DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

This seminar will be an intensive, multi-genre study of literary and cinematic works that focus on the phenomenon of "passing" and the reinvention of identity from the turn of the 20th through the turn of the 21st century. Through film, literature and other expository writings, this seminar will explore the various ways in which notions of class, gender, race, sexuality and other identities are socially constructed performances. Performance covers various modes of human communication—from how we use language to storytelling to cultural rituals. Some of the questions we will consider in this seminar are: how do various identities relate to one another or do they? What are some of the ways in which we perform versions of ourselves daily based on the expectations of those around us? Finally, when are these social constructions of identity fluid, interchangeable, temporary or permanent?

Capital and ongoing state violence against Black populations across the Americas have a history in slavery, Native American removal, and the development of western law. This course explores the development of colonial law and indigenous displacement through the lens of colonial attempts to regulate slavery and claim Indigenous territories. Students will read and engage a range of colonial texts to explore the ways that racial slavery served to sketch American capital and law. Students will come away with the ability to critically discuss these developments in their own words, and perhaps think more carefully about the implications of law and state structures etched during the era with regard to racial slavery. Through it, students will come to know the peculiar relationship between slavery, property, capital, race, and Law across the Americas.

Given the many gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, what accounts for the rise of #BlackLivesMatter? Why do the police and criminal legal system seem so resistant to change? This seminar examines racial conditions since the 1960s and explores some of the analysis, remedies and solutions that young activists are formulating to address the challenges of the 21st century. Readings include historical studies and first person accounts.

Introductory survey of fiction, poetry, drama, folktales, and other literary forms of Africa and the African diaspora. Texts may span the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods and will cover central themes, such as memory, trauma, spirituality, struggle, identity, freedom, and humor.

1. Key concepts in African American history from 1700 to 1861. Includes African origins; the Atlantic slave trade; origins of slaving and racism in the United States; life under slavery in the North and South; and religion, family, culture, and resistance. 2. Key concepts in African American history from emancipation to the beginnings of the civil rights era. Focus on constructions of class, gender, and community; the rise of Jim Crow; strategies of protest; and migration and urbanization. Taught with HISTORY 212; students may not earn credit for both courses.

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Problems and experiences of racialized minorities: blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina/os. Comparison of their relationships with each other and with the majority society.

Analysis of class, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, and ethnic origin in black society and politics. Focus on demographic trends, lived experiences, and ideological debates.

The Northern and Southern civil rights movements and the rise of black nationalism and feminism, 1945-72.

Key texts and concepts in African American studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Examination of events, movements, theories, and texts that have shaped the development of the African diaspora. Topics include slavery; abolitionism; Pan-Africanism; the culture/politics nexus; hip-hop; AIDS; linkages among gender, sexuality, and diasporic sensibilities.

Race as a social concept and recurrent cause of differentiation in multiracial societies. Impact of race on social, cultural, economic, and political institutions. Discussion of prejudice, racism, and discrimination.

Readings in classic black American fiction and studying the author as creator and participant. Includes the works of Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and others. Prerequisite: sophomore standing.

Examination of the evolution and persistence of the notion of "race" in 19th-century America, with attention to the origins of the idea of race in the West. Focus on the multiracial character of 19th-century America.

Making the historical, political, and cultural formation of whiteness in western modernity visible and narratable for commentary and analysis. Particular reference to contemporary culture.

Afro-Latin communities, cultures, and identities throughout Latin America and the Hispanic diaspora after 1800. Emergence of race and nation in modern Latin America, migration, gender, Afro-Latin spiritual systems and religion, family, and politics.

History of Africans and African-descended people throughout Latin America from 1492 to 1800, emphasizing the varied experiences of slavery and freedom struggles, the emergence of race and colonial categories of difference, and the gendered lives of racialized colonial subjects.

Advanced introduction to critical theories of race and racialization. Investigation of blackness as a category of critical analysis for analyzing Afro-diasporic formations. Consideration of how blackness is shaped by gender, class, sexuality, and nationality.

In-depth examination of a selected author's body of work. Choice of author varies. May be repeated for credit with change of author.

Impact of racism in the formation of Western modernity. Critical conceptual and historical analyses of the social formation of "race" and the historical implications of racism in the contemporary West.

Advanced work on social, cultural, or historical topics. May be repeated for credit with different topic. Prerequisite: advanced student or senior.

Advanced work on social, cultural, or historical topics. May be repeated for credit with different topic. Prerequisite: advanced student or senior.

Advanced work on social, cultural, or historical topics. May be repeated for credit with different topic. Prerequisite: advanced student or senior.

Methods of researching the African American experience. Identification of research problems; location, selection, and critique of relevant literature; data gathering and analysis; report writing. Topics vary. Prerequisite: advanced student or senior standing.

