Black Life 2024
Winter 2024
Alex Weheliye
Office Hours: T 12-1pm
T 1-3:30pm
Granoff Center N420
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
Require Texts:
Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes
Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia
Sharon Holland, An Other: a Black Feminist Consideration of Animal Life
Dixa Ramirez-d'Oleo, This Will Not Be Generative
J.T. Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place
Semester Schedule
January 30, 2024 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*,” Kimberly Bain, “Black Soil”
February 6, 2024 Axelle Kerera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,”
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpts), Vanessa Agard Jones, “What the Sands Remember,” Tianna Bruno, “Ecological Memory in the Biophysical Afterlife of Slavery”
February 13, 2024 Dixa Ramirez- D'Oleo, This Will Not Be Generative
Class visit Dixa Ramirez- D'Oleo
February 20, 2024 No Class
February 27, 2024 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,” Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Theorizing in a Void: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics.”
March 5, 2024 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”
March 12, 2024 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
March 19, 2024 Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
March 26, 2024 No Class
April 2, 2024 Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia
April 9, 2024 Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes
Three-page abstract & bibliography due via Canvas at noon Thursday, April 11
April 16, 2024 J.T. Roane, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place
April 23, 2024 Sharon Holland, An Other: a Black Feminist Consideration of Animal Life
April 30, 2024 Presentations
Final essays/projects due May 19, 2022 on Canvas