DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

This class considers what it means to conceptualize, articulate, and actualize a liberatory Black educational project within U.S. public schools structured by anti-Black solidarity. In the first section of the course, we explore the fight to desegregate public schools and the ways the historic Brown v. Board of Education case transformed schooling for Black children and their communities. In considering the impact of the Brown decision on the experiences of Black students in U.S. public schools, we interrogate the rebukes of Brown including the various educational projects (community control, Panther freedom schools, the Black independent school movement etc.) advanced in Brown's aftermath. In the second section of the course, we explore the myriad ways Black students experience antiblackness and anti-Black racism in U.S. public schools contemporarily, as well as the ways Black students, educators, administrators, community and family members, and scholars have articulated what the notion of liberation may mean in the face of antiblackness. In the final section of the course, we consider the tensions and possibilities in the desire to "get free" within the confines of U.S. public schools.

In “Feminist Afro-Futurisms,” our class will explore the long history of black feminist speculative production, beginning with the turn of the twentieth-century. We will explore black feminine subjectivity in the 1903 novel by Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood, along with later twentieth-century works by Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson. By situating these works side-by-side, along additional literary works and black feminist literary theory and criticism, this course bridges more recent writing and concerns of black women feminists with the lesser known works of nineteenth century Black New Women. We will also interrogate the legacy of black feminine creative production spanning the century.  These issues include but are not limited to the position of black women as mothers and family members, concerns of sexual violence, hypersexuality and hypervisibility, questions of canonicity, and the ongoing marginality of black women’s works within the academic classroom. This is a reading and discussion-based class, and regular class participation is a must. Come prepared to tackle issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Assignments will include leading in-class discussion, two small papers, and a multi-media group final.

Literature of blacks from slavery to freedom. Works of major writers and significant but unsung bards of the past.

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.

Comparative historical analysis of Asian-black relations in the United States, including racialized and sexualized discourses structuring interracial relations and social, political, and economic location. Slavery, immigration, model minority myth, cross-racial politics. Taught with ASIAN AM 218; students may not earn credit for both courses.

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.

Examination of the debates within African American communities about the proper role and function of black art and artists in relation to black politics.

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

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.

This course will examine the lives of African American women between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Topics to be addressed include labor; family and community relationships; sexuality and intimacy; and political activism: free black women in the anti-slavery movement and enslaved women's resistance to enslavement. Students must participate in a Discussion Section on Fridays at either 1 p.m., 2 p.m. or 3 p.m.

What does it mean to read major works of post-soul black literature from the standpoint of insecurity? How is black insecurity distinct from insecurity broadly conceived? What unique qualities does literature have that help critics understand black insecurity in ways other forms can’t? This class will examine essays, poetry, and fiction written in the post-soul era—that is written between the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—to examine the ongoing struggle for black freedom and the conditions of insecurity that underwrite it. We will specifically examine the relationship between insecurity as an affect, and the periodization of post-soul writing, asking specific questions about the unfulfilled promises of Civil Rights era agitation and the ongoing insecurities that suffuse discourses of black activism, especially those related to police and vigilante violence of the last decade. We relate these forms of antiblack violence to the ongoing War on Terror to assess their interdependence. We will also interrogate how progressive calls for various kinds of security from food security to climate security reinforce the discourse of security.

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.

Course Description TBA.

This course will be an intensive study in understanding the relationship between American journalism and the U.S. military in creating an American empire. By focusing on how the U.S. military has segregated service members by race, sexuality, gender, and gender identity—and on how U.S. media has covered the military—students will study how identity roles have been formed by both the military and the media in American society. Readings will include primary sources, works of journalism, and scholarship. Topics covered will include the histories of LGBTQ rights; "pinkwashing" and "homonationalism"; "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"; racial segregation; the development of the condom; government management of HIV/AIDS; subjectivity and objectivity; and, essentialism. The course is intended for journalism majors and non-majors alike, and will be centered on helping both analyze news media critically in order to better understand how race, gender, sexuality and American identity are constructed.

A study of Black religions, from the time of slavery to the present, in the context of American social, political, and religious history. The course pushes students to take a panoramic view of Black Religions in America. Consideration will be given to debates concerning the roots of Black American Religion, the Black Social Gospel, the Centrality (or lack there of) of Black Churches, Black Islam, Blacl Catholiciam, African Indigenous Religions, Black Atheism, the Religiousity of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Theology, Womanist Theology, Black Televangelism, and the present battle for Black Rights. *Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religion studies major concentration.

