AFAM101 Introduction to Africana Studies: Examining the Spatial Dynamics That Constitute Diasporic Life

In this course students will be introduced to the political-intellectual projects that have informed Africana thought, such as Negritude, Cimarronaje, and Garveyism. To understand the breadth of Africana interventions requires a geographic lens. That said, students will examine the spatial dynamics (structures and experiences) that constitute diasporic life. One problematic that students will consider is the extent to which the transatlantic has dominated representations of diasporic life.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM112F Reading Black Culture (FYS)

Blackness is the lifeblood of the culture industry. U.S. popular culture--which traverses national boundaries due to the workings of imperialism and global capital--has a predominantly Black face, at the same time that Black people, in the United States and across the globe, are made to live in unrelenting proximity to death and destitution. This introductory course aims to tackle this seemingly contradictory state of things by considering the manifold ways Blackness circulates in the global cultural landscape. With the ultimate aim of increasing cultural literacy, we will engage with key questions such as: What makes a Black text? What, if any, political duty does the Black cultural worker have to the larger "Black community"? How does a critique of capital figure into Black culture? How might we conceptualize intellectual work as central to Black cultural traditions? This course traces these questions through the analytic of "reading"--as a mode of critical engagement that exceeds the textual. We will contend with Blackness in its varying permutations and figurations across the domains of literature, music, film, sport, visual art, and performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL112F
Prereq: None

AFAM115F Freedom School (FYS)

From the point of view of the U.S. nation-state, education has always been a hegemonic means to control knowledge, to calibrate unequal forms of citizenship, and to promote the social reproduction of power. Yet as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, "education among all kinds of men [sic] always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men [sic] strive to know." Drawing inspiration from the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum and spanning from enslavement to emancipation to the long civil rights movement, this course explores how people of African descent in the United States, and black women in particular, have used education to empower themselves, produce social change, and redefine the terms under which change may occur.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM116F The Black Radical Tradition (or Black Radicalism) (FYS)

In a nation that was founded on the liberty of white men and women, and the enslavement of people of African descent, black radical action and movements have steered the history of struggles for freedom, citizenship, equal treatment, social and economic justice, and protection from the state. Figures such as Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, and Angela Davis constitute part of a long tradition of black radicals. Even as the meaning of "radical" has shifted historically, black radicals are joined by their visions of dismantling existing systems and institutions for a freer and more equitable society. Spanning the periods of black radical abolitionism, black nationalism, Black Power, and the Black Lives Matter movement, this course explores key radical thinkers, activists, and texts in historical perspective.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM122F Race and Identity in 21st Century Literature (FYS)

This course will center on race and identity in contemporary American literature by focusing on novels written by Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Junot Diaz, Tommy Orange and Ocean Vuong as well as plays by Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Ayad Akhtar and Jackie Sibbles Drury. Extra readings will include poems and short stories. We will consider the portrayals of race, identity, class, ethnicity, religion, trauma, citizenship, migration and sexuality in these works, as well as the ways in which these authors conceptualize and problematize American identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST122F
Prereq: None

AFAM141F The Revolutionary Rupture: Slavery, Latifundio & Rev. in Caribbean & Lat. Amer. Lit. & Cinema (FYS)

The word "Revolution" often evokes a vertical and/or eruptive image: a standing militant who was once a "premodern," non-European figure; a bottom-to-top explosion of imperial and colonial disorder and normative violence; a rising and world-overturning wind or "natural event." Does the eruption of an "event" worthy of the name "Revolution" begin on the imagined x-axis, say, of the earth's surface? Or does it point beyond that plane of seemingly commonly shared life? Or to that notion itself--i.e., commonly shared life--as a question? How do configurations of hell, heaven, God, Satan, the dead--what's below, what's above--come to bear in representations of "Revolutions"?



