Course Overview

Where #BlackLivesMatter Meets #MeToo:

Violence and Representation in the African Diaspora

Complex Problems Core Course | AADS 1501 / SOCY 1511

Professors Régine Jean-Charles and C. Shawn McGuffey

This course explores the pressing problem of racial violence and rape culture together in multiple contexts: North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and throughout the African Diaspora. Utilizing interdisciplinary perspectives in both the humanities and social sciences, we will examine the roots of race-based sexual violence, the ways in which it has been expressed, the meanings attached to it, and its implications for society. We approach rape culture as a complex and urgent problem that is global in scope. According to the authors of the collection, Transforming a Rape Culture, from which this class draws its inspiration: “transforming a rape culture involves imaginative leaps from our present state of institutionalized violence to a future that is safer and more just. We must summon our imaginations for this task, because history and society have so few precedents for us…transforming a rape culture is about changing fundamental attitudes and values.” Taking the above statement seriously, students in this course will not only consider the wide-ranging manifestations and ramifications of rape culture, but they will also be asked to summon their imaginations to envision a world without sexual violence and consider how to challenge the norms that perpetuate rape culture. Specifically, this course will explore and grapple with rape culture in the African American, Caribbean and African contexts from the perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities (literary and cultural studies) and equip students to imagine solutions for intervening in and eradicating rape culture.

The course will interrogate some of the ongoing debates within trauma studies, as well as the larger scholarship on the intersections of racial and sexual violence. For instance, we will ask: Do people shape society or does society shape people? How do historical racialized, sexualized and gendered tropes help us understand current day responses to sexual assault? What are the causes of violence? How does the redefinition of what constitutes sexual violence shape how we respond to both perpetrators and survivors? What are the limits of our ability to overcome oppression and inequality? What is the meaning of progress? Why is rape culture so pervasive around the world? How do writers represent sexual violence in their fiction? What is the relationship between rape and representation? How do representations of rape differ in various mediums? How are rape victim/survivors portrayed in literature and film? How do cultural workers reflect, challenge, or attempt to dismantle some of the basic premises of rape culture through their representations of sexual violence?

COURSE OBJECTIVES

1. To define rape culture as a global phenomenon

2. To gain understanding of how different academic fields have responded to the problem of sexual violence

3. To examine representations of sexual violence that wrestle with rape culture

4. To equip students to imagine what a world without sexual violence might look like and posit their own solutions