| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| AFAM 10 | GOSPEL CHOIR | MCCOOL, M. | A performance group that works with the music and culture of the gospel tradition. This is a two-unit class that requires attendance and participation as well as one short music review. |
| AFAM 40B | AFRICAN AMERICAN II | SEXTON, J. | This course offers a critical introduction to the history of modern racial thinking both concepts of race and ideologies of racism in the western hemisphere, with particular emphasis on its development in the British North American colonies and the United States. We will trace its emergence in religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writings; in legal statutes and legislation; in political debate and public policy; and in the entertainments of popular culture. More importantly, we will discuss its relationship to the material contexts of racial oppression. First and foremost: the transatlantic enslavement of Africans and the vast system of plantation slavery throughout the Americas alongside the conquest of land and the genocide of indigenous peoples. But also: “Manifest Destiny” and westward expansion, the Mexican American War, the international abolitionist movement and the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation and the high tide of lynching, the Spanish-American War and the spread of US imperialism, the regulation of immigration from Asia and Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries, military intervention from WW I to Vietnam to the Persian Gulf, and the continuing assaults on movements for human rights and social justice in the age of globalization. Though there will be a clear focus on the specificities of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism therein, we will also think comparatively about other regions of racial inequality and always with an eye to the construction of the global racial hierarchy that has come to dominance over this centuries-long period. We will read for quality not quantity and with a premium on engaged class participation and well-informed discussion. Several short writing assignments will round out the engagement with course materials. |
| AFAM 110 | BLACK POLITICS | TATE, K. | In this course, students examine the politics of African Americans in order to gain a broader perspective of the American political process. The principal issues we will address are how have Blacks attempted to increase their influence over the political process? How do Blacks win elections, and do their numbers as officeholders in government mat¬ter? The broader question that we will grapple with in this course is can Blacks use electoral politics as an effective means toward their economic and social empowerment? |
| AFAM 110 | AFRICAN AMERICAN PROTEST | O\'CONNELL, C. | This course examines the work of major African-American Marxist individuals and organizations in the 20th Century. It looks at their theories of racism and capitalism, the practices they developed in attempts to destroy racism and capitalism and the response of the white-dominated establishment. The course will also study how the analyses and practices of the “Black Reds” differed from those of major nationalist and liberal African-American groups and how those differences affected the relationships among them. Finally, the role of internal and external factors in the rise and decline of the African-American communists will be considered. |
| AFAM 130 | HARLEM AND SOPHIATOWN RENNAISANCE | MASILELA, N. | One of the extraordinary events of the twentieth century has been the emergence of black modernities across the oceanic divide. These modernities took on particular historical forms as well as singular cultural configurations. Invariably, in their formation, realization, and actualization, whether on African or in the African Diaspora, they constituted themselves as historical discourse, usually across the Atlantic, about cultural identities, historical survivals, invention of traditions and the formation of new nationalities. At the center of these reciprocal exchanges and interactions in the black world has bee the New Negro modernity in the United States. It was largely the New Negro modernity which orchestrated the deeper strains of cultural splay of black historical avant-gardes globally.
The course will investigate and analyze some of these seminal United States cultural and literary influences on south Africa. On the cultural plane, of essential importance will be an understanding of how the concepts of the New Negro and New African were formulated and came into being, as well as the ‘construction’ of the literary periods of the Harlem Renaissance and the Sophiatown Renaissance. Within each literary period, the complexly different intersection and combination of literary modernity and literary modernism will be theorized. Each literary period had a peculiarly differential structure of generic forms. Despite this, several parallels between writers will be discussed: say, between Zora Neale Hurston and Bessie Head, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.I.E. Dhlomo, Langston Hughes and Rive Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele, Rudolph Fisher and Arthur Maimane, George Schuyler and Casey Motsisi, and etc.