A study of Black religions, from the time of slavery to the present, in the context of American social, political, and religious history. The course pushes students to take a panoramic view of Black Religions in America. Consideration will be given to debates concerning the roots of Black American Religion, the Black Social Gospel, the Centrality (or lack there of) of Black Churches, Black Islam, Blacl Catholiciam, African Indigenous Religions, Black Atheism, the Religiousity of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Theology, Womanist Theology, Black Televangelism, and the present battle for Black Rights. *Counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religion studies major concentration.

This course examines visual and literary representations of Black pain, past and present, to critically engage their use in animating various modes of Black resistance, fugitivity, and refusal.  By foregrounding the concept of “regard,” we will consider for whom and to what end Black pain has and might yet serve.  

This course introduces students to a variety of works by black writers of the long nineteenth century. In this class, we will concentrate on the poetry and fiction of this period and explore the central themes, styles, commonalities, and differences within these works. For instance, we will consider how dialect and geography change our understanding of the subject matter. We will confront our preconceived expectations of what "black literature" means in the nineteenth century and consider the implications of this process throughout the semester. The course is reading and writing intensive, and every class will require preparation of a primary text and supplementary reading through which we will explore central issues in the assigned reading, including issues of class and citizenship, identity formation, and gender. Texts will include works by Florence Hall, Harriet E. Wilson, Mary Prince, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and others, in addition to companion critical and theoretical articles.

This course will take as fundamental that black vernacular—the dialects and slang and folk language found in black communities—is a form of theory and theorizing. This theory, though different from the capital-T Theory of notable philosophers, will be shown to also possess intellectual sophistication, simply in, as Barbara Christian has said, “the form of the hieroglyph.” If we assume, rightly, that black people have always theorized, only in different and alternative ways, how might we examine the nuances of that theory? What does it look like? Where, and it what forms, can it be found? “Black Vernacular as Theory” will traverse myriad discursive genres—from novels to poems to music to social media to personal lives. It will put, say, the conversations between black women in the kitchen on par with the intellectual status of literary theorists, dismantling implicit hierarchies between “high” and “low” theory. Students will read the work of Barbara Christian, Geneva Smitherman, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and others; listen to the corpus of Kendrick Lamar and Big L; and reflect on community conversations from family reunions and barbershops. Ultimately, we will begin to rethink what “counts” as theory, and how we might come to understand various marginalized communities within black cultural production as doing substantive work in terms of knowledge production.

This research seminar introduces students to central debates in Black studies on a graduate level, and, it also emphasizes critical thinking, research, documentation, and writing in order to prepare students for undertaking effective and successful scholarly writing projects. Students will learn how to envision research questions, incorporate theoretical and methodological paradigms into their research, and devise their own research project.

We will examine different methodologies (historiographic, literary, ethnographic, social scientific, etc.) for producing Black studies based research projects and essays in order to analyze different strategies of argumentation, presenting evidence, and bibliographic methods with a particular emphasis on the many digital tools available. Students are expected to continuously work on researching and writing their essays over the course of the quarter so as to produce a publishable paper at the end of the term.

Readings: Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel, eds. The Black Studies Reader, Winston Napier, ed. African American Literary Theory: a Reader; Timothy P. Fong, ed. Ethnic Studies Research: Approaches and Perspectives; Anthony Winkler and Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell, Writing the Research Paper: A Handbook; drew Abbott,Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials.

This course examines the multiple, changing meanings and political effects of gender and sexuality on black identity in different socio-cultural contexts. Drawing on the work of black LGBTQ and feminist thinkers, it analyzes how social institutions such as the law, family and economy, and cultural representations, e.g. literary and popular media, shape competing concepts of black genders and sexualities.

This course also stages a series of dialogues between global black feminist theory and black queer theory through the discussion of such topics as: the legacies of slavery and colonialism; diaspora; citizenship; activism; labor, kinship; body politics, , reproduction, violence, HIV/AIDs, as well as appropriations and alliances. The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn:

E. Patrick Johnson & Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics; Thomas Glave, ed. Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles; Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, "Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic;" Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Oguntoye, et al, Showing Our Colors Afro-German Women Speak Out; M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought; Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture; Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora; Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low; Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, eds. Queer African Reader.

This graduate level course introduces students to a survey of cultural, social, historical, and theoretical approaches to understanding the meaning and applications of Blackness, discussing a range of approaches involved in developing a global analytics of blackness. The Middle Passage, transatlantic racial slavery, the plantation system, and the gendered racial terror erected on them were not one time events, spanning almost 500 years from the early 15th century to well into 19th century, and their effects are still felt not only in Americas but in many places around the globe, including continental Africa.

