| 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.
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| AFAM 110 | CARIB:COLNL-EMNCPTN | JAMES, W. | Exploration of the history of the archipelago from pre-Columbian times to the end of slavery; examining the impact of European colonization, decimation of the indigenous populations, African slavery, resistance and emancipation; the unity and diversity of experience in region. |
| AFAM 110 | ASNAM/AFAM RELATION | FUJITA-RONY, D. | 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 110 | SOUTH AFRICAN HIST. | MITCHELL, L.M. | Landscapes of Power; Complexions of Authority
This course is a combination of lecture and student discussion based on textual, visual, filmed and musical sources. We will investigate the location and operation of power in Southern African societies, discuss the formations of social identity, and examine the historical basis of authority in contemporary South Africa. The course asks why South Africa experienced a particular, gendered intersection of race and violence. The course is not a comprehensive survey; it will draw on case studies that span early human settlement, colonial interventions, the industrial revolution, apartheid, and post-colonial South Africa. No Prerequisites. |
| AFAM 111A | AFAM ART: 1650-1900 | COOKS, B. | This course investigates the history of aesthetics of African American art with an emphasis on the politics of cultural representation. Students will use course readings and class discussions as the primary means of investigating the ideas discussed. |
| AFAM 130 | AFAM REPRESENTATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE | NEARY, J. | This course is anchored in a sustained analysis of the ways in which various forms of representation of African Americans (both textual and visual) have been a primary discursive mechanism of the West to explain and excuse the forced removal, exploitation, violation, damage, and finally exclusion of African Americans from Western notions of humanity. We will examine the ways in which African American writers and artists have generated political, cultural, and aesthetic resistance to forms of racist representation that dominate in American mainstream culture. Beginning with slave narratives we will examine nineteenth-century paradigms of African American self-representation as a counter-tradition within American literature, concluding the course with an exploration of how these paradigms are adapted and revised in a diverse range of material—Ellen Driscoll’s “Loophole of Retreat,” Sun Ra’s experimental music and film, and Charles Johnson’s “neo-slave narrative” Middle Passage. In addition to the course readings, each student will be responsible for weekly NoteBoard posts, a midterm exam, and a 5-7 page final paper. |
| 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 150 | AFRO-AMERICAN PSYCH | PARHAM, T.A. | The course will begin with an historical overview of the development of Black psychology and the African American frame of reference and continue with a discussion of topic areas including, but not limited to, personality development, psychological assessment, issues in education, Black family, Black mental health and mental health illness, and the role of the Black psychologist in the community |
| 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 160 | ISS AFRO FUTURISM | JENKINS, U. | This course will explore various African-American artistic engagements with cultural and philosophical traditions that have evolved into the development of an Afro-futurist aesthetic. An examination of how linkage to ancient African belief systems and science and technology has emerged into an artistic expression of freedom. The course will examine a variety of disciplines in the arts: literature, music and the visual arts; with an emphasis based upon the social implications African-American Woman. |
| 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 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 | CONTEMP BLACK FILM | SEXTON, J. | This course will provide an introduction to the history and theory of black cinema, and a critical engagement with select works from contemporary black filmmakers from the 1970s to the present. Among other things, we will explore themes of representation and responsibility; the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality; the politics of authenticity; and the tensions between independent and corporate productions. Films discussed include: Charles Burnett’s The Killer of Sheep, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover, Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman, Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day, Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Marlon Riggs’ Black Is, Black Ain’t. |