| 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 112B | AFRCN WOMEN WRITERS | KEIZER, A. | In an interview from the early 1980s, Toni Morrison states that "narrative remains the best way to learn anything . . . so I continue with narrative form." The aim of this course is to explore, in detail, Morrison's uses of narrative form and figurative language. We will read most of Morrison's novels, examining the development of themes and formal strategies. We will also read Morrison's literary and cultural criticism, paying particular attention to the ways in which issues in the novels are addressed in these non-fiction works. Among the questions we will attempt to answer by reading the novels and criticism together is the question of how narrative might function as a form of theory. Another ongoing concern of the class will be to situate Morrison's work in the African American and American literary traditions. Course requirements include a book review, a midterm, and a final paper (in the form of a take-home exam). |
| AFAM 128 | RACE, GENDER, ENVIR | HUA, L. | This course examines the impact that race and gender have on our experience and perception of the environment, both as a sense of "place" and as a source of the "natural." Specifically, we will look at the emotional, social, and psychological impact of urban gentrification on women and communities of color, the role of the desert in Mexican and Chicano/a geopolitical history, the role of the forest in African American fugitivity, and the role of the ocean in Vietnamese evacuation. |
| AFAM 137 | AFRICAN DIASPORA | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | This lecture course examines the causes and consequences of the multiple diasporas of African peoples since the sixteenth century in the Atlantic world, especially the Americas and Europe. While some conversations on diaspora foreground cultural survivals, we shall take up the question of black internationalism and other such black confrontations with the nation state and capital as the primary animating features of diaspora. In this course we shall focus on the political nature of diaspora as a set of organizing tactics and political reference points. A political notion of diaspora confounds geographies of modernity by re-centering racial slavery, everyday resistance to slavery, slave revolt, and slave memory. Thus, offering some explanations about why and how the notion of a black world is still so compelling. |
| AFAM 138 | INTELLECT HIST II | CHANDLER, N. | This term is the second of a two quarter course that introduces students to the African American intellectual construction of the American experience. The second term can be taken regardless of whether or not you took the first term. Focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries, the course as a whole highlights the early emergence, intensity and breadth of African American intellectual engagement. A guiding question of the spring tem will be the meaning of freedom – for the newly freed American slaves, certainly, but also for America and for the modern epoch of world history in general. It will consider abolitionism, renewed questions American democracy in coming of the American Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction and the aftermath of its failure, industrialization, and the advent of a new imperialism. Among other figures, key texts are by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois. |
| AFAM 152 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | TATE, K. | In this course, students examine the politics 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 American politics for African American Americans, including the civil rights movement and the Obama presidency, the continuing problem of racism, American public policy, as well as the role of governing institutions, such as the courts and the U.S. Congress. |
| AFAM 163 | BLK NARRATVS LAT AM | BORUCKI, A. | This course is an introduction to both Latin American history and literature with an emphasis on the experience of Africans and their descendants. Primary and secondary sources will allow students to analyze the writing of history and the construction of biographical accounts as a research method. Exploring questions of agency, race and ethnicity, this course draws on the rich written culture of the colonial era to supplement black narratives produced during the modern period. |