In this course, we will slow down, read, and work through these and other questions and figurations on the verge, in the midst, and/or seemingly on the other side of revolutionary ruptures--ruptures which are also returns. We will read select literatures and cinemas of Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Cuba that convey refusals of "given" life and death and that render different imperial, colonial, and neo-liberal systems of oppression and their attendant philosophies of the human, non-human, animal, native, enslaved, and blackened. The Haitian Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, insurrections in Chiapas before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and 20th-21st century armed movements against U.S. economic and military invasions of the Caribbean and Central American regions would be the historical "flashpoints" of the course. While de-romanticizing the commercialized Che-t-shirt notion of "Revolution" in the U.S., we will, more importantly, encounter and deconstruct discourses of hetero-masculinity, modernization, mestizaje, whitening, and "development" that sometimes appear radical and/or revolutionary.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL141F
Prereq: None

AFAM152F Staging America: Modern American Drama (FYS)

Can modern American drama--as cultural analysis--teach us to reread how America ticks? Together we will explore this question as we read and discuss some of the most provocative classic and uncanonized plays written between the 1910s and the present. Plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, Mike Gold, workers theater troupes, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Kopit, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Ayad Akhtar, and others will help us think about what's at stake in staging America and equip us as cultural analysts, critical thinkers, close readers of literature, and imaginative historians of culture and theater. This seminar will introduce first-year students to the kind of critical thinking developed in majors such as English; American Studies; African American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; College of Letters; Theater Studies; and the Social and Cultural Theory Certificate.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL175F, AMST125F, FGSS175F, THEA172F
Prereq: None

AFAM171F The Prison State: Race, Law, and Mass Incarceration in U.S. History (FYS)

This first-year seminar course explores the history and effects of the United States' mass incarceration crisis. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. And people of color make up a highly disproportionate number of the over 2 million individuals incarcerated in the U.S. today. Beginning with slavery and continuing through the rise of prisons, debt peonage, Jim Crow, and the Black Lives Matter movement, the course will explore how efforts to police, detain, and control black bodies have been at the center of U.S. law and legal practice since the nation's founding. At the same time, we will compare and contrast how race, gender, and sexual orientation have been policed, controlled, and shaped through incarceration practices throughout U.S. history.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM175F The Black Atlantic, A Religious Interpretation (FYS)

The world as we know it is shaped by The Black Atlantic. This phrase centers the forced movement of enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas and Europe as the center of a set of complex forces: European global expansion, land expropriation, indigenous extermination and, of course African enslavement. But Africans were not solely objects of dehumanizing subjugation and property. Africans co-created this world through material practices, traditions of knowledge, and meaning making summed up in the word religion. This course will both introduce students to the themes of Black religions formed in and through the Black Atlantic, and specific communities, for example, Rastafarianism, Islam, Buddhism, and Pentecostalism. Students will read scholarly articles and engage multi-sensory sources and first-person accounts of both themes and communities. All resources will be provided in class or via Moodle.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI177F, AMST137F
Prereq: None

AFAM177F August Wilson (FYS)

During his lifetime, the world-renowned African American playwright August Wilson graced stages with award-winning plays from his "Century Cycle." This course examines the cycle's 10 plays in the order in which the playwright wrote them, from JITNEY (1982) to RADIO GOLF (2005). In all cases, we pay special attention to the playwright's presentation of language, history, memory, religion, visual art, and music within his oeuvre.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL176F, THEA175F
Prereq: None

AFAM189F LGBTQ, or LGBT Who? Race, Sexuality, and Community in 20th-century U.S. History (FYS)

Beginning with the early-20th-century construction of the "homosexual" as a distinct identity, this course will explore the evolving, complex, and contested history of the queer community over the past century. The course will especially explore how race and gender frequently shaped marginalized yet resilient social movements for the lives, dignity, and rights of trans and other queer people of color, from the drag balls of a century ago through the Black Lives Matter movement.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM202 Introduction to African American Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literature. It will be divided into two parts. The first will pay particular attention to the experience of enslavement by focusing on several unique primary and secondary textual couplings, including (but not limited to): Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) and Saidiya Hartman's "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America" (1997); and Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (1861) together with Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (1987). In addition to these classic 19th-century slave narratives and contemporary sources, then, the first part will also include supplementary readings by Kenneth Warren, David Blight, Angela Davis, Alexander Weheliye, Spillers, Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, Jennifer Morgan, and Frank Wilderson. The second part will focus on 20th- and 21st-century African American literature and literary criticism. It will bring together a wide range of readings from across genres and disciplines, attempting to sketch out the major aesthetic and political features of the black literary project. Authors here will include W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Hazel Carby, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Alain Locke, Shane Vogel, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Asia Leeds, Roderick Ferguson, Claude McKay, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cornel West, Claudia Rankine, Warren, and Fred Moten.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL240, AMST275
Prereq: None

