| AFAM 143 | BLACK POP MUSIC II | MUTERE, M. | Black Popular Music tells the story of how African-American cultural agency has captivated and cultivated the popular imagination worldwide through effective applications of oral communication and traditions. This course will examine genres such as R&B, rock, soul, funk, and hip-hop as manifestations of this dynamic cultural legacy. The performativity, delivery mechanisms and style of specific artists within these genres will be considered, as well as the philosophical tensions that exist between an art-for-life’s-sake oral-aesthetic mission and its interface with an acquisitive industry that manages the communication gateways into the marketplace. Students will reflect on the historical and social significance of African-American culture and of its humanizing agency through a culturally-centered appreciation of Black Popular Music. |
| AFAM 158 | PHIL GENOME RACE | CHANDLER, N. | 1. The course elaborates an investigation of the critical thought that in the history of modern thought and science the very idea of race is not an aberration or anachronism. It proposes, instead, that such an idea is encoded in the problem of the supposed commonness of the human, as it has been produced and engaged in modern discourses, in particular since the 18th century. These discourses include both philosophy and social-political-legal thought on the one hand and the sciences, social and natural, including among the latter not only biology and genetics, but even certain aspects of contemporary physics, on the other.
2. Beginning with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to formulate a philosophical concept of race, the course then engages the intellectual history of the concept of race since the late eighteenth century. This includes 19th century Darwinism and its interlocutors, early 20th century engagements with Mendelian inheritance, including both eugenics and then the evolving first synthesis in the biological sciences, as well as certain aspects of the critique of the concept of race by way of the production of a concept of culture in anthropology and ethnology on the one hand. It also considers more contemporary problematics, especially the massive implications of the mapping of the human genome and the rise of a new genetics, all of which now implicate projects for the reconstruction or enhancement of the human (both bodily and cognitive forms of intelligence, the cyborg, for example), and the ongoing reappearance of a 'new' eugenics' which have taken shape across the past quarter century, on the other.
The course addresses some of the most far reaching issues of the present and the future, considering especially the moral and ethical questions that arise therein. Thus, students of comparative literature, philosophy, history of science, and anthropology should find the course of great value in helping them prepare to address such difficult issues in all facets of professional and public life.
3. This course compliments the African American Studies course Philosophy and the Matrix Trilogy, which is also taught Winter 2014 and x-listed with Comp-Lit, Film and Media, and Anthropology. Those students who took the Matrix course in 2012 or 2013, can profitably take this course, or new students can usefully take both courses together this coming winter. Along classic and contemporary philosophy, science, and history texts, several programs from the four seasons of the Science Channel series “Through the Wormhole” narrated by Morgan Freeman will be among the required texts for the course.
4. This course is part of the STAR initiative -- Science, Technology, and Race -- established within the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. |