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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course is designed to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the historical development and changing dynamics of race in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. In doing so, we will take on the fundamental position that race is a meaningful classification of human bodies. The question we will keep in front of us at all times is this: How does social milieu determine the meaningfulness of race? Racial classifications, like all classifications, are collectively imagined, and appear mired in various spheres of social life. We will devote a fair amount of attention to the meaning of race in personal experience, economic production and distribution, political organization, and popular culture. The complexity of race will be explored within a number of writings by authors such as Michael Hanchard, Edwidge Dandicat, and Patricia Hill Collins. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which they confront, negotiate, and at times challenge dominant U.S. and/or European social hierarchies.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
The critically acclaimed television program, The Wire, ran for five seasons on Home Box Office (HBO) between 2002 and 2008. Set in "inner city" Baltimore, the program addressed a wide array of topics, including, but not limited to, the urban drug trade, law enforcement, local city politics, labor unions, education, and the newspaper industry. Though a work of "fiction," sociologist William Julius Wilson has called the show an important and instructive portrayal of the "deep inequality in inner-city America." By contrast, some scholars and critics have decried the series and indeed, courses like this one, as examples of mainstream America's fascination with and acceptance of African American drug use, criminal tendencies, and corruption. In this course, we will not deconstruct The Wire per se, but use select episodes from the series to explore key issues in Africana Studies, ranging from political geography to a history of Baltimore and the "War on Drugs." Students should have some familiarity with the show. Africana Studies will show select episodes during Winter Study. Readings will include texts about African American urban life, such as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day.
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3.00 Credits
Minority artists--writers and visual artists mainly and, to a lesser degree, musicians--face a difficult "double bind" when creating works of art: the expectation is that they, like their racially marked bodies, will exhibit their difference by means of concrete signifiers (details, tropes, narratives, themes) of racial difference. Thus, the work is judged primarily in terms of its embodied sociological content (material, empirical) and not by "abstract" standards of aesthetic subtlety, philosophical sophistication, and so on. At the same time, in the popular and academic imaginary, minority subjects and artists poets occupy a single abstract signifying category--homogeneous, undifferentiated, "other," marginalized, non-universal--while "unmarked" (white) artists occupy the position of being universal and individual at once. The irony, of course, is that, say, an African American poet's being read as an abstract signifier does not mean that the black subject or writer is seen as capable of engaging in abstract ideas. This course will ask questions about the problem of race and abstraction by looking at the work of various writers, visual artists and musicians--including Will Alexander, Cecil Taylor, David Hammons--as well as critics. We will pay particular attention to formally experimental works.
Prerequisite:
At least one previous literature or art or music class would be helpful
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3.00 Credits
This advanced seminar introduces students to queer of color critique, a mode of queer theory emphasizing diverse experiences, geographies, and epistemologies that also foregrounds the intersection of sexual and racial constructs. We will examine the history of this line of critique, exploring how and why it became a necessary intervention into the then still emerging field of queer studies. In addition to theoretical works, we also examine literary and cinematic works that exemplify and enact queer of color critique. We will read major works by those individuals who established the discipline, thereby surveying works from a variety of fields including critical race studies, literary theory, anthropology, feminist/womanist studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and others. Much of this early work in queer of color critique is North American in context, but we will also explore more recent scholarship that deals with transnational contexts and applications and examine how queer of color critique contributed to the emergence of transnational queer studies. A key feature of this course will be its uniquely dialogic structure that will allow a variety of diverse authors and artists to appear virtually to answer questions about their published work as well as some emerging scholars in the field who will share their experiences finding their way into this area of study and how they developed research and artistic projects. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it focuses on empathetic understanding, power and privilege, and critical theorization, especially in relation class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in both the US and global comparative contexts.
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3.00 Credits
Today the countries of North Africa are experiencing rapid social change. Rap music can be heard spilling out of windows while television sets broadcast a call to prayer. In the market place, those selling their goods compete to be heard over the ringing of cell-phones. Old and new exist side by side, albeit sometimes very uncomfortably. During the past decade, literature has emerged in both French and Arabic examining the effects of globalization: unequal modernization, unemployment, cultural change and cultural resistance. In this course, we will read short stories that address these issues as well as analyze films, sociological texts and Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian newspapers on the web in order to explore contemporary transformations of life in North Africa. Readings by Maissa Bey, Abdelfattah Kilito, Zeina Tabi, Mohamed Zafzaf, Ahmed Bouzfour, Soumaya Zahy and Abdelhak Serhane among others.Conducted in French.
Prerequisite:
French 201, 202 or 203 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the constructions of feminine and masculine categories in modern Africa. We will concentrate on the particular history of women's experiences during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In addition, we will examine how the study of history and gender offers perspectives on contemporary women's issues such as female-circumcision, teen pregnancy, wife-beating, and "AIDS."
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructors permission
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3.00 Credits
What are "scriptures," and what is "race"? How and why did these two terms come to have any relationship to each other? How and why do peoples engage ?scriptures?? In what ways have ?scriptures? informed how peoples imagine themselves and others? How did ?scriptures? and race? inform each other in modern colonialisms and imperialisms? In this course, we will examine the ways that ?scriptures? have been employed in order to understand and develop notions of ?race,? and we will examine how ideas about ?race? have informed the concept of ?scriptures? as well as practices of scriptural interpretation. While this course will focus on the relationships between constructions of ?race? in the post-1492 American world and ?Christian scriptures,? we will also consider a few other historical moments and places where ?race? is engaged, as well as other texts and practices identified with ?scriptures.?
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3.00 Credits
Media theorists have raised three key questions regarding representations of race (or the lack thereof) within contemporary media forms: (1) Is race a liability in the 21st century where utopian forecasts suggest a race-free or `post-race' future" (2) Is there more to new media and race than assumptions about a 'digital divide'? (3) Are race distinctions truly eliminated with digital technologies? In this course we will respond to these questions by investigating the nuanced ways that race becomes constructed in popular media forms. Although we will largely focus on representations of blackness in modern film, we will also explore the implications of `new' medias and technologies upon the categories of race, gender, and sexuality. We will, for example, consider how avatar-based social and entertainment medias become viable forums for conceptualizing race, and whether or not these formats are somehow `better' spaces in which racialized `bodies' can exist. Additional discussion topics may include: how racial discourses in the `real world' are (or are not) reshaped and redefined in the virtual world; blogosphere politics; social networking; gaming and the virtual world; activism on the web; and fandom in the twitter era.
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3.00 Credits
Whether presented as maternal saints, divas, video vixens, or bitches, black female celebrities navigate a tumultuous terrain in popular culture. This course considers the ways that black female celebrities such as Oprah, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, and Michelle Obama negotiate womanhood and sexuality, and the popular landscapes through which we witness that negotiation. It also engages contemporary black feminist scholarship, which most frequently presents the presentation of black female bodies in popular media forms as exploitive. We will review historical stereotypes of black women in popular media forms, discuss the history of the "politics of respectability" within black culture, engage black feminist responses to these types, and examine theoretical approaches to assess social constructions of womanhood and sexuality. We will also consider provocative questions relevant to discussions of contemporary black sexual politics: Should we view these women as feminists? Are they merely representatives of cultural commodification and control of black women's bodies? Do these women best exemplify the reiteration of problematic characterizations? Are they positive models for demonstrating female empowerment, agency, or "fierceness?" This course explores the histories of representation of black female figures in popular culture, and in so doing, troubles contemporary considerations of black womanhood and sexuality. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative.
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3.00 Credits
In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies.
Prerequisite:
Some coursework in WGSS, AFR, ENGL or COMP
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