AFAM203 African American History, 1444-1877

This course examines the historical interactions between peoples on three continents--Africa, Europe, and the Americas--and the consequences of European colonization, trans-Atlantic slavery, and racial capitalism. Focusing on a period from the Antiquity to the late 19th centuries, we will explore how European notions concerning Africa its peoples evolved over millennia in response to shifting political, economic, and demographic circumstances. We will chart how Africans and their descendants in the Americas experienced and responded to colonialism. And we will analyze how debates concerning enslavement and freedom, indigeneity and civilization, and pan-Africanism and national citizenship played out across the African Diaspora and in the United States.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AMST213
Prereq: None

AFAM204 Introduction to Modern African American History

This course explores the African American struggle for equality, liberation, and justice from Reconstruction through to the present. We will examine how gender, class, sexuality, and ideology, among other factors, have shaped the history of black protest and community. We will visit key periods and themes including Jim Crow/segregation, The Great Migration, World War II, Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter, to understand the intersection of the African American lives and American history. Central to this course are the ways that African Americans have exposed American hypocrisy; have shown their historical patriotism; and have challenged American institutions to live up to their professed ideals.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM208 History of African American Art

This course will introduce students to a history of African American artistic production from the late 18th century to the present, in a range of media and styles. While we will focus primarily on the visual arts--looking at sculpture, painting, photography, collage, film, performance, and installation--we will also consider the deeply interdisciplinary nature of Black cultural production, highlighting the important role of music, poetry, dance, and theater.



We will explore how African American artists, both individually and collectively, have negotiated the terms made available to them by cultural institutions, whether by struggling for inclusion, acknowledgement, and validation; actively protesting racist and exclusionary policies; or by forming alternative institutions, communities, and spaces in which to work and share support. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement and "post-Black" exhibitions, art works will serve as a primary source to ask, is there such a thing as a "Black aesthetic" and if so, how would one define it? Why might an African American artist reject such an idea? Other key questions will include: What is the role of visual representation in political struggle? How have artists mobilized portraiture as a tool of liberation? What does it mean to turn away from figuration, toward abstraction or opacity? How have artists grappled with questions of nationhood, belonging, and diaspora?



Together, we will trace how artistic forms, techniques, and motifs have served both as sites of collective history and as speculative propositions to envision new futures, articulating what Robin D.G. Kelley calls "freedom dreams."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA269, AMST248
Prereq: None

AFAM209 Digital and Visual Storytelling

During this seminar, we will develop a digital group project that addresses the question of remembering and denying pasts through the historical and critical relationship between carcerality, race, and storytelling in Connecticut. By engaging with contemporary forms of digital and visual storytelling (ArcGIS StoryMaps), this group project will work with the modalities of archival studies and digital humanities, accompanied by readings in critical race studies, visual and literary theory, and decolonial theory. We will first explore "remembering the past" through two post-Civil War Connecticut landmarks: The Church of the Good Shepherd (1867-69), dedicated to Samuel Colt, and the Mark Twain House (1874), now a museum. Both architectures exist as pivotal markers for a new modern American narrative intertwined with legacies of slavery, manufacturing, firearms, and storytelling. We will then consider how to make visible denied "pasts" by conducting archival research on the formative period of the 1860s and 1870s and in respect of the Connecticut context. Centrally, valuable insights for the project development will be provided by the in-class meetings with scholars, artists, and archivists, whose work rethinks and challenges the bond between carcerality, race, and storytelling.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST208, AMST277
Prereq: None

AFAM211 Critical Philosophy of Race

What is race? Can philosophy account for it or describe it? This class will serve as an introduction to the field of philosophy of race, and examine the general crises or problems that race and racism raise for philosophical projects and methods. We will explore topics such as the ontology of race, its relationship to other social formations like class and gender, its foundations in violence, and its fugitive possibilities. We will read work from classical philosophers of race--like Charles Mills, Linda Alcoff, and David Haekwon Kim--and from scholars at the margins of philosophy--like Gloria Anzaldua, Adrian Piper, and Fred Moten.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL211
Prereq: None

AFAM212 Modern Africa

What is African Modernity? We will examine this question as we survey the major historical transformations in Africa since approximately 1800. Important themes include: African political innovations, the abolition of the slave trade and its effects, European colonialism, African adaptation and resistance, nationalism and decolonization, and Africa's role in shaping major global events. We will also study the impacts of religious and social transformations amid rapid economic and political change. Finally, we will examine African visions for post-colonial development and how to shape the future of the continent.



