About the Program

African American Studies at UCI is an interdisciplinary enterprise ranging across the Fine Arts, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences in order to study the societies and cultures established by peoples of the African diaspora in the Western hemisphere, particularly, in the United States.

The program engages these issues as historical and symbolic concerns, foremost through the orientations of critical theory and cultural studies. Critical theory investigates the ideological nature of social organization, identifying the co-implications of material and political economies with the symbolic operations of cultural and psychic practices. Cultural Studies analyzes the lines along which social power most fully coalesces, as well as the practices by which social power is most routinely, though often deleteriously, exercised in modern social organization.

The three-part introductory sequence of courses considers, in turn:

• AfAm 40A, the developing historical presence of African-derived persons in the Western hemisphere and the United States;
• AfAm 40B, Western theories of race as well as the historical forms of racist practice African-derived communities confront in the Western hemisphere ;
• AfAm 40C, theories of racial blackness, which is to say, the aesthetic, linguistic, and expressive forms developed in and disseminated from African diasporic communities.

The further range of topics available in the elective courses for the major and minor include African American literary traditions, musical traditions, political participation, protest traditions, race and visual representations, slave narratives, and slave societies. This course of study in African American communities and traditions is attentive to the dynamic interplay of the rubrics of class, gender, race, and sexuality as points of cultural, individual, and social identification.