Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| AFAM (W19) | 156 AFRICAN FEMINISMS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| This course examines the violent incorporation of Africa within European modernity especially through the paradigmatic invention of the concept of women, womanhood, gender and feminist discourses. We will consider African gendered and feminist responses to and engagement in the discourses of Pan-Africanism, African Nationalisms, Negritude, African Marxism, and/or African Socialism in juxtaposition to the forces of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism that restructure African history. Additionally, this course will introduce students to critical questions about the role of slavery, empire, space, environment, work, health, and justice that reframe discussions about gender politics, gender justice, and African women. Taking up the limits of African diasporic frameworks and global sisterhood how does our scholarship about African societies and politics change when we center African gender studies’ and African feminists’ definitions of race, class, and gender? | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 156 S AFRCN SOCIAL IDS | WILLOUGHBY-HER, T. |
| Same as GSS 184. Political thought in post-apartheid South Africa must reconcile with the legacy of racism. But, reconciling with the legacy of racism has become increasingly challenging when cultural theorists insist that there is no truth with a capital T to be found in grand narratives about the past. How do we talk about accountability, ethics, reparations, or social justice at a period in which many people believe that we are in a "post-racial period"? How do we talk about social justice in a period of ever expanding global apartheid and deepening criminalization of and genocide against the poor? One answer was provided in the late1990s when a group of scholars began to research and talk about the new politics of identity construction in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. They were concerned with discussing the legacy of racism and "new" identity formations and transnational identities. This course will look at the collected materials that emerged from these scholars. This is a Comparative Political Thought course that will pay close attention to concepts such as: intersectionality, LGBT politics, the South African Gender Commission, history and memory, economic justice, youth culture, demilitarization, affirmative action, the new "black middle class," African Renaissance, The Rainbow Nation, the legacies of displacement, and the so-called Colored and Indian communities, HIV/ AIDS. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 113 BLACK CINEMA | WILDERSON, F. |
| The goals of this course are to introduce students to Afropessimism, an intervention in critical theory that argues slavery (what Orlando Patterson calls social death) structures the paradigm of reality for Black people in the 21st century. Cinema plays a vital role in our deliberations. Some of our guiding questions are: How does the cinematic staging of Black people and violence expand and/or constrain our ability to think about discourse as a positioning modality? Are narrative arcs sutured or distended when the figure of emplotment is the Slave/the Black? In what ways do a film’s cinematic strategies (acoustics, lighting, image, editing, and camera work) unsettle the assumptive logic of poststructuralism? Unlike its companion course (Film and Racial Conflict offered in Fall 2017) this course will focus entirely on films that are either made by Black directors and/or films whose ethical dilemmas meditate on the Black dilemma of social death. The work of David Marriott, a leading Afropessimist psychoanalytic thinker and film theorist, will be at the center of our deliberations. Students who have taken Film and Racial Conflict during Fall of 2017 will find Black Cinema to be a deepening and extension of the knowledge they gained; but the Fall course is not a prerequisite for this course. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 162W BLACK PROTEST TRADN | WILDERSON, F. |
| History and discourses of the black protest tradition. Traces emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy from the early colonial period to present and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities in the twentieth century. Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of the Lower-Division Writing requirement. Restriction: Upper-division students only. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | WILDERSON, F. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 40B AFRICAN AMERICAN II | SEXTON, J. |
| This course offers a critical introduction to the history of modern racial thinking in Western society, with emphasis on the British North American colonies and the United States. We trace its emergence in religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; in legal statute and legislation; in political debate and public policy; and in popular culture. More importantly, we discuss its relationship to the material contexts of racial oppression. First and foremost: the enslavement of Africans and the vast system of racial slavery throughout the Atlantic world. Though there is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism, we also think comparatively about the construction of global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | SEXTON, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | MURILLO, J. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 118 REMEMBER TO BREATHE | MURILLO, J. |
| "Shattered" is an apropos adjective to describe the relationship between Blackness and time. This has strange significance for practitioners of "rememory" like ourselves. Through visitations with literary forays into memory and Blackness, this course reconsiders the very nature, mechanics, and stakes of memory and breath, remembrance and care, for Black folk in the antiblack world. Eric Garner said "I can't breathe" over a dozen times while being murdered by officer Daniel Pantaleo. We chant and wear shirts emblazoned with those words in the wake of his unjust death because we know what it is to be breathless--to have our breath taken, halted, shaken, and quieted by the antiblack world. The pieces of literature we investigate in this class will serve as guides for a meditation on what it means to be breathless, on how memory plays a crucial role in understanding how we might draw breath in a world where antiblackness is like the very air we breathe, and on how we might facilitate the breathing of other Black folk. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 144 REMEMBRANCE, RESURRECTION, REVOLUTION | MURILLO, J. |
| Claudia Rankine writes that "the condition of Black life is one of mourning." Through Black films, television shows, music, literature, graphic novels, and poetry, this course investigates the implications that Rankine's words have for Black creative practices. Our goal is to examine the relationship between mourning, Blackness, creation, and revolution. Living while Black under the conditions of the antiblack world means, at least in part, living with a monstrous kind of intimacy with grief. From the constant stream of news about another Black person's murder to our own encounters with antiblack violence, destruction, and death, Black folk live in a constant state of mourning. We aim to investigate how Black folk have developed creative practices and products--film, literature, music, etc.--in order to engage in radical acts of mourning that not only honor and remember the dead, but that also mobilize loss into revolutionary acts of creation. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 143 SOUNDS OF RESISTANC | MITCHELL, N. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 155 BLACK INDIGENOUS | HARVEY, S. |
| In this course we explore the histories, politics, and imaginaries of black indigeneity in both the Americas and Africa. We examine colonialism, chattel slavery, and imperialism as forces that shape who counts as indigenous and why. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | HARVEY, S. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 163 POLICING BLACK LIVE | HARVEY, S. |
| We explore how law and prison serve as institutions that manage blackness and its gender formations. The course reviews the surveillance of black people beginning with slavery to the present and considers the potentiality of prison abolition as a movement for liberation. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 113 MUSLIM CINEMA | DAULATZAI, S. |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 111B CONTEMP AFAM ART | COOKS CUMBO, B. |
| This course is a study of art by African Americans with a particular focus on the politics of representation. Beginning chronologically with government sponsored artworks in the 1930s, students will discuss artworks created in a variety of forms including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and new media. Museum visits are often incorporated. | ||
| AFAM (W19) | 198 DIRECTED GRP/STUDY | COOKS CUMBO, B. |
| No detailed description available. | ||