During the semester we will also cover some of the issues surrounding African history as a discipline. No single course can cover more than a sliver of the complexity and variety in the continent. For this reason, we approach the study of Modern Africa as comparative history. However, students satisfactorily completing this course will be able to write knowledgeably about African history and will have the foundation necessary to undertake further study about Africa with sensitivity to the complexity of its recent past.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST212
Prereq: None

AFAM213 Abolition Geographies

"Space always matters, and what we make of it in thought and practice determines, and it is determined by, how we mix our creativity with the external word to change it and ourselves in the process. In other words, one need not be a nationalist nor imagine self-determination to be fixed in modern definitions of states and sovereignty, to conclude that at the end of the day, freedom is a place. How do we find the place of freedom? More precisely, how do we make such a place over and over again?"

--Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition Geographies"



This course is not only an introduction to the burgeoning field of abolition geographies, introduced through the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but invites students to engage with abolition geography as an intellectual and political practice. In this seminar, we will consider the relationship between freedom and place-making (the production of places) by examining Ruth Wilson Gilmore's analytics and by also engaging in a range of geographic struggles. For example, students will consider the extent to which enslaved rebellions, not limited to the Haitian Revolution, remade what we envision today as the Atlantic. Students will also have the opportunity to apply an abolitionist framework to their own research.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: ENVS240
Prereq: None

AFAM216 A Small Place

Inspired by both Jamaica Kincaid and Paule Marshall's notion of a "small place," this seminar examines colonial and imperialist binaries of "large" versus "small" that render the Caribbean, the Pacific, and many other archipelagos as existing outside of the "world." How do islands become microsomes of a shared but contested global reality? This one of many questions students will be asked to consider throughout the seminar.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM217 Empires, Slavery, and Revolution: Africa to 1800

In this course we will examine the dynamic political and social histories of precolonial Africa. We will study the rise of kingdoms and empires such as Mali and Kongo, as well as revolutions in society from the technological development of iron production, to the emergence of trade networks, the development of ancient cities, the spread of religious healing and reform movements such as Cwezi spirit possession, and the role of gender in early African societies. Over the course of the semester we will also consider the impact of slavery and the first African encounters with Europeans. The methods for studying the early African past are interdisciplinary. You will have the opportunity to explore how ancient Africa has been imagined in the past by Africans and early Arabic and European observers, and how contemporary scholars write these histories. As we trace a history of early Africa in the world, we will consider several methods: the study of myths and oral traditions, linguistic and archaeological data, as well as ecological and archival records.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST217
Prereq: None

AFAM219 "The History that Hurts": Reading Saidiya Hartman

This course will introduce students to the major works of the black literary theorist and cultural historian Saidiya Valarie Hartman (b. June 25, 1961), who was named a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow in Literary History and Criticism and American History. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1984, Hartman earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1992; she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Students enrolled in this course will read and write about Hartman's trilogy of scholarly monographs: SCENES OF SUBJECTION: TERROR, SLAVERY, AND SELF-MAKING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA (Oxford University Press, 1997); LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS: INTIMATE HISTORIES OF RIOTOUS BLACK GIRLS, TROUBLESOME WOMEN, AND QUEER RADICALS (W. W. Norton, 2019). Finally, if her new book project is published before the syllabus is finalized, then students enrolled in this course will also read and write about Hartman's fourth scholarly monograph (tentatively titled "N Folio: An Essay on Narrative and the Archive").
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AMST319, ENGL218, FGSS219
Prereq: None

AFAM220 Poetics of Blackness

This course brings together Black critical theory and contemporary Black poetry in order to think through key sites of conflict in the theorization of Blackness. Rather than offer a literary history of Black poetry, this course is interested in approaching poetry as a crucial node of Black critical thought. Throughout this course we will pay particular attention to questions of form, genre, archive, queerness, gender, affect, visuality, ontology, and temporality as they approach and are undone by Blackness.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL222
Prereq: None

AFAM221 The African Novel I: Nervous Conditions

This class considers several canonical novels from sub-Saharan Africa. Our focus will be on their aesthetic and thematic properties; the novels are not meant as introductions to African histories, cultures, peoples, or practices. We will explore instead the specific subjects and styles of each work in the context of wider debates about orality, language, colonialism, gender, and the novel. To fathom the political and aesthetic stakes of African literary canon formation, we will also attempt to identify what makes a work canonical.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL221
Prereq: None

