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Winter 2022
Alex Weheliye
Black Life
This course will look at the relationship between Blackness and different concepts of life to highlight how Black life functions as a constitutive ontological limit for the workings of modern humanity. To that end, we will study texts from such recent fields as new materialism, animal studies, disability studies, and affect theory in tandem with writings from a variety a Black Studies approaches in order ascertain how they might fruitfully speak to each other. We will pay particular attention to the complex ways gender and sexuality function in the barring of Black flesh from the category of the human-as-Man, while also as providing the conditions of possibility for alternate ways of inhabiting the world.
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
Required Texts:
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human. Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Quarter Schedule
January 6 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Matter beyond the Equation of Value;” Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” Huey Copeland, “Tending-toward-Blackness*,” Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life”
January 13 Axelle Kerera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,”
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpts), Vanessa Agard Jones, “Bodies in the System” and “What the Sands Remember.”
January 20 David Marriott, “On Decadence: Bling Bling,” Krista Thompson, Shine (excerpts), Tavia Nyong’o, “Crushed Black: On Archival Opacity” from Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life
January 27 Evelyn Hammonds’ “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles,” Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Jennifer Nash, “Black Anality”
February 3 C. Riley Snorton, “Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being,” Calvin Warren, “Onticide: Toward an Afro-Pessimistic Queer Theory,” Treva Ellison, “Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender”
February 10 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human. Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
February 17 Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women
February 24 Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution & Anarkata: A Statement – Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas
New edition available here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345819/anarchism-and-the-black-revolution/
March 3 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
March 10 Presentations
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