This class focuses on the long history of violence against African American women and their bodies in the United States. For African American women questions about the rights to their own bodies did not end with the abolition of slavery. Rather African American women endured acts of intimate violence during their long journey to “freedom.” Often, relying on only themselves and other women in their communities, African American women faced down these forms of oppression. In doing so, they forged a legacy and developed strategies that were often radical and liberatory.  This class investigates this complicated history by using the words, actions, and change brought on by Black women from slavery to the present.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

In this course we explore the histories, politics, and imaginaries of black indigeneity in both the Americas and Africa. We examine colonialism, chattel slavery, and imperialism as forces that shape who counts as indigenous and why.
Days: TH  09:00-11:50 AM

The aim of Prisons and Public Education is to analyze, deconstruct social relations and posit new realities with respect to interlocking violence that is levied against Black people in the form of public education and the prison regime. The course is built within an interdisciplinary framework that utilizes a wide array of sources in an effort to develop a multifaceted comprehension as to the inner workings of state violence, public education and the prison regime.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

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.
Days: TU  11:00-01:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Africas
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.
Days: MO  12:00-02:50 PM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Africas, Inter-Area Studies
In this course we explore the histories, politics, and imaginaries of black indigeneity in both the Americas and Africa. We examine colonialism, chattel slavery, and imperialism as forces that shape who counts as indigenous and why.
Days: TH  09:00-11:50 AM