| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 40C | AFRICAN AMERICN III | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | Introduction to theories of racial blackness in the modern world, with emphasis on developments in British colonies and U.S. Traces emergence of blackness as term of collective identity, social organization, and political mobilization. |
| AFAM 111B | CONTEMP AFAM ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. | Investigates the history of contemporary African American art; emphasis on the politics of representation. Explores art in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and new media. Cultural politics, appropriation, identity, gender, sexuality, hybridity and civil rights issues discussed. |
| AFAM 115 | CINEMA OF POLICING | SEXTON, J. | Examines film, documentary, fine art, photography, and other visual media to explore the multiple ways in which ideas about race are projected and woven through the visual landscape and the impacts this has on perpetuating social inequalities.
According to a 2006 report by Human Rights Watch: "For years, the United States has held the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people and at a higher rate than any other peacetime nation in the world," a fact that has prompted leading scholars to term the U.S. the first genuine “prison society” in modern history. This fact also forces us to consider the possibility that policing sits at the heart of U.S. society as a whole. Our task is to develop a conceptual framework that enables us to discuss adequately how this state of affairs has come to be and what role the cinema has played in accommodating or criticizing these developments. To that end, this course provides a critical survey of popular onscreen depictions of policing in the post-civil rights era. The aim is to question the received wisdom about the powers of the state and the reach of law. We will engage a range of scholarship on the cinematic representation of law in order to understand how such representations have shifted from the late 1960s to the present: from Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967) to Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon (1987) to Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007). We will be particularly interested to examine how ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality have shaped these various portrayals of the police, and how science fiction police films have projected such ideologies into the imagined future. |
| AFAM 128 | BLK FMNST PLAYWRTS | WILLIAMS, J. | This course focuses on plays written by ten Twentieth and Twenty-first century Black women dramatists: Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Robbie McCauley, Pearl Cleage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kia Corthron, Lynn Nottage, and Regina Taylor.
The course will treat their plays as BOTH works within the dramatic literary canon, and as political interventions into the structured and structuring animus of antiblack racism as a continuing problem of our present. We will also examine the ways in which gender complicates that problem, and how the Black feminist lens reads that complication differently from non-black feminisms.
In conjunction with these ten plays, we will engage an ensemble of critical and literary texts by Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Angela Davis, and several others. These texts will aid in our deciphering the political ethos by which these dramatists’ respective dramaturgies are framed. In so doing, our interrogation of the forbidden discourse around antiblack racism’s centrality to the praxis of racism and domination more broadly, will be a productive one in that it will point to the ways in which dramatic literature is integral to the larger socio-political discourse. |
| AFAM 137 | AFRICAN DIASPORA | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | 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. |
| AFAM 138 | COMP SLAVE AMERICAS | BORUCKI, A. | 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 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 158 | DUBOIS & MAX WEBER | CHANDLER, N. | On Death and Power: W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber and Modern Social Thought
Title in Registrar's Schedule: DUBOIS & MAX WEBER
This course brings into focus and examines the question of how to think about the general moral and ethical dimension of a social field by a seminar level close study of two classic texts from the opening years of the 20th century, placing them in comparative purview: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1897-1903) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904-1905).
The moral and ethical dimension of sociality, even as it articulates in every aspect of the symbolic in human social life, indicates most fundamentally the horizon in terms of which judgments of right and wrong are formed and the context in which our ideals for living are constructed at the respective social levels of both individuals and collectives. This course, in its concern with this kind of question, thus goes beyond the juridical dimension of law in the social order (rules and restrictions, penalties and incentives) to explore the moral and ethical foundations of society in general.
The operative question for a critical understanding of such a dimension is the relative status of the common or the diverse therein. That is to say -- the question is how to think differences of moral and ethical commitments within a common horizon. And, then most radically, this question takes shape as the relation of a defined social context (sometimes a society) to both its past and its future.
A century past these classic texts by Du Bois and Weber, grappling as they were with the massively difficult questions of how to address the privilege of an ideal of accumulation (in the ascendance of a full-blown world-wide capitalist organization of “market”) and an affirmation of a new sense of hierarchy on a global horizon in the face of new concatenations of social difference (what Du Bois famously called the global level “problem of the color line”), what lessons do these studies offer for us in the 21st century, one already marked by the rise of new global powers and complex over-wrought contexts of antagonistically related horizons of moral and ethical value on a planetary scale (to wit: 9/11 and its aftermath; or, planetary level climate change, by way of examples).
Along with selections from Nishida Kitaro’s essay An Inquiry Into the Good from 1911, a thinker who was a contemporary of Du Bois and Weber, Friederich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality from 1888 and several essays by Michel Foucault from the 1970s and 1980s will, respectively, stand as dialogic references for the course.
W. E. B. DuBois & MaxWeber |