Embedded Files
Winter 2025
Alex Weheliye
Office Hours: T 12-1pm
T 1:00-3:30pm
Granoff Center N420
Theorizing Blackness
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? Drawing on theoretical discourses from the social sciences and humanities, the course surveys blackness as a global category of critical analysis for both historical and contemporary social formations in the African Diaspora. In addition, by considering the different manifestations of Blackness as well as other forms of racialized identity across the globe from historical, empirical, and theoretical perspectives, it also considers how gender, class, sexuality, and nationality shape the territory of blackness. We will study scholarly works that address, on the one hand, the continued significance of slavery, colonialism, incarceration, segregation, other forms of racialized violence, 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 or Project
*Creating/editing three Wikipedia entries related to the course topic
Required Texts:
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Armond Towns, On Black Media Philosophy
Semester Schedule
January 28, 2025 Course Introduction
Hortense Spillers “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date” & Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.”
February 4, 2025 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
February 11, 2025 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.”
February 18, 2025 No Class Long Weekend
February 20, 2025 Attend opening of Julien Creuzet: Attila cataract your source at the feet of the green peaks will end up in the great sea blue abyss we drowned in the tidal tears of the moon at Bell Gallery
February 25, 2025 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (excerpt) & Christian, “The Race for Theory,” June Jordan, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” & Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens.”
March 4, 2025 “The Blackness of Things” in Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear
and “Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics” in Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
Patricia Ekpo Class Visit
March 11, 2025 Omis’eke Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic,”
Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” Calvin Warren, “Onticide: Toward an Afro-Pessimistic Queer Theory,” & Treva Ellison, “Black Femme Praxis and the Promise of Black Gender”
March 18, 2025 Armond Towns, On Black Media Philosophy
March 25, 2025 No Class Spring Break
April 1, 2025 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
April 8, 2025 Axelle Kerera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,”
Kimberly Bain, “Black Soil” & Vanessa Agard Jones, “What the Sands Remember.”
April 15, 2025 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-
Pessimism and Black Optimism” and “The Vel of Slavery,” Fred Moten, “Chromatic Saturation: The Case of Blackness,” & Tyrone Palmer, “Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation.”
Tyrone Palmer Class Visit via Zoom
April 22, 2025 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return and Jemima Pierre,
The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Preface, Introduction, & Chapter 6).
Abstracts for final essays/projects due April 25, 2025 on Canvas
April 29, 2025 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, “The Plot of Her Undoing” & “Venus in Two Acts”
May 6, 2025 Final Presentations
Final essays/projects due May 19, 2025 on Canvas
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