| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| 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 113 | FILM & RACIAL CONFLICT | WILDERSON, F. | Same as Flm&Mda 190. "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 115 | RACE&REPRESENTATION | DAULATZAI, S. | Same as Flm&Mda 130. This course will explore issues of race and its manifestations within visual culture, primarily mainstream Hollywood film, independent cinema and documentary. In doing so, we will examine issues of power and its relationships to representation across different historical periods and within specific contexts, as well as the ways in which race intersects with gender, class, sexuality and nationhood. Films will include The Godfather, Traffic, Mississippi Masala, The Siege, The Searchers, Lone Star and others. |
| AFAM 118 | HARLEM RENAISSANCE SOPHIATOWN | MASILELA, N. | Same as English 105 and HumArts 101. 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 118 | 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 118 | HOME & AWAY: CULTURE, THEORY, LITERATURE | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | Same as AsianAm 110 and ComLit 108. Is home a literal place, a territory, a state of mind? What does it mean to be “at home,” and how does such a feeling of security relate to “being at home in the world?” How do Home and the World replicate each other; or, do they? Is home a sovereign and normative space, or is it a space of non-discriminating, ever inclusive belonging? Can some one’s home become some other’s exile? Can home be the function of a regime such as Nationalism? What is the relationship between having a home and enjoying the privileges of citizenship? How do race, gender, immigration, ethnicity, and sexuality determine what is home and what is exile? What happens when one leaves one’s home and lives elsewhere? Can there be divided homes characterized by “double consciousness?” During these times of intensive diasporas, movements of peoples-goods-and ideas across boundaries and borders, how does home become a mere location, and location acquire the significance of home? Is a home more natural than a mere location? Are homes natural or are they imagined constructs? With these questions in mind, we will be analyzing a number of texts, some fictional and some theoretical, as they traverse home and away in an infinite series of arrivals and departures.
Format: A combination of lectures, discussions, and class presentations. 1 take home examination, 1 short paper, and 1 long paper. |
| AFAM 128 | AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN VISUAL ARTS | COOKS CUMBO, B. | Same as Art Hist 164A and Womn St 189. This course addresses the historical depictions of African American women in American art and popular culture. Students will explore the history of visual art created by African American women from the 19th century through contemporary art in a variety of media including textiles, painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance. The course focuses on African American women's experiences, perspectives, and strategies for self-representation in the visual arts. Students will use course readings and class discussions as the primary means of investigating the ideas discussed. |
| AFAM 128 | RACE MIXTURE POLITICS | SEXTON, J. | Same as Womn St 189. 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. |
| AFAM 153 | AF AM PSYCHOLOGY | PARHAM, T. | 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. |