101-6-20 First-Year Seminar: From Black Power to Black Lives Matter
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.
Analysis of class, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, and ethnic origin in black society and politics. Focus on demographic trends, lived experiences, and ideological debates.
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.
335-0-20 Race and Literature in 19th Century America
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.
460-0-20 Race, Politics, Society, Culture: Black Social and Political Thought
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.
