Post-Soul Blackness

Fall 2011

Popular discourses about the ‘post-racial’ era notwithstanding, race still suffuses many aspects of culture and policy in the western world, especially blackness. Moreover, critical arguments about the ways gender, sexuality, class, and nationality fracture race, have questioned unitary notions of blackness. Why does blackness still persist despite these challenges? How is this category continually reconstituted through social, economic, cultural, legal, political, etc. discourses and institutions?

This course will investigate the utility and limitation of blackness as a category of critical analysis for contemporary social formations. To this end, we will discuss recent considerations of the significant changes black culture has undergone in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and decolonization. We will also study literary and scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, and segregation in the present moment, and, on the other hand, texts that imagine future forms of blackness.

Requirements

*Weekly blog posts

*In-class presentation

*Active in-class participation

*Final essay

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

Required Texts

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race

Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics

João Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities

Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: the Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality

Quarter Schedule

Tues. Sept. 20 Course Introduction

Frantz Fanon, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” Hortense Spillers, “Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A

Post-Date,” Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory.” (Blackboard)

Tues. Sept. 27 No Class

Tues. Oct. 4 Nahum Chandler, “Originary Displacement, “Stuart Hall, “Who Needs 'Identity'?” Katherine McKittrick, Demonic

Grounds (Chapters 4, 5 and conclusion)

Tues. Oct. 11 Richard Iton, In Search of The Black Fantastic, Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies, Ken Warren, What Was African

American Literature (excerpts; all on Blackboard)

Tues. Oct. 18 Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness

Tues. Oct. 25 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes; Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White

Supremacy,” Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (excerpts)

Tues. Nov. 1 Denise da Silva, Toward A Global Idea of Race

Paul Gilroy, “Modernity and Infrahumanity,” (Blackboard)

Tues. Nov. 8 Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible

Tues. Nov. 15 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Film: Visions of Abolition (Blackboard)

Tues. Nov. 22 João Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism & Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams,

(Excerpts, Blackboard)

Tues. Nov. 29 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Course Synthesis