| AFAM (S17) | 40C AFRICAN AMERICN III | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| Introduction to theories of racial blackness in the modern world, with emphasis on developments in British colonies and U.S. Traces emergence of blackness as term of collective identity, social organization, and political mobilization. |
| AFAM (S17) | 128 FANON & FEMINISM | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| Expressions of genders and sexualities across the spectrum of African American experience and creativity. |
| AFAM (S17) | 111A MODERN AFAM ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. |
| Investigates the history of African American art with a focus on the politics of representation. Begins with the arrival of Africans to the British colonies and ends with the modern New Negro Movement. Material culture and fine art are explored. |
| AFAM (S17) | 112B BUTLER & ATWOOD | CHANDLER, N. |
| This seminar examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically – the work of which is conceived here as a critical archaeology of our senses of the future. For the spring term of 2016, this course is devoted to Octavia Butler’s Parable duologys, 1993-1998 (Parable of the Sower, 1993 and Parable of the Talents, 1998, of which a third volume remained incomplete upon her passing) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from 2003-2013 (Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and MaddAddam, 2013). Notably, the Wachowski’s made-for-television series Sense8 from 2015 (the first 12 episodes, so far released) will be required viewing and serve as a counterpart form of narrative for the course. The student who completes this course will understand both the necessity and possibility of thinking beyond traditional forms of supposed historical and philosophical understanding, even within literature, which remain so tied to traditional forms of identification – primarily but not only senses of human – in order to engage fully the diverse possibilities of historical existence – primarily those oriented toward the future, real and imagined, utopian and dystopian – that make up today’s global and truly cosmopolitan – that is to say cosmological, both micrological and macrological – senses of world. In the course of which we deal with climate change, the breakdown of California’s gated communities, corporate greed and global governance, misogyny, AI, new religions and new forms of religiosity, and the cyborg, whether human and machine or human and other animal. This is thus fundamentally a course about the relative and difficult different senses of world – that comprise our (whomever is such) future(s). This seminar is a part of a series of courses (taught by this professor), with alternating topics that respectively – that is to say, in different ways – take up the problem of thinking otherwise than our dominant senses of the human. The course is an upper division writing intensive seminar. This means students who wish to take this course should be prepared for both substantial reading and substantial writing. |
| AFAM (S17) | 158 PHIL GENOME RACE | CHANDLER, N. |
| This course considers the philosophical and scientific intellectual history of the concept of race since the late eighteenth century. This includes 19th century Darwinism and its interlocutors, early 20th century grappling with Mendelian inheritance, including both eugenics and the evolving first post-Darwin and post-Mendelian synthesis in the biological sciences during this time, as well as certain aspects of the critique of the concept of race by way of the production of a concept of culture in anthropology and ethnology on the one hand. AND, then, on the other hand, the course engages more contemporary questions, especially the massive implications of the mapping of the human genome and the rise of a new genetics, all of which now implicate projects for the reconstruction or enhancement of the human (both bodily and cognitive forms of intelligence, the cyborg, for example). Finally, takes up the ongoing reappearance of a 'new' eugenics that has taken shape across the past 25 years, on the other. The course thus elaborates upon an investigation of the critical thought that the very idea of race is not an aberration or anachronism. It should be noted that this course will not avow the idea of race as susceptible to a legitimate critical conceptualization in the contemporary context. Rather, it will destabilize any and all epistemological grounds that might portend to enable the presupposition or affirmation of the validity of this concept. Rather, the course has three main objectives: 1) to give insight into why the idea of race is so intractable for modern thought, showing in what way it emerged as an essential idea in modern practice (in thought, philosophy, politics, and science), and not as an aberration or failure of intellectual acumen, or ethical commitment, or policy; 2) to cultivate the intellectual basis for developing some new critical ways of thinking about the status of human sameness and difference; 3) to offer some initial perspectives on problems of knowledge and politics of the idea and concept of race that have taken shape in the aftermath of the mapping of the human genome. The seminar is built around building core or fundamental lectures, especially early in the course, some reading of short selected primary texts, and contemporary films – such as Gattaca (1997) and Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement (2013) – around these topics; a weekly journal in response to this material, along with a final examination, is at the core of grade work in the seminar. |
