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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.