AFAM Course Descriptions for 2021-2022

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Spring Course Descriptions
CourseTitleInstructorDescription
AFAM 40CAFRICAN AMERICN IIIHARVEY, S.This class offers an introduction to theories in Black Studies. We begin from the argument that while blackness is a social construct—meaning that there is no biological truth to the idea of race—what it means to be black has very real consequences for those of us that inhabit this identity. Our class also recognizes that not all Black people have the same experiences. That is, blackness is signified and resignified in multiple ways across geographies, histories, politics, and time. Our task in this class is to trace ideas and formations of blackness as they emerge through and traffic amongst various social forces including the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, post-colonialism, neocolonialism, settler-colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and queer antagonisms. There are a lot of “-isms.”


Our class also looks at what political struggles emerge out of Black experience with these “-isms.” In order to do this work, we will be studying black thought across the globe. Together, we’ll read a number of Black, African, and Afrodiasporic thinkers and writers, including Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire and Kwame Nkrumah, V. Y. Mudimbe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Stella Nyanzi, Ifi Amadiume, and Keguro Macharia.


Ultimately, we—Black thinkers (that’s you!) and our allies/co-conspirators (that’s you) ask quite frankly, “what is it that we want?” If we are to demand, and I believe “we” all do, that Black Lives Matter, then we must think seriously about every word in that phrase: 1) What is “Black”? How has Eurocentric thought given shape to this racial concept in order to support its own cultural, intellectual, and economic “superiority”? In what ways is “blackness” as a concept used to bolster up the so-called civilized world? 2) What do we mean about Black lives? Which Black lives? What does it mean to truly live? In what sorts of spaces and times can Black people live? Oftentimes, these spaces and times look quite different from standard Eurocentric understandings of space and time. What does living mean in contrast to “survival”? 3) Finally, what does it mean to “matter”? To whom? For what purpose? These questions make up the course objectives.
AFAM 115BLACK TV COMEDYHAGGINS, B.
AFAM 138IDEA OF AMERICA IICHANDLER, N.
AFAM 138SLAVE REBELLIONSMILLWARD, J.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYWILLOUGHBY-HER, T.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYWILDERSON, F.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYSEXTON, J.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYMURILLO, J.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYHARVEY, S.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYCOOKS, B.
AFAM 198DIRECTED GRP/STUDYCHANDLER, N.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYWILLOUGHBY-HER, T.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYWILDERSON, F.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYSEXTON, J.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYMURILLO, J.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYHARVEY, S.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYCOOKS, B.
AFAM 199INDEPENDENT STUDYCHANDLER, N.
AFAM 399UNIVERSITY TEACHINGHARVEY, S.