Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies

Winter 2013

AfAm 491-0-29 & English 471-0-21

Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies

The trope of the talking book that conferred humanity and power upon its owners is one starting point for the study of Afro-diasporic expressive arts. The very term points to an oxymoron, juxtaposing the alleged fixity of the written word against the ephemeral polysemy of the body in performance that artists, critics, and lay people have sought to negotiate and complicate in order to articulate individual subjectivity and collective identity. Using crosscutting thematic, historical, and generic grids, the course will utilize slave narratives, fiction, poetry, music, critical theory, and the visual arts to survey how African-descended writers, artists, and theorists have grappled with the constitution of blackness as it relates to the modern conception of humanity. Afro-diasporic cultures provide singular, mutable and contingent figurations of the human, and thus do not represent mere bids for inclusion into or critiques of the shortcomings of western liberal humanism. Since blackness has functioned as one of the key signifiers for apportioning and delimiting which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot, black expressive arts have developed a series of comprehensive conceptual and poetic frameworks—both critical and utopian—in the service of better understanding and dismantling the modern figuration of racialized humanity.

Quarter Schedule

Jan. 10, 2013 Course Introduction

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” and “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism” (Lore Website)

Jan. 17, 2013 Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (excerpt), Fred Moten, In the Break

(excerpt), Ronald Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon (excerpt), Barrett, “African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority”

Jan. 24, 2013 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl http://archive.org/details/incidentsinlife02jacogoog

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds (Chapter 2) E-Book: http://bit.ly/mZdPAx

Jan. 31, 2013 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk http://bit.ly/X9Sm3o

Nahum Chandler, “Originary Displacement,” Hazel Carby, “The Souls of Black Men,” Charles Nero, “Queering The Souls of Black Folk,” Eric

Sundquist, “W. E. B. Du Bois: African America and the Kingdom of Culture.”

Feb. 7, 2013 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse,” Anne Cheng, “Ralph Ellison: Melancholic Visibility and the Crisis of American Civil Rights,” Alexander Weheliye, “I Am I Be: The Subject of Sonic Afro-Modernity.”

Feb. 14, 2013 Toni Morrison, Sula

Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Deborah McDowell, “New Directions in Black Feminist Criticism,” “Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin” and responses, Tom Cohen, “Politics of the Pre-Figural,” and Stockton, “Anal Economics and Critical Debasement of Freud in Sula.”

Feb. 21, 2013 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo

Alondra Nelson, “Future Texts,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture.”

Feb. 28, 2013 Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed

Film: Last Angel of History

Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” and More Brilliant Than the Sun (excerpt), Madhu Dubey, “Becoming Animal in Black Women’s Science Fiction.”

March 7, 2013 Film: Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years

Audre Lorde: Berlin Is Hard on Colored Girls, Interview with Ch. Rowell, selections from Sister Outsider

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (125-233), and Maisha Eggers, “Knowledges of (Un)Belonging: Epistemic Change as a Defining Mode for Black Womens Activism in Germany.”

March 14, 2013 Final Paper Presentations