| 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 111A | AFAM ART: 1619-1929 | COOKS CUMBO, B. | This course is part one of a two part investigation of the history and aesthetics of African American art with a particular focus on the politics of African American representation. Beginning chronologically with the arrival of Africans to the British colonies in 1619 and ending with the cultural phenomenon of the New Negro Movement, students will study African American cultural environments, and the objects of material culture (i.e. slave houses, jugs, quilts, furniture) and artworks created by African Americans. Course readings and class discussions are the primary means of investigating the topics discussed. |
| AFAM 113 | FILM&RACIAL CONFLCT | 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 | AFAM & PHOTOGRAPHY | COOKS CUMBO, B. | This course explores the ways in which African Americans have been depicted and have depicted the world around them through photography. Students will examine the history of photography in relationship to African American culture through a variety of media from early daguerreotype processes to digital imagery. The course focuses on African American photographers' experiences, perspectives, and strategies for representation in visual culture. Students will use course readings and class discussions as the primary means of investigating the ideas discussed. |
| AFAM 128 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | 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. |
| AFAM 154 | BLK WEALTH POVERTY | WILLOUGHBY-HERARD, T. | This African American Studies and Black Politics course will take up the racial wealth divide and consider the politics of uplift, self-reliance, welfare reform, personal responsibility, the invisible hand and other tropes about the market. Two key texts will focus in detail on particular cities to provide cases of critical policy urgency. Similarly, all key texts will take up questions of race, class, gender, and the role of aspirations toward normative masculinity that are often linked to the meanings that we associate with class and status. Using popular fiction written to provide mass and popular education about the values of capitalism and wealth in U.S. society, we shall contextualize and assess the psychic and ethical impact of the racialization of poverty. |
| AFAM 158 | IMMIGRATION AND BLACKS | WILLOUGHBY-HERARD, T. | This course examines advanced African American Studies scholarship and political science scholarship in the area of political theory and critical social thought. Our focus shall be on the idea of the immigrant and the citizen and the function of racial spectacle and vigilantism in delineating which residents are regarded as immigrants and which as citizens. We consider the normative, ethical, and epistemological implications for the contemporary debates, policies, and laws on immigration—linking them to the history of debates, policies and laws that reinforced and constituted second class and non-citizenship for Blacks in the United States. We shall study the complex dynamics of the exclusionary practices and institutions—popular and elite—that shape American citizenship. |