Black Studies Now

Th 2-5pm: AfAm Seminar Room

AFAM 480

Alex Weheliye

Office Hours: T/Th 12:30-1:30pm

Black Studies Now

While Black Studies became an institutional and disciplinary formation in mainstream US universities in the 1960s, it has existed since the eighteenth century as a set of intellectual traditions and liberation struggles that have borne witness to the production and maintenance of hierarchical distinctions between groups of humans. Viewed in this light, Black Studies represents a substantial critique of Western modernity and a sizeable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives. This course surveys recent monographs in Black Studies to think about what is possible and to consider the work that still needs to be done in this undisciplinary field of inquiry.

Requirements

*Weekly blog posts

*In-class presentation

*Active in-class participation

*Final essay or Project

*Creating/editing three Wikipedia entries related to the course topic

Blog Posts & Presentations

The discussion section of the course Canvas site provides a forum for discussion before and after our class sessions.

Each week one or two students will be responsible for providing a substantive blog post (600-800 words), which should be posted on the course blog 24 hours before the class session. You post should introduce the materials assigned for the session, consider the texts within the framework of selected secondary sources, relate them to the larger themes of the course, and offer discussion questions. The substantive blog post will also serve as the basis for your fifteen-minute in-class presentation. The remaining students should post their responses (300 words) to the substantive post and/or the assigned materials at 9am on the day of the class session.

You are also encouraged to respond in a less formal manner to the posts and comments of your classmates, provide links and/or quotes that illustrate or challenge another post, etc.

The extended blog posts and in-class presentations should focus on both the assigned texts and possible other sources so that we can trace the critical conversations these newer works are drawing on and how these dialogues are related to the larger project of Black Studies.

Quarter Schedule

Th, 1/11 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

Th, 1/18 Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Th, 1/25 No Class

Th, 2/1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity & Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.

Th, 2/8 Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

Th, 2/15 Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility

Th, 2/22 Hershini Bhana Young, Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora

Th, 3/1 Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race

Three page abstract & bibliography due via Canvas at noon Friday, March 2

Th, 3/8 Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

Th 3/15 Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili's Mirrors: Black Queer Genders

Th 3/22 Presentations of Final Papers/Projects