As an analytic Blackness emphasizes how Black people are positioned in relationship to this abstract force differently than other groups (e.g. whites, Latin@, Native, Asian American, etc.) and internally differentiated depending on gender, sexuality, class, phenotype, nationality, etc. Thus, blackness - just as whiteness - is not primarily about cataloging the existence of racial groups but addresses a spectrum of power along which all racial groups are unequally positioned.

Drawing on theoretical discourses from the social sciences and humanities, the course surveys blackness as a global category of critical analysis for both historical and contemporary social formations in the African Diaspora. In addition, by considering the different manifestations of Blackness as well as other forms of racialized identity across the globe from historical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, it also considers how gender, class, sexuality, and nationality shape the territory of blackness.

We will study scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, incarceration, segregation, other forms of racialized violence, and, on the other hand, texts that imagine Blackness as a pathway alternative forms of being human.

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; Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race; Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks; Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Fred Moten, In the Break, Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness;Joao Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities; Patricia Hill-Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Nahum Chandler, X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle;Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies;Sylvia Wynter, "On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory" and "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom," Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness; Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People; Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture; Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora

The aim of this course is to interrogate the histories and logics of race and racism as concepts. In considering the significance of race and racism as a concepts, it critiques the discursive traditions in which they been traditionally narrated as historically self-evident objects. The course turns attention to the contested social construction of race within the concept of racism, revealing the suppression of the colonial formation of race as a political object of contestation, which in turn facilitates the privileging of race as a natural object of scientific investigation. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and the exception in western sovereignty, to the constitutive logics of convention and regime in contemporary western liberal democracies. Seeking to establish a reformulated concept of race and racism in the material and discursive terms of governance and histories of practices rather than ideology and histories of ideas, the course draws upon Foucauldian method of genealogy.

This course will interrogate Afro-Latin America from its early modern constitution through the present, broadly through the mode of historiography. The question, history, people and region that make up Afro-Latin America and Afro-Latinidad sit now, as they have across history, at the very tip of the spear of racial policing, state violence and carcerality. The territorial claims they mark/ed off remain at intersections of mineral wealth, sovereignty, and the limits of governance, excess. Broadly, we will examine the field and experiences of Afro-Latin Americans as entangled within African Diaspra History, which is to say Black history. In this sense, we will begin our course with a consideration of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past, and ask that all have read it by the first day. Final papers may address a range of related topics, places, and methodologies, including, but not limited to slavery, casta, race, Blackness, sexuality, spirituality, African historiography and global archaeology.

Course Description TBA.

This seminar is designed to explore neoliberalism as a particular “conjuncture” (Hall) within a broader genealogy of “racial capitalism” (Robinson). It is comprised of two components. The first scrutinizes neoliberalism as “late global capitalism” (Jameson) or as a post-war global class project identified as post-Fordism or Post-Taylorism. In the global north, this has been manifested in de-industrialization, attacks on labor unions, intensified policing/surveillance, persecution of immigrants, gentrification, mass incarceration, growing class division, and the “prison industrial complex” (Davis). In the global south, this has been manifested in dispossession, war, indigenous genocide, poverty, imperialism, Islamophobia, border militarization, ecological degradation, and forced migration. Key authors for this part of the seminar will include: David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Alex Callinicos, Samir Amin, Angela Davis, Antonio Negri, Manning Marable and others. The second component scrutinizes neoliberalism as a corresponding ethic or mode of biopolitical governance. This part of the seminar will explore the (post-Keynsian) transition from a welfare state to a carceral state as a defining element of post-Cold War racial statecraft. In the global north, this has been manifested in domestic warfare against insurgent anti-racist struggles (political assassinations, incarceration, psy-ops, and COINTELPRO); the appropriation of such struggles as race/ethnic studies curricula; a growing divide between academe and grassroots organizing; fabricated moral panics (wars on gangs, crime, or drugs) as a rationale for racialized policing and imprisonment; a growing emphasis on therapeutic adjustment (multiculturalism, diversity, safe space) over insurgent critiques of power; the pathologization of working class Black and Brown communities (the Moynihan report); and a resurgence of white supremacist nationalism in the form of patriotism. Key authors for this part of the seminar will include: Dylan Rodríguez, Joy James, Gustavo Esteva, Jodi Melamed, Junaid Rana, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Mumia Abu Jamal, Lester Spence, Fred Moten, Robin Kelley, Roderick Ferguson, Sarah Ahmed and others.

In this course, we will investigate the role of the body in the emerging field of Queer African Studies. Looking to performance, visual art, film, and literature, students will consider what it means to engage African studies through a queer optic, and examine how queerness has been discussed, theorized and articulated via the "African" body.