101-6-20 First-Year Seminar: Passing and the Performance of Identity in America
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
420-0-20 Expressive Arts & Cult Studies: Black Expressive Arts
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."
