with independence, form key components of the course. The course concludes with a critical examination of the colonial legacy, the role of the United States in the region, the limitations of political independence, and the significance of the Cuban Revolution. |
| AFAM 138 | COMP SLAVE AMERICAS | BORUCKI, A. | Same as History 150. What did a Kimbundu-speaking man born in colonial Angola and a woman from pre-colonial Nigeria have in common in the Americas? After forcibly crossing the Atlantic, they were subjected to work in different regions of the New World. From Boston to Buenos Aires, slavery was the most widespread institution across the Americas from beginnings of colonization to well into the nineteenth century. This course compares the experiences of Africans and their descendants from slavery to abolition across the New World. What were the forces that pulled coerced labor from Africa to the Americas during the early-modern Atlantic World? How did slavery operate, and how did people from diverse cultural backgrounds respond to it? In addition, what were the long-standing legacies that these dynamics left in the Americas? While the core of the course is devoted to the United States, Brazil and Cuba, the class glances at other regions such as Mexico, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata to show the diversity of the slave experience. The goal of this course is to broaden the perspectives of students interested in the Atlantic World by exposing them to the experience of people from different continents who met in the Americas. |
| AFAM 143 | BLACK POP MUSIC II | MUTERE, M | Hip-Hop culture is caught in the contested space that lies at the intersection of gender, culture, and commerce as the evolution of Rap from its old- to new-school and hard-core styles attests. Students in this course will critically evaluate a representative sample of lyrics and videos while examining Rap music's history, crossover into the American mainstream, and subsequent influences abroad from an oral-tradition perspective. This in-depth focus on Rap music will allow Black Popular Music students to gain significant insight into the tensions that exist when cultural roles become circumscribed by media and entertainment industry interests, and will challenge students to think innovatively about the “griot’s” responsibility and role towards society.
Black Popular Music (W12) is NOT a prerequisite for this course. |
| AFAM 144 | HIST MEMORY&IMAGINA | CHANDLER, N. | The Matrix Trilogy: Historical Difference, Ontological Difference, and Imagination (Or, Futurity Now!)
This course examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically - conceived as a critical archaeology of the future. For the 2012 spring term, this course will take as its focus the blockbuster film project, The Matrix Trilogy (The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski from 1999 to 2004, including the special project that was also part of it, a collection of short films presented under the title Animatrix, involving several Japanese and Korean, and Chinese American, artists and directors working in manga and anime. While the course takes as its signature an engagement of the rich diversity of the religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions that have bearing for thinking a collective human future, as well as key global level historical turning points -- all of which are densely interwoven in The Matrix Trilogy -- its critical guide is the way in which the historicity of the African Diaspora, African Americans in the United States in particular, expose the most profound questions about the sense of a common futural historicity for humankind in general over the coming centuries. The student who completes this course will understand both the need and some of the ways to go beyond traditional forms of history which remain so tied to traditional forms of identification in order to engage fully the diverse ways of life -- real and imagined -- that make up today’s globalized senses of world. In addition to the Ultimate Matrix Collection from 2004, core documents for the course will include selections: from the contemporary writers Jean Beaudrillard, Raymond Kurzweil, Roger Penrose, William Gibson, Hortense Spillers, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Kevin Kelly, Edwin Black, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Frank Wilderson III; from three films of the 1990s, Microsomos (Claude Nuridsany, Marie Pérennou, Jacques Perrin, 1996), Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, Forest Whitaker, 1999), Ghost in the Shell (Masmune Shirow, 1995); and from several classic texts in philosophy, literature, science and religion, including work by Nishida, Kitarō, W. E. B. Du Bois, Lewis Carroll, and Charles Darwin. |
| AFAM 145 | AFAM & PHOTOGRAPHY | COOKS CUMBO, B. | This course explores the ways in which African Americans have been depicted and have depicted the world around them through photography. Students will examine the history of photography in relationship to African American culture through a variety of media from early daguerreotype processes to digital imagery. The course focuses on African American photographers' experiences, perspectives, and strategies for representation in visual culture. Students will use course readings and class discussions as the primary means of investigating the ideas discussed. |
| AFAM 152 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | TATE, K. | |
| AFAM 156 | AFRICAN FEMINISMS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This course examines the violent incorporation of Africa within European modernity especially through the paradigmatic invention of the concept of women, womanhood, gender discourses and feminist responses. We will consider African feminist responses to and engagement in the discourses of Pan-Africanism, African Nationalisms, Negritude, African Marxism, and/or African Socialism in juxtaposition to the forces of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism that restructure African history.
Additionally, this course will introduce students to critical questions about the role of slavery, empire, space, environment, work, health, and justice that reframe discussions about gender politics and African women.
Taking up the limits of African diasporic frameworks and global sisterhood how does our scholarship about African societies and politics change when we center African feminists’ definitions of race, class, and gender? |
| AFAM 158 | DUBOIS &FDN AFAM II | CHANDLER, N. | Divided into two parts and taught over two quarters, this course reexamines the earliest systematic program for the study of matters African American in the United States, that is, the project proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois from the late 1890s through to the First World War. The scale of Du Bois’s project is seldom fully grasped. Yet, it was pioneering, not only for African American studies, but for the human sciences in general, in that it placed at its center historical formations as the object of study and interpretation as the signal method. It was parallel to the work of other path-breaking figures (such as Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, or Franz Boas). Taking its grounding in essential early essays by Du Bois, the course places The Philadelphia Negro (1899) at its center for the first term and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the pivotal reference of the second term. Across both terms, culminating in the spring, the two decades long annual Atlanta Conferences for the Study of the Negro Problems project (the first sustained effort to establish a comprehensive program of an African American studies in the United States) will be followed and contextualized. Appropriate secondary works will also be considered. Upon completion of this course the student will have a deeper understanding of the origin and core problematic of African American studies, as well as a more fundamental understanding of the basic concepts of the human sciences and how they work in the study of a concrete historical context (useful, for example, in public policy work and advanced social research), along with a deep introduction to one of the most gifted and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. |
| AFAM 163 | DOUBLE CONSCIOUS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Same as English 105. Beginning with a careful study of W.E.B. Dubois’s classic formulation of black double consciousness, this course will explore the significance of doubleness in the context of subject formation. Here are a few of the questions that will resonate throughout the course. Is double consciousness a problem that is specific only to certain identities, or is it a generalizable human condition? Is double consciousness the same as ethnic hyphenation? In the context of American subject formation, to what extent does the Du Boisian formulation that is based on the virulence of the black-white color/racial line anticipate others forms of difference and heterogeneity: brown folks, Asian-Americans, Latino and Chicano formations? How radical is the threat of double consciousness to the sovereignty of the imagined community of the nation state? What is the relationship of double consciousness to the emerging discourses of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism?
The texts we will be studying will be a mix of literary texts and theoretical essays. Here is a tentative sampling of the course material: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands; and essays by Cornel West, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Anthony Appiah, Hortense Spillers, Vijay Prashad, Paul Gilroy, and others. I will be preparing a course package for the essays.
Depending on the size of the class, the teaching will be a combination of lectures and class discussion and participation. Requirements: 1 short and 1 long paper. |