AFAM222 Literature and Black Feminism: The Dramas of Black Capital

This class explores Black women's fiction as a mode of critique and intervention into Black Americans' complicated relationships with social and economic capital in the wake of US chattel slavery. How do Black people negotiate the transition from being to owning property? How does the persistence of capital, even in the absence of the system of racial slavery that ushered it into being, continue to shape Black institutional access and Black intramural relations? How are white, Western regimes of value--constructed as they are through the production of racial-sexual difference in dominant habits of thought and representation--contested and, at times, recapitulated in Black social life? How does Black women's literature take up these questions, and what about Black women's literature uniquely equips it to meet this challenge? Ultimately, the course takes seriously Black women's literature as Black feminist thought, exploring how it indicts and imagines beyond the violence of modern racial capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS220, ENGL213
Prereq: None

AFAM223 20th-Century Franco-Caribbean Literature and the Search for Identity

This course investigates how 20th-century Francophone literature from the Caribbean defines Caribbean identity. Through a study of literary texts, films, and paintings from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haiti, Guyana, and Louisiana, we will explore the evolution of Caribbean self-definition, focusing on the major concepts of Negritude, Antillanite, Creolite, and Louisianitude.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-RLAN
Identical With: COL225, AMST226, LAST220
Prereq: None

AFAM224F Afrofuturism (FYS)

Mainstream readings of the African American literary and cultural canon have tended to emphasize texts with a social realist bent, those that present their audience with a supposedly "authentic" version of the African American experience. However, as cultural critic Greg Tate observes, 20th-century African American literary history includes "huge dollops of fantasy, horror, and science fiction" because, in his view, "Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine." While Tate's statement perhaps overly generalizes the black experience, there seems to be something to his notion that, in part because of the fact that they were forced to live an often "alienated" experience in America, there has always been a strong element of the speculative in black literary and cultural expression. This course traces this under-examined speculative strain in 20th and 21st-century African American literature, music, film, and visual art, as black artists explore, or speculate, on the possibilities that imagining alternative realities and modes of living open up. The course will focus especially on speculative and Afrofuturist aesthetics as they manifest in hip hop music and culture. We will examine the ways that black artists have employed elements of the speculative genres in order to re-envision the African American past, present, and future--rendering versions of historical African American experience and subjectivity that exceed traditional notions of "authenticity," complicating contemporary regimes of identification, and presenting alternative visions of the futures of blackness.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM225 The African Novel II: After Achebe

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2003 novel, PURPLE HIBISCUS, summons Chinua Achebe, the "grandfather of African literature," in its opening line: "Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion." While Achebe is a formative influence on Adichie and on many other contemporary African writers, the central preoccupations of African literature have shifted considerably in recent years. This class will consider recent topics animating the field. These include debates about Afropolitanism, the role of publication houses and prize committees in the canonization and circulation of texts, queer African literature, African-language literature, and the position of African literature vis-à-vis world literature. Readings will be chosen from among the newest novels and short stories in publication.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL223
Prereq: None

AFAM226 Afro-Surrealism

Amiri Baraka coined the term "Afro-Surreal" to describe the writer Henry Dumas's "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one." In his 2009 "Afro-Surrealist Manifesto," D. Scot Miller builds on Baraka's observations and distinguishes Afro-Surrealism from Afrofuturism in the former's concern with the "RIGHT NOW." Indeed, in the "right now" of 2018, Afro-Surrealism seems to be having a moment, with the success of films like "Sorry to Bother You" and "Get Out," the musical and filmic work of Donald Glover/Childish Gambino, the visual art of Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, and the literature of Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead, among others. This course will examine this contemporary resurgence of the Afro-Surreal, and trace its echoes in black popular music, in the work of African American literary figures like Dumas, Toni Morrison, Bob Kaufman, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, and through its African and Afrodiasporic foundations in the work of artists inspired by Léopold Senghor's Négritude movement. All of these artists "distort reality for emotional impact," as Miller puts it, and we will aim to connect these distortions of the "right now" to the material reality of life under regimes of anti-blackness and racial oppression that these Afro-Surreal works lays bare.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL229
Prereq: None

AFAM228Z Thinking with Octavia Butler's "Wild Seed"

Blend: Monday and Thursday class time synchronous; additional class hours asynchronous.



Black speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler's novel "Wild Seed" (1980) begins on the African continent in the 17th century amid the rise of transatlantic slavery and concludes on a plantation in Louisiana on the eve of the 19th-century American Civil War. "Wild Seed" was the last published book in Butler's Patternist series, but it relates the earliest segment of that epic story, which follows a shape-shifter named Anyanwu and a body-jumper named Doro across geographies, centuries, classes, corporealities, genders, races, and even, in Anyanwu's case, across species. To quote one student: "It's the weirdest novel I've ever read." This seminar takes up the myriad and interwoven provocations Butler offers in "Wild Seed" by reading her novel alongside a wide range of scholarly literature in the fields of African and African diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, gender & sexuality studies, animal studies, history, disability studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, as well as visual arts. Rather than "apply" the syllabus texts directly to Butler's novel, we will attend to how her novel not only reflects--indeed, anticipates--such scholarly and artistic production, but also produces its own aesthetics and epistemologies.



The seminar unfolds part-synchronously (via Zoom) and part-asynchronously (via writing assignments, screenings, and research project check-ins). Twice-weekly virtual meetings will be centered on presentations of research projects that students will develop over the course of the month, engaging a particular theme or question that they will identify in Butler's work. As such, the syllabus texts are subject to change. Students will be expected to read "Wild Seed" in its entirety in advance of the first class and to have begun thinking about topics they might explore for their presentation and research project (the former being preparation for the latter). The seminar's asynchronous component will consist primarily of weekly writing exercises asking students to reflect on how the assigned texts converse with Butler's novel and vice versa and to comment on one another's analyses. Shared annotatable pdfs will be used to generate conversations about the readings outside of class and to identify questions and topics for discussion. The professor will consider proposals for a creative final project, but it, too, will require substantive research.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS229Z, AMST277Z
Prereq: None

AFAM229 Reading Toni Morrison: Blackness and the Literary Imagination

This course will introduce students to the major works of the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019). In addition to the trilogy--"Beloved" (1987), "Jazz" (1992), and "Paradise" (1997)--and "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" (1992; originally delivered as the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 1990), readings may also include the following novels (in chronological order): "The Bluest Eye" (1970); "Sula" (1973); "Song of Solomon" (1977); "Tar Baby" (1981); "Love" (2003); "A Mercy" (2008); "Home" (2012); and "God Help the Child" (2015).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL241
Prereq: None

AFAM230F Marxism and Abolitionism (FYS)

This course explores the historical encounter of Marxist revolutionary theory, with its roots in German idealism (Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel), and abolitionist causes. How have abolitionist movements historically informed, expanded, and challenged Marxist theory and its tactical playbook? What made Marx a touchstone for so many black revolutionary thinkers, including W.E.B. du Bois, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Angela Davis? How have anticommunist, racist, security-statist ideologies been mobilized to undermine and defeat transformative social movements? We will begin with the Haitian Revolution and work our way through the abolition of slavery in the US and the anticolonial and civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century to the prison abolition movement today. In addition to the above mentioned authors, readings will include Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Ottilie Assing, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Max Weber, Martin Luther King, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, and the Combahee River Collective.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-GRST
Identical With: GRST232F, AMST132F
Prereq: None

AFAM232 Black and Indigenous Foundations of U.S. Society

The United States of America rests upon the historic dispossession of indigenous lands and the enslavement of bodies. Our course will chart how these two forces created enduring logics--elimination and alienation--that continue to structure U.S. society. Discussion topics will include whiteness, indigenous slavery, structural racism, settler colonialism, strategies of resistance, and alternative models of belonging and kinship.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM233 All Ah We: Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Drama & Performance

What are the dramatic utterances of Afro-Caribbean artists? How do Afro-Caribbean playwrights and other narrative-based performance artists present "Caribbean" and/or "West Indian" subjectivities in ways that are shared, yet critically different? In what ways are Afro-Caribbean dramas and performance pieces repositories for the practical, the theoretical, the sociological, the political, the imagined, and the lost? In answering these questions and more, we examine these textual and embodied expressions from the complicated crossroads of class, creolization, diaspora, ethnicity, folklore, gender, history, indentured servitude, isolation, language, race, religion, and slavery. At all times, this course revels in the polyphony that is Afro-Caribbean drama and performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL233, THEA233, CHUM233
Prereq: None

