This is a course in which you will learn the first principles of critical race theory, specifically, Afropessimism—and how it resonates (and is dissonant) with the first principles of Marxism and (non-Black) feminism. With this skill-set you will be able to discern the structural difference between three different structures or forms of narrative. Narrative structure asks a different question than What the story is about? It asks the question, How is the story being told. The three narrative structures that we will learn about (and which will, in some way, inform our own storytelling) are:

1. Bourgeois narrative (typical Hollywood stories or mainstream novels and memoirs: here the causal principle is based on individual psychology and morality).

2. Political narrative (here the causal principle is based on institutional forces rather than individual psychology and is also motivated by ethics rather than morality).

3. Afropessimist anti-narrative (an interrogation of both 1 and 2, above, because neither of the aforementioned causal principles are up to the task of narrating Black suffering).


This is a course in which you will also develop as a creative writer and as a critical theorist. The readings will teach you how to tell a traditional bourgeois story (Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life) wherein the protagonist embodies the ethical dilemmas of, for the most part, White-heteronormative characters; how to tell a story wherein the protagonist embodies the ethical dilemmas of non-White and non-Black oppressed people such as working class non-Black gay men (Theorising Video Practice) and/or non-Black women; and how to tell a story of impossible being—the story of Blackness and the long durée of slavery (The Man Who Lived Underground, Season of Migration to the North, and Afropessimism).
Days: TU  10:30-01:20 PM

This is a course in which we study the more psychoanalytically-oriented work of the Black revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. This means that the bulk of the course will be spent reading Black Skin, White Masks and, to a lesser extent, the book that made him famous among activists in the streets, The Wretched of the Earth. We will augment our reading of Fanon’s two famous texts with secondary readings of two Black feminists, Hortense Spillers and Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, as well as by the person whom I believe to be Fanon’s “first reader,” David Marriott. And, we will read Alice Cherki’s biography of Fanon, which centers on his life as a revolutionary. Cherki worked with Fanon in the psychiatric ward of an Algerian hospital—the last “normal” job Fanon had before he and his wife, Josie, join the Algerian revolution.


Fanon was a Black person from the Western Hemisphere (Martinique) who fought in Europe as well as in Africa to end oppression for all humankind. What his life experiences taught him, however, and what his writing often unintentionally reflects, is that humankind defines itself in contradistinction to Blackness. We will try to suss out where Fanon’s work alerts us to this traumatic revelation, as well as where his work finds that truth to be too painful to consider, much less accept.
Days: TH  10:30-01:20 PM

This course is an introduction to both Latin American history and literature with an emphasis on the experience of Africans and their  descendants. Primary and secondary sources will allow students to  analyze the writing of history and the construction of biographical  accounts as a research method. Exploring questions of agency, race and  ethnicity, this course draws on the rich written culture of the colonial era to supplement 20th Century Black narratives.

Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of the Lower-Division Writing requirement.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM