| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| AFAM 40B | AFRICAN AMERICAN II | MURILLO, J. | This lecture course is an introductory investigation into the question of race and the earthshattering impact this invention has had on Black life and death in the antiblack world. Our journey winds through poetry, literature, historical analysis, and critical theory in order to piece together a vision of the mechanics, stakes, and consequences of the invention of Blackness in the modern world. In doing so, we contend with the rudimentary and oft-deployed remark that “race is man-made” or “race is invented,” most often issued as reasons to take race, and more specifically Blackness, less seriously—i.e. they are “made-up,” so we merely need look away, or disbelieve, or think and imagine ‘otherwise.’ Our investigation begins and moves based on the premise that, in fact, this “made-up” or “conjured” quality of this invention make it more malleable, more unwieldy, and deadlier, and, instead demands that we take its fictions far more seriously than we do, for in them writhe the truths of the modern world as we know it. |
| AFAM 138 | IDEA OF AMERICA II | CHANDLER, N. | The Very Idea of America II – Historiography, Literature, Political Philosophy – 1808-1915 Employing a multidisciplinary approach to the understanding of American society, culture and history, from the 15th century to the early 20th century, this course will provide a new introduction to the very idea and the founding history of America. With touchstone attention to Asia (notably India, Japan, and China) in the idea of America, the diverse sources of its people, African, European, Native American, and more, this course takes the history of matters African American as a central guide. The aftermath of the American Reconstruction, as itself the aftermath of the great modern revolutions, is the central reference. The matter of "citizenship" is a key problematic. The course aims to cultivate a perspective that is at once historical and “cultural,” and thus also comparative, in all of its practices. |
| AFAM 143 | HIP HOP REFLECTIONS | MURILLO, J. | Hip-Hop music and culture are forged in the crucible of the ongoing antagonism between Black folk and the antiblack world. We know this. Despite the persistence of all others, Hip-Hop music and culture cannot be disentangled from singularity of the struggle of Black folk vying to complete the large, amorphous, and all-important project of liberation. We know this. And Hip-Hop music and culture, at its best and most defiant, tarries in radical acts of speculation and reflection that allow us both, deeper insight into the Black psyche and how that psyche negotiates the daily, ubiquitous terror of antiblackness, as well as opportunities for sometimes-bombastic, sometimes-soulful, always-defiant, critical, imaginative, and daring creativity aimed at dismantling the structures of power governing our world and the dominant symbolic order (the ruling system of knowledge and value) that bolsters those structures. We may not always know this, but we feel it. Let’s explore that feeling. |
| AFAM 144 | BLACK POP CULTURE | PAYTON, P. | This course is a survey of the shifting signs of blackness through the lens of popular culture from the late 1980s to the millennium. Focusing on politics, film, television, and music, we will discuss the interrelated evolution of these forms in order to understand the persistent impact of racial capitalism on culture. Before arriving into the nineties, we will begin with a summary of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the implications of his term on low-income Black communities. From here we will assess the many socio-cultural responses that gained mainstream traction in the late eighties and early nineties, as seen particularly, in film and music. Often glossed over and under-studied, this course will largely focus on how Bill Clinton’s presidency and policies conflicted with mainstream and marginalized perceptions of his overall cultural impact. Overall, we will focus on the ways in which politics and Black cultural production in the nineties merged to produce a unique assemblage of material that continues to resonate in today’s media. |
| 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. |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 198 | DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| AFAM 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | SPEARE, M. |