| 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 emphasis on the British North American colonies and the United States. We trace its emergence in religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; in legal statute and legislation; in political debate and public policy; and in popular culture. More importantly, we 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 is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism, we also think comparatively about the construction of global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE. |
| AFAM 111A | MODERN AFAM ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. | Examines art by African Americans with a particular focus on the politics of representation. Beginning with the 17th century arrival of Africans to the British colonies and ending with the cultural phenomenon of the Harlem Renaissance, students will discuss artwork created in a variety of forms including material culture, decorative arts, painting, sculpture, and photography. |
| AFAM 112B | DARK FANTASY LIT | MURILLO, J. | The title of this course is informed by two living artifacts: the first is (Old) Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the other is a line from Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black that reads “to stay in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight.” There are several other resonances here, and part of the job of the course will be to unpack those connections between Black people fantasizing—imagining, creating, wondering, dreaming—and Black people being bound to the hold of the slave ship. We will read Black fantasy literature, watch Black fantasy and surrealist music videos, and think together about what’s at stake and what’s possible when we take Black fantasies and Black fantasizing seriously in this antiblack catastrophe of a world. |
| AFAM 125 | AFAM WOMEN IN ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. | Examines depictions of and by African American women in art and popular culture through in a variety of media including textiles, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Focuses on African American women’s experiences, perspectives, and strategies for contemporary representation. |
| AFAM 128 | AFRICAN FEMINISMS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. | Introduce students to concepts of gender and feminist activist movements generated and led by and about women and gender outlaws from the African continent and the context in which rebellion, social protest, and transformation occurs. We will explore a range of texts: poetry collections, fiction, prison memoirs, social commentaries, films, and cultural and social histories. We will lean heavily (almost exclusively) on South African materials by poet Koleka Putuma; filmmakers Bev Ditsie and Rehad Desai; photographer Zanele Muholi; feminist cultural studies scholars Pumla Gqola & Devarakshanam (Betty) Govinden; and freedom fighter Winnie Madikizela Mandela. Prominent exceptions include Ghanaian classic, Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo; Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s tour de force Black Girl; and British Zimbabwean director and screenwriter, Ingrid Sinclair’s prized Flame. |
| AFAM 138 | SLAVE REBELLIONS | MILLWARD, J. | This course investigates slave resistance, agency, and revolution during key “slave rebellions” in the Atlantic World. The main course objective is to provide students with an overview of classic and more recent scholarship on topics presented in the course. Of particular importance is the relationship between individuals vs. community resistance, and forms of resistance available to slaves based upon their locale, gender, and status in the enslaved community. Students will work to isolate criteria as to what makes a “successful” slave rebellion. We will approach slave resistance and rebellion from a Diasporic perspective. Students will develop critical and analytical skills by doing oral and written assignments, some of which will be comparative in nature. The reading assignments promise to provide students with a theoretical overview of classic debates in African American history/studies such as class conflict, gendered experiences, and collective action. This class is designed for students who have taken other African American Studies or History courses as well as those who have a general interest in the course material. |
| AFAM 152 | AFRICAN AMER POLTCS | PHOENIX, D. | The story of the African-American struggle for true equality is a distinctly American one. Not simply because it features a distinct set of American actors interacting within the unique confines of the U.S. political system; but more so because this story is one that highlights and challenges the ideas at the heart of America. Are all people truly created equal? Can the rules and institutions of American democracy safeguard the liberty of its most marginalized denizens? Can the American dream be more than a dream deferred for a people simultaneously essential to American advancement and subjugated by it? Special emphasis will be placed on: (1) the goals of political advancement articulated by various black leaders, and the strategies employed to achieve those goals, and (2) the manner in which these goals and strategies are shaped and constrained by U.S. political institutions such as the two party system, federalism, the criminal justice system, etc. This course will feature a mix of lecture, small and large group discussion, in-class written exercises, and viewing of media clips such as documentaries, news features and podcasts. Students are expected to be active participants in both small and large group discussions. Objectives 1. To immerse students in a range of relevant historical and contemporary discourses on black political objectives, strategies, movements and ideologies 2. To improve students’ ability to interrogate and analyze the dominant institutions and ideas at the heart of American politics—particularly how those institutions and ideas shape the political development of African Americans 3. To familiarize students with political science-informed perspectives on the instrumental role of race in shaping politics in the U.S. |
| AFAM 154 | CAPITALISM&BLK/FEMT | HARVEY, S. | This course will offer students a working knowledge of black feminist thought and criticisms of capitalism. We’ll read from and about authors/activists including Lucy Parsons, Claudia Jones, Esther Cooper Jackson, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective. In doing so we ask how black feminist theory and activism draws connections between colonialism, chattel slavery, imperialism and the life of black peoples in Africa and throughout the diaspora. |
| AFAM 157 | CRITICAL RACE THRY | MURILLO, J. | Crucial to our ability to understand Blackness (and by extension race, and by extension human existence) is our understanding of Black relationships with time and space. This is definitely phenomenological, bound up with unsettling, if not terrifying, experiences of time and space, but it’s also definitely structural, bound up with the mechanics of time and space. We will read traditionally academic texts, but we will also read creative works, watch films and music videos, and listen to songs that also theorize Black time and space. Much of what we’ll read in this course will have us wade through the experiences, mechanics, and constitutive features of Black time and space in order to build a more nuanced, critical grasp of Blackness, race, and human existence. |
| AFAM 162W | BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. | History and discourses of the black protest tradition. Traces emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy from the early colonial period to present and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities in the twentieth century. Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of the Lower-Division Writing requirement. Restriction: Upper-division students only. |
| AFAM 163 | POLICING BLACK LIVE | HARVEY, S. | We explore how law and prison serve as institutions that manage blackness and its gender formations. The course reviews the surveillance of black people beginning with slavery to the present and considers the potentiality of prison abolition as a movement for liberation. |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | COOKS CUMBO, B. | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | HARVEY, S. | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | MURILLO, J. | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | SEXTON, J. | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | WILDERSON, F. | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |