African American Studies

This course provides an examination of intellectual and creative productions, developments, and events that have come to be recognized as the discipline of African American Studies. The course explores literature, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics as a way to identify the historical and political origins and objectives of Black Studies and the 1960s Black Liberation struggles, the early academic and social concerns of Black Studies advocates, the theoretical and critical approaches to Black Studies as a discipline, and the early objectives of Black Studies in relation to present goals of multiculturalism.

This course is an integrative course in the humanities that explores various constructions of black female identity. The course looks at black womanhood as it’s represented in the public imaginary, feminist theories, critical race theories, and in literature and literary criticism written by black women writers. One of the questions the course asks is: How have scholars and writers addressed fundamental questions of black female identity? To answer this question, students read and view a wide survey of materials including novels, essays, memoir, and film. Through this investigation, students consider how studies of race, feminism, and gender connect to personal lives.

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the history and expressive culture of the civil rights era. Emphasizing what historians call the "long civil rights movement," the course explores earlier strategies of resistance, the civil rights and black power movements, and legacies of these movements. An interdisciplinary approach is particularly applicable for a course focused on the civil rights movement because the literature of racial protest and of the "black arts" was not simply parallel to the political upheavals. As Amiri Baraka put it in 1971, "Art is Politics." Readings and assignments engage the complex, sometimes contradictory, legal, political, literary, artistic, and musical responses of this charged historical period, and the intersecting struggles over knowledge, power, and identity.

This course examines the renaissance of African American literature, music, and visual art that, for the most part, emerges from Harlem, a cultural hub in the 1920s and 1930s. The course also approaches the literature, music, and visual art, as well as the social changes in Harlem, from different disciplinary perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, music criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic theory. Students explore social and aesthetic debates that arose during the Harlem Renaissance and connect these to parallel debates today. Students also make connections between and among different artists and thinkers of the period, including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Sargent Johnson, Romare Bearden, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, and Walter White. The course invites students to make connections between literature, visual art, and music from the period and between the Harlem Renaissance and their own ideas about art and society.

This course takes as its central object the idea of race. Race is understood as a social construct that designates relations of structural difference and disparity. How race is treated is a crucial issue in this course. It is in this question of ’the how’ that the term narrative becomes salient. The term narrative intentionally focuses attention on the material practices through which we have come to define race as a social construct. This terminology, ’narratives of race’ spotlights an interest in investigating the historical events and visual and verbal images employed in the linking, patterning, sequencing, and relaying our ways of knowing race and its social relations. Implicated in the construction of race is its production and deployment of the moral and intellectual values that our academic disciplines bear. In considering such values as part of the investigation, this course includes careful comparative analyses of the ways in which the disciplinary systems of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and politics are used in the making and remaking of the academic and social grammars of race. Thus the analysis necessarily includes an intertextualization of the several academic disciplines engaging the question of race.