Of the six assigned books, five are anthologies. Fredric Jameson has recently observed: “The eclipse of avant-gardes (including political ones) has often been taken to be more than accidental characteristic of the postmodern turn; less often remarked is the concomitant substitution---for the great avant-garde manifestos and indeed for the very conception of the great individual master text or statement---of the anthology, the collective symposium, as the generic expression of the emergence of new concerns and new fields or objects of study.” Clearly, the relation between United States and South African concerning modernity and modernism is an emergent new concern of intellectual endeavor. |
| AFAM 130 | AFRICAN AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVES | BARRETT, L. | This course will examine primarily the \"classic\" U.S. Slave Narrative (1836 - 1965) and consider issues of authorial control of the narrative, as well as the strategies by which the texts challenge the regulatory mechanisms of race, gender, and sexuality. Texts which include: \"Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass\", \"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl\", \" The Fugitive Blacksmith\" and others. Course work will include a mid-term, final and one paper. |
| AFAM 139W | BLACK PROTEST TRADITION | STAFF | An upper-division undergraduate course. Students will be introduced to the history and discourse of the black protest tradition, from the earliest slave revolts to the Los Angeles uprising. This course will race the emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities during the twentieth century. Some of the texts students will be required to analyze include the protest literature of Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X., Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and James Baldwin. A special emphasis will be placed on the role of music in black protest tradition, examining negro spirituals, the blues, reggae, and hip hop specifically. Writing assignments will consist of three short papers (approximately 5 pages each) as well as a midterm and a final project. This class will serve as the upper division writing requirement for the major in African-American Studies. |
| AFAM 150 | RACIAL PROFILING | SEXTON, J. | This course will address the issue of “racial profiling” from a number of critical perspectives: legal, political, and economic; sociological, psychological, and philosophical; but above all historical. The aim is to challenge the received wisdom and to interrogate the terms of present debates about it, both before and after 9/11. We will survey the vast literature that has developed around this issue since the late 1990s, when the ACLU launched its “Driving While Black” campaign and international monitoring groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch commissioned detailed studies of the widespread human rights violations embedded in the entire criminal justice system. More importantly, we will revisit the history of policing in the US: from its antecedents in the slave patrols of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to the formation of modern police departments in the aftermath of the Civil War to the development of a nationally coordinated and federally funded police force since the social movements of the 1960s to the consolidation of a virtually unchecked prison-industrial complex in the economic turmoil and political conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s. The United States now holds the dubious title of being the world’s leading incarcerator, both per capita and in raw numbers; one-in-four prisoners globally is warehoused in the US. What this alarming fact forces us to consider is the possibility that, far more than a pernicious and institutionalized practice of the police, racial profiling actually sits at the heart of US society as a whole. Our task is to develop a conceptual framework and a critical vocabulary that enable us to discuss adequately how and why this state of affairs has become the status quo and what might be done to intervene in meaningful ways. We will read for quality not quantity and with a premium on engaged class participation and well-informed discussion. Several short writing assignments will round out the engagement with course materials. |
| AFAM 151 | COMPARATIVE MINORITY POLITICS | TORRES, R. | This course examines the political experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans in the United States from roughly 1950 to the present. It focuses on how each group has pursued political empowerment via both conventional political channels and social movements. |
| AFAM 160 | ISSUES IN HYBRIDITY | O\'GRADY, L. | Against a background of slavery and globalization, we consider the effects on expressive culture when large groups come into contact and/or conflict, examining the processes by which new cultural and artistic forms emerge. Our study of adapted and syncretic forms focuses on visual art in the contemporary United States, but other arts and locations are touched on as well. |
| AFAM 160 | FIRE MUSIC: JAZZ AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT | STAFF | This course will explore the crossroads of jazz and the Black Arts movement (BAM) of the 1960s. The interaction between African-American jazz musicians and BAM writers demonstrates varied strategies of racial representation through musical expression. In search of new forms of artistic expression, many writers looked to music as a site of authentic \"blackness.\" The search for a \"Black Aesthetic\" prompted varied responses from musicians, most of which challenged straight-forward, monological understandings of the relationship between race and artistic expression. Moreover, standard histories of jazz in the 1960s often fail to identify the larger cultural, political, and social formations that informed the rise of the jazz avant-garde.
This course will begin with an overview of the jazz avant-garde, situating its key figures in the historical continuum of the jazz tradition. In order to develop a contextual understanding of the views of Black Arts Movement writers on music, we will look at ways important earlier Harlem Renaissance theorists viewed jazz and Black classical music. Influential community formations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis that centered on African-American musical expression will be studied. Key tenets of the Black Arts Movement and collaborations between writers and the jazz avant-garde will be a central focus throughout the quarter. Special attention will be given to the iconoclastic music writings of Amiri Baraka (Blues People and the more recent anthology of his music criticism Black Music), as well as other Black Arts Movement writers such as Larry Neal, Addison Gayle, Jr., Hoyt Fuller, Ishmael Reed, James Stewart, and others.
Core readings for the course will consist of important music writings of the Black Arts Movement, standard and marginalized histories of jazz and the avant-garde of the 1960s, biographies of musicians, interviews with musicians, and mainstream critical responses to the music (specifically in Downbeat and Metronome). |
| AFAM 160 | ISS AFRO FUTURISM | JENKINS, U. | This course will explore various African-American artistic engagement with cultural and philosophical traditions that have evolved into the development of an Afrofuturist aesthetic. An examination of how linkage to ancient African belief systems and science and technology have emerged into an artistic expression of freedom. The course will examine a variety disciplines in the arts: literature, music and the visual arts; with major consideration based upon the social implications of \"outer space\" as a trope for black existential freedom and intergalactic travel. |
| AFAM 160 | ASIAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN RELATIONS | FUJITA-RONY | This course will explore the comparative and often connected history of Asian Americans and African Americans in the United States, with particular emphasis on the contemporary era. Themes will include labor, economic systems, political mobilization, and the struggle for civil rights and cultural expression. Requirements will be a 5-page paper, midterm, final exam, and engaged class participation. |
| AFAM 170 | RACE AND GENDER | ESSED, P. | All students, as upcoming professionals in a multicultural society and in a globalizing world, can benefit from learning about gender and racism in everyday life. The course will teach students how to identify subtle manifestations of discrimination, how to prevent and how to overcome its damaging effects. Through international readings, including the US, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, students will be challenged to discuss the impact of race and everyday racism on gender and identity formation. Theoretical, ethnographic, and autobiographical essays will help participants taking this course to identify and analyze how race, ethnicity, gender and racism impact their own lives and the experiences of family, friends, and colleagues. This course also offers a rich overview of contemporary (young) women and men in national and international struggles for racial justice. |