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 fungible1 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.
Days: TH  10:30-01:20 PM

The concept of Diaspora has played a central role in guiding the identity formations of people of African descent in the Americas, as well as the social, political, and religious movements they constructed from the period of trans-Atlantic slavery to the present. Notions of an African Diaspora have been theorized, articulated, and utilized by Black intellectuals, organizers, and everyday people in a myriad of ways. This class seeks to historicize and examine the idea of an African Diaspora and the movements for Black self-determination it helped to inspire. We will begin by discussing varying theorizations of Diaspora, along with major debates regarding historical, cultural, and political connections between people of African descent around the world and those on the African continent. Subsequent course readings will be organized around several themes including: pan-Africanism, the political economy of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades, African retentions and transferals, Black religious nationalism, Africans in Asia and the Middle East, Black resistance and Black Power, recent African immigration, and competing notions/meanings of Blackness. All these topics will be examined within a transnational context and with special consideration for the dynamics of class, gender, and national identity.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Africas
This course traces the emergence of race and gender as technologies of surveillance within the U.S. context. We focus on the emergence of blackness and its gender formations. Students will examine the institutions of chattel slavery, prisons, capitalism, and the law as key institutions in the development of surveillance regimes. Further, we will examine the ways that surveillance and imprisonment are productive—that is, in its performance it produces different sorts of binaries including humans/nonhumans, cisgender/transgender people, good workers/surplus laborers, and the ways these subjects respond. Finally, we ask: “What is to be done?”
Days: TU  09:00-11:50 AM