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.
218-0-20 Asian-Black Historical Relations in the U.S.
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.
Examination of the debates within African American communities about the proper role and function of black art and artists in relation to black politics.
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.
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.