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The trope of the talking book that conferred humanity and power upon its owners is one starting point for the study of Afro-diasporic expressive arts. The very term points to an oxymoron, juxtaposing the alleged fixity of the written word against the ephemeral polysemy of the body in performance that artists, critics, and lay people have sought to negotiate and complicate in order to articulate individual subjectivity and collective identity.

Using crosscutting thematic, historical, and generic grids, the course will utilize slave narratives, fiction, poetry, music, critical theory, and the visual arts to survey how African-descended writers, artists, and theorists have grappled with the constitution of Blackness as it relates to the modern conception of humanity.

The course will discuss how Black writers and theorists have debated topics such as: the relationship to Africa (survivalisms, diaspora, Pan Africanism, Afrocentrism, Black Atlanticism); literature as a mode of self-articulation and struggle (protest tradition, the New Negro Renaissance, Negritude, Indigenism, postcoloniality); performance as a site of knowledge production and contestation; the constitution of Blackness (authenticity, creolite, migratory subjectivity, Black feminisms, queer/"quare" theory); modes of representation and their relationship to various ideological and/or theoretical debates; the global circulation of Black cultural production.

The course also exposes students to a variety of research methodologies and provides jumping-off points for further analysis from national, regional, and/or transnational perspectives.

The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays; Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey; Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America; Stuart Hall, Representation and the Media and Race, the Floating Signifier (video recordings); Kara Keeling, The Witch's Flight; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism; Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C.L.R. James Reader; Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali A. Mazrui, eds., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (selected essays); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; Sheila S. Walker, ed., African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas; Michelle Wright,Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora; E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology; Dwight A. McBride, "Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority;"Sandra L. Richards, "Yoruba Gods on the American Stage: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone."

This graduate level course charts the development of African American history writings and interpretations from the era of enslavement through the twentieth century. The course has four parts. The first part explores the texts early writers produced to chronicle the contributions of African Americans to the making of America. These first writers were self-taught and wrote not only to document Black achievement but to counter prevailing negative stereotypes in the larger society. The second part focuses on the work of scholars who received formal academic training and produced books that celebrated African Americans as active agents of history.

The range of texts includes essays, monographs, anthologies, journals etc. and other writings of individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles and others. The third part focuses on the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era scholars who spearheaded the development of Black Studies. Foci concern the traditional academic scholarship that challenged conventional interpretations of slavery, Black nationalism, Black institutional and organizational development, and enhanced comprehension of Black expressive culture as fundamental to American culture.

Another critical development in part three was the emergence of survey texts in African American Studies such as Ron Karenga's Introduction to African American Studies. The fourth part examines the major ideological developments in African American Studies as it acquired legitimacy and acceptance within the academy.

The works of Afrocentrists such as Molefi Asante, the challenge of African American women studies scholars that made gender a category of analysis as important as race, and the emergence of African diaspora studies and comparative Black history signaled another important development in African American Studies Historiography.

While the course devotes considerable attention to historical works, it is equally important to concentrate on the writings of literary and cultural studies theorists, as well as those of sociologists and political scientists in order to appreciate the richness and expanse of intellectual engagement and productivity of this vital and dynamic discipline.

The following texts form the basis for a sample representative reading list of works that provide a foundation for the diverse ideological contours and streams of black studies scholarship: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro; E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie; John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams; Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity; Sterling Stuckey, Black Nationalism; Ron Karenga, Introduction to African American Studies; Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora; Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas; and Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas; Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought; and Barbara Smith, Homegirls.

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Sustained social and political questionings of inequalities in the formation of the modern world have been posed by Black populations across the African diaspora since the end of the 17th century. The study of Black communities, Black politics, and Black culture includes investigating the pivotal scholarly texts produced by social scientists that investigate the social, cultural, and political practices of abolitionists, maroons, Pan-Africanists, club women, freedom fighters, poets, and the vast array of "race men and women" across the spectrum of crusades.

The course also includes interrogation into the everyday lives of Black folks in families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and workplaces. Finally, this course situates Black communities within specific economic, political, cultural, legal, and social contexts, and thus includes texts that describe and explain the structural nature of exploitation, oppression, and racism.

The course will attend to important axes of difference among African-descended peoples, such as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and skin color, as well as to the transnational linkages and interactions that constitute the global African diaspora despite these particularities. Overall, it serves as an introduction to the major theories and debates in the social scientific study of Blackness and Black communities.

The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America; C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins; Melville Herskovitz, Acculturation: The Study of Cultural Contact; Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, The Black Bourgeoisie, and The Negro Church in America; Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule and Black Visions; Michael Hanchard, Orpheus and Power; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences, Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; David Scott, Refashioning Futures; Barnor Hesse, Un/Settled Multiculturalisms; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority; Randall Kennedy, Race Crime and the Law; and Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, Black Power.

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