| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFAM 40B | AFRICAN AMERICAN II | SEXTON, J. | This course offers a critical introduction to the history of modern racial thinking in Western society, with particular emphasis on 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 enslavement of Africans and the vast system of racial slavery throughout the Atlantic world. Though there will be a focus on the specificities of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism, we will also think comparatively about other regions of racial inequality and the construction of global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE. We will read for quality, not quantity, with a focus on engaged class participation (see "Ground Rules" below). |
| AFAM 113 | BLACK CINEMA | DAULATZAI, S. | Using history and theory, cinema and documentary, commercial and independent film, this course seeks to explore the brilliant complexity that constitutes the contours of Blackness as a site for collective identity, political empowerment, and radical consciousness. With Black visual representation and Black creative impulses from throughout the diaspora as our guide, this course will explore how cinema became a vehicle for situating a multiplicity of Black identities within a broad social, political and cultural field. Films may include: Do the Right Thing, Killer of Sheep, The Spook Who Sat By the Door, Afropunk, Daughters of the Dust, The Black Power Mixtape, Bush Mama, Menace II Society, Pariah, Concerning Violence, Handsworth Songs, amongst others. |
| AFAM 117 | ASAM & AFAM RELATNS | LEE, J. | This comparative course will address the relationship of the Asian American and African American communities in the United States, with focus on the contemporary era Topics will include race, class, gender, labor, economic systems, political mobilization, community formation, civil rights, activism, and cultural expression. |
| AFAM 128 | RACE MIXTURE POLTCS | SEXTON, J. | This course explores the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States from the antebellum period to the post-civil rights era, paying specific attention to interracial sexuality as a fulcrum of power relations shaped by racial slavery and historical capitalism. We will address the emergence of the multiracial identity movement since the 1990s and discuss its relation to the legacies of white supremacy and the black freedom struggle. We will read for quality not quantity, with a premium on engaged class participation. Several short writing assignments, a midterm and a final exam are required |
| AFAM 143 | BPM2 - HIP HOP | MUTERE, M. | This course will examine the agency of African-American oral traditions in the creation and development of hip hop culture and its 4 key elements within their historical and sociological frameworks. The hero’s journey of each student’s artist-of-choice will serve as an assigned case study. Discussions will include reflections on the applicability of traditional roles in multi-cultural contexts; an impact-assessment of music industry appropriation and commoditization of this cultural expression; and an evaluation of where social responsibility lies with regard to the misogynistic and violent messages that are often promoted through rap. If the African-American voice and its cultural mission has been co-opted through mainstream marketing strategies and assumptions of ownership by commercial interests, how might this be remedied? |
| AFAM 158 | W. E. B. DU BOIS AND MAX WEBER | CHANDLER, N. | This course brings into focus and examines the question of how to think about the general moral and ethical dimension of a social field by a seminar level close study of two classic texts from the opening years of the 20th century, placing them in comparative purview: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1897-1903) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904-1905). The moral and ethical dimension of sociality, even as it articulates in every aspect of the symbolic in human social life, indicates most fundamentally the horizon in terms of which judgments of right and wrong are formed and the context in which our ideals for living are constructed at the respective social levels of both individuals and collectives. This course, in its concern with this kind of question, thus goes beyond the juridical dimension of law in the social order (rules and restrictions, penalties and incentives) to explore the moral and ethical foundations of society in general. The operative question for a critical understanding of such a dimension is the relative status of the common or the diverse therein. That is to say -- the question is how to think differences of moral and ethical commitment within a common horizon. And, then most radically, this question takes shape as the relation of a defined social context (sometimes a society) to both its past and its future. A century past their first publication, these classic texts by Du Bois and Weber – grappling as they were with the massively difficult questions of how to address the privilege of an ideal of accumulation (in the ascendance of a full-blown world-wide capitalist organization of “market”) and an affirmation of a new sense of hierarchy on a global horizon in the face of new concatenations of social difference (what Du Bois famously called the global level “problem of the color line”) – could these studies still offer lessons and insights for us in the 21st century, one already marked by the rise of new global powers and somewhat new complex over-wrought contexts of antagonistically related horizons of moral and ethical value on a planetary scale (to wit: 9/11 and its aftermath; or, planetary level climate change, for example). In brief, the answer is yes; and that is the premise for this course. |
| AFAM 162W | BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. | This course will introduce students to the rhetorical problems, constraints, and possibilities of the Black protest tradition. Our guiding questions are, What does it mean to suffer? and What does it mean to be free? from the vantage point of the Slave. We will try to understand the dissonance, or rhetorical gaps between, on the one hand, what various kinds of Black protest discourses describe as the goals of a protest and struggle, and what, on the other hand, is the paradigmatic condition of Black suffering in America. We will take a cultural studies approach to expository and creative texts that emerged from Black struggles. The texts we will read and screen (i.e., films) are there to assist us in understanding the forces that position (place) Blacks as accumulated and fungible objects in a world of living subjects. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where people are positioned within the American paradigm) of Blacks in relation to the positionality of other races in America. We will be concerned only secondarily with the individually affirming and often identity aggrandizing “cultural voices” of Blacks. In other words, the course seeks to clarify the difference between a politics of culture and a culture of politics. |