Spring 2021 Class Schedule
Spring 2021 class Schedule
Spring 2021 course descriptions
212-1-20 – Introduction to African American History 1: Key Concepts From 1700-1861
AFAM 212-1 African American History offers an introduction to the history of Africans and the descendants in the making of the modern Americas. Between 1500 and 1825 three out of four people arriving in the Americas were Africans. This course explores questions of colonialism, slavery, and race in charting the history of Africans and their descendants before 1619 through the period following the Haitian Revolution. Charting African political, cultural and spiritual practices, it argues that Africans brought more than toil to the Americas, informing technologies while producing intellectual traditions, languages, food-ways, myriad musical forms, and spiritual systems informing and presenting powerful challenges to emergent colonial societies across the Americas.
225-0-20 – African American Culture
Survey of African American culture from slavery to the present. Relation of African American culture to African and Euro-American cultures, the Black Atlantic as a unit of analysis, representations of blackness in the public imagination.
339-0-20 – Unsettling Whiteness
Whiteness refers to the meaning of racially specific, dominating and violating forms of being, seeing, doing and ordering, that define, assemble and rule the worlds of white and non-white populations. Whiteness, whether it occurs under the heading of white supremacy, white privilege or white authority is the meaning that defines just the way things are, a normal state of affairs, like in the phrase, ‘getting back to normal’. However, of the various populations, groups, communities, ethnicities, nationalities and identities western scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has deemed worthy of legitimate study, it remains the case that whiteness as it shapes and affects both white populations and non-white populations is routinely exempted from analysis. All of which raises the question of how and why this particular white elephant in the nation’s room has remained unstudied and understudied for so long, so much so that many white individuals appear to be oblivious to the racial issues of whiteness and their own whiteness, until they encounter people of color. At the same time people of color find so much of their lives involve protracted and difficult encounters and negotiations with institutional and individual forms of racially discriminatory whiteness, that simply cannot be ignored. This course will examine whiteness in four main ways: as the racialization of white populations; as the formation of white supremacy; as the cultural institution of the White Gaze; and as the regime of White Democracy.
380-0-20 – "Introduction to Black Political Thought"
Between 2015 and 2020 the political movement Black Lives Matter emerged in the US and different parts of the world, concerned with the mobilizations against police violence towards Black populations and oppositions to structural white supremacy. In 2020 the scale and longevity of Black Lives Matter was such that the New York Times referred to it as the largest social movement in US history. Certainly, there had been nothing like it since the anti-colonial movements and civil rights movements of the late 1950s and mid-1960s or the Black power movement of the 1970s, all of which had reverberations and replications among different Black populations across the world (e.g. Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean). This course seeks to introduce students to the historical and political underpinnings of issues and questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, examining their meaning in relation to Black politics and as part of what Cedric Robinson famously referred to as the Black Radical Tradition. Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the relation between history and theory in engaging with histories of Slavery, Reconstruction, Post-colonialism and Post-Civil rights; and in develop understandings of Black political thought in relation to movements that include, Anti-slavery, Pan-Africanism, Anti-Colonialism, Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Feminism, Black Lives Matter, Afropessimism and Afrofuturism.
380-0-21 – Topics: "Feeling Black/Black Feeling"
This course introduces and investigates the matter of black feeling. Does blackness have a feeling? What emotional baggage accompanies racial difference? How do emotions inform, distort, and even precede our notions of race and culture? And how do all types of feelings, personal and public, shape or interrogate the project of racial representation? Drawing together seminal and lesser-known works in African American literature with secondary texts from affect theory, black studies, postcolonial theory, and Afro-pessimism, we will explore the messy entwinement of blackness and emotion and identify how this entwinement is variously represented across the African American literary tradition.
440-0-20 – Black Historiography
Black Historiography explores questions of historical methods, major debates, key texts, and a range of sources that have animated the study of Black History. Along the way, we will interrogate what is meant by both terms—Black History and Black Historiography. To do so, we will explore areas of Black historical thought and the role of Black history in the making of the historical profession. As a core course for PhD students in African American Studies, a central preoccupation of the courses asks, whither Black History in the field of Black Studies?
480-0-20 – Topics: "Studies in 20th & 21st Century Art: Mellon Foundation John E Sawyer Seminar: Black Art in Anti-Black Worlds: Africa and the Black Diaspora"
As the world begins to boldly name and directly address white supremacy in many sectors, the recognition of anti- Blackness as a primary pillar of that social terror becomes more widely understood. This graduate seminar explores how Black art navigates social and aesthetic agency and autonomy in worlds founded on the denigration of Black people and the realities we make. From questions of the legibility of Black Bodies, to the use of sonic innovations, to the politics of linguistic and textual choices, Black art making asserts Black truths in spite of the persistence of social abjection. By creating performance scores in response to readings and prompts from a group of international artist/scholars, students employ embodied strategies as visceral theory-making and art-building. In addition, students will have opportunities to build community with each other as they practice written and oral collegial commentaries.