| AFAM 115 | RACE/SPORT/MEDIA | JOHNSON, V. | This course examines the intersection of race, sports, and media in everyday U.S. popular culture (film, TV, advertising, social media, gaming) and political culture. We will analyze historic and contemporary debates at this intersection, with particular focus on African American representation and U.S. ideology regarding race, gender, nation, celebrity and capital in the “mass” media era. Attention to current debates (e.g., the “politics” of sports celebrity and activism; the concept of “colorblindness” and the “post-racial” in sports; the semiotics of race in sports’ commodification and marketing; sports league’s corporate social responsibility “activism”; and broader debates regarding race, gender, self-expression, sexuality, and violence in sports will be contextualized and studied through scholarly theories of race and media representation and analysis that encourage us to think about U.S. media as sites of struggle over what constitutes citizenship, local and national identity, and what it has meant to “be American” in post-World War II U.S. culture. That is, we will investigate the ways in which debates or controversies at the intersection of “race/sports/media” have most often been struggles over what it means to be a “representative” American citizen. Required course work will involve extensive readings, active participation in discussion board, written screening analysis, and midterm and final exams. |
| AFAM 128 | PSYAN, RACE, & SEX | STAFF | Psychoanalytic theory continues to be a powerfully productive discourse for queer theory, critical race theory, Post-Colonial Studies, and Black Studies. Yet, while psychoanalysis has had a lot to say about subject formation, desire, resistance, and anti-social forms of belonging, they have had very little to say on the conditions which allow access to such conceptual models. Critical black theories, particularly in the last decade, have interrogated such conditions and have questioned the function of blackness as constitutive in the production of gender and sexual difference, formations of the human, and the uncertainty of (non-)being. In addition to offering a general overview into these insights and debates, the course provides a basic, but fundamental, introduction to key concepts and themes in psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and Black Studies/ critical black theories. As one method of the course, students will think through the historical memory and afterlife of slavery to reflect on the applicability (and possible limitations) of various psychoanalytic theories, concepts, and structures. We will cover texts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Alenka ZupanÄiÄ, Lee Edelman, Frantz Fanon, Calvin Warren, Hortense Spillers, Patricia Williams, and David Marriott, to name a few. The course will also explore visual artwork and film including, but not limited to: Kara Walker; Ellen Gallagher; Wangechi Mutu; Noah Davis; Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight; Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman; Sean Baker’s Tangerine; and Sebastían Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman. |