| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
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| 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 50 | BLOOMSBURY & HARLEM | BARRETT, L. | This course will examine the divergent versions of modernism produced by the self-conscious artistic movements based in Bloomsbury, London and Harlem, New York by considering the divergent racial and aesthetic sensibilities of the literary productions of the two groups, the divergent forms of disillusionment and optimism these groups produce in response to the conditions of early twentieth century modernity, their treatments of the concept of “primitivism,” as well as the divergent roles of the bourgeois paradigm of social relations in the works of these groups. Authors considered will include Quinton Bell, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Jean Toomer, Discussion will consider matters of race, gender, and sexuality; course work will include a mid-term exam, a final exam, and a 5-6 page paper. |
| AFAM 110 | AFRICAN AMERICAN ECONOMICS | BARKLEY, D. | This course is designed to enable students to apply general economic principles to explain the economic contemporary conditions of African-Americans. In doing so we will explore various elements of African-American society including: residential settlement patterns, employment patterns, affirmative action, and reparations. The course content will draw upon a wide variety of perspectives and academic disciplines. |
| AFAM 130 | HARLM REN SOPHIATWN | 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 139W | BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. | 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 | BLACK INTERNATIONALISM | DAULATZAI, S. | This course will explore the 20th century history of race within a broader international context. Using the African diaspora as the lens through which we will examine the ways in which national, racial and political identities were forged and resisted, this course will center its examination on Black freedom struggles in the United States and their relationships to the profound shifts that were occurring in the twentieth century as the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements were taking shape throughout the globe.
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| AFAM 150 | RACE & ETHNICITY II | GONZALEZ, A. | Race and Ethnicity in America II is the second part of the Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony Program. This course will engage the connections between "race", gender, ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. We will explore the meaning of theories such as "double consciousness" (DuBois), colonialism (Fanon), and structures of power inherent in a society comprised of dominant and subordinate cultures. |
| AFAM 151 | COMP MINORITY POLIT | KIM, C.J. | 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 | 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 | FILM&RACIAL CONFLCT | WILDERSON, F. | "Film and Racial Conflict" examines how U.S cinema, as an institution within a matrix of other institutions (i.e. families, schools, churches, prisons), positions Whites, Indians, and Blacks. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where subjects are placed by discourse, i.e. film) of the three above races this country has produced through settlerism, genocide, and slavery; and concerned, secondarily, with the culturally affirming, and often identity aggrandizing, "voices" of our three focus groups. Settlerism, genocide, and slavery are the three structural necessities which underwrite U.S. society. Our guiding question is this: In what ways do the formal and narrative properties of 20th and 21st century fiction film disavow and/or acknowledge these structural necessities? Put another way, we will explore how late 20th and early 21st century cinema is suggestive of America’s foundational, triangulated, and unresolved antagonisms: The White demand for mastery and expansion; the Red demand for return of the both the land and a genocided population; and the Black demand for repair and return of, literally, everything (subjectivity in the present and the memory of subjectivity from the past). A basic assumption of course is that the fiction film, even a love story, stands in relation to these unresolved antagonisms; and furthermore, the narrative (the script) of most films tries not to reflect upon this relation. |
| AFAM 160 | GLOBAL BOB MARLEY | ROBINSON, J. | In this course we will use the life and music of Bob Marley to help us generate a set of questions about the globalization of culture. Our principal focus will be the music of Jamaica but we will also consider musics from other nations in the Caribbean (Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico). We will not, however, be viewing the Caribbean simply as a bounded geographical space; our discussions will rest on the premise that the Caribbean is a global formation that cuts across the borders of nation states. In this regard, we will deal extensively with manifestations of Caribbean culture in Brazil, in various countries in Africa, and in Great Britain and the United States. |
| AFAM 160 | HIP HOP CULTURE | DAULATZAI, S. | This course will examine hip-hop culture and its relationships to broader issues of power. In doing so, we will explore how hip-hop as a commercial force has created a new lexicon for understanding and influencing culture and politics in the 21st century. By examining the historical forces that birthed this art form, this course seeks to provide a context with which to understand the compelling critiques that hip-hop offers regarding race, class, gender, sexuality and American national identity. |
| AFAM 170 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | SEXTON, J. | This course will explore the history and politics of race, gender, and sexuality from the antebellum period to the post-civil rights era, paying specific attention to the ways that interracial sexuality has functioned as a fulcrum of power relations associated with racial slavery, patriarchy, and capitalism. We will address the emergence of the recent multiracial identity movement and discuss its relation to both the legacies of white supremacy and the black freedom struggle. Texts will include readings in critical theory, history, and literature as well as examples of film and media.
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