AFAM234 Black Labor and Working-Class History

This course examines the history of Black people's work experiences, labor activism, and working-class life in the United States. Topics will include wage labor in the emerging market economy of the late 18th century; the many forms of enslaved labor; labor activism and radicalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; racial exclusion from the New Deal order; Black socialist and communist politics; changes and continuities in Black women's labor during the 20th century; the "surplus labor" to prisoner pipeline in the late 20th century; and the rise of gig labor and new worker movements (particularly in health care and e-commerce) during the 21st century. Using historical scholarship, novels, films, theory, and music, alongside a wide variety of primary sources, we will consider the changing ideas and practices of workers, their families and communities, and employers. We will highlight persistent themes that challenge the typical (white-centric) narrative of working-class history in the United States, such as the ways in which anti-Black racism has shaped labor politics. We will also discuss the flourishing of creative thought and practice that often happens alongside, or in response to, the seemingly endless demand for Black labor in American society.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM235 Activism and Theories of Change

In this course we will explore strategies and theories of change that shape social justice movements, with particular reference to recent movements in the United States. We will discuss the benefits and risks of the many available strategies including direct action, grassroots mobilization, impact litigation, legislative campaigns, electoral campaigns, artistic protest, and public education. What strategic, ethical, or moral questions are raised by various types of protest and communications? The instructor will draw on her own experiences as an activist for women's rights, queer rights, and economic justice. In addition, the course will feature a guest teacher for a segment of the semester: Beverly Tillery, Executive Director of the Anti-Violence project in NYC will look at the ways BIPOC and Queer BIPOC communities are reshaping the social justice landscape by addressing the safety of trans women, challenging the gender binary and reforming and ending the carceral legal system. We will allow time to discuss events that may occur in real time over the course of the semester. This course will be relevant to students interested in public policy, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and other social sciences, and will provide useful insight for future organizers and activists, lawyers, and public policy makers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL235, FGSS236, IDEA235
Prereq: None

AFAM236 Introduction to Postcolonial Studies

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism signaled the presence of postcolonial studies, a field of intellectual inquiry that proved influential in the humanities and social sciences. How, from our vantage point in the latter end of the 20th century, do we understand both the age of imperialism/colonialism, and what happens afterwards? What are the conditions of decolonization and national independences? How do the cultures of the formerly colonized countries use and modify imperial vestiges, and invent themselves anew? Central to our course will be the work of three major theorists in the field of postcolonial studies: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Among other important ideas, we will discuss Orientalism, subalternity, and mimicry.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GSAS
Identical With: GSAS233, ENGL234
Prereq: None

AFAM237 Technologies of the Self

Where does the idea of an authentic self come from? The desire to represent the authentic self informs the narrative genres of the confession and memoir and visual ones of the selfie and self-portrait alike. Yet both the memoir and the selfie "self" are mediated, first, via the technologies of print and screen, and second, via the conventions of particular genres that make these legible as a memoir and selfie, as opposed to, for example, an interview or a portrait. In this course, we will examine how different technologies not only represent but produce the self. These technologies include "writing" technologies: print and digital; genre and medium (autobiography, the slave narrative, memoir, self-portraits, and selfies); and technologies of the state, which produce citizens, subjects, and humans.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL250, AMST223
Prereq: None

AFAM238 Imperial Education: Colonial Template

Where, how, and for what reasons did our modern structures of education originate? Beginning with the sketching out of an educational model in the British Raj, we will examine the dissemination of that model globally, in the British and French colonies of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and among immigrants and the proletariat. How and where does that model change, and to what effect? History will provide the context for our major subject matter: literature focussing on the educational experience. Among our historical and theoretical readings will be Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, Viswanathan's The Beginnings of English literary study in British India, Wa Thiong'o's Decolonizing the Mind, Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and José Marti's On Education. We will also analyze literary texts and films, including Narayan's The English Teacher, Beti's Mission to Kala, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, the film Sugar Cane Alley, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-EDST
Identical With: EDST237, GSAS237, ENGL247
Prereq: None

AFAM240 From the Banjo to Dembow: Afro-Caribbean Music in Motion

This course analyzes the global circulation of Afro-Caribbean musicians, dancers, audiences, musical styles, and even musical instruments from the beginning of European colonialism to the present day. We will seek to understand the political interconnections between the Caribbean and the wider world by focusing our attention on specific "musical itineraries." These will include, among others, the creation of the banjo by enslaved people in the Caribbean and the instrument's role in black resistance in North and South America, the musical aftershocks of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba and Louisiana, the production of black internationalist politics at weekly "regge" dances led by Jamaicans in early 20th-century Costa Rica, and the rise of reggaetón between Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.



We will question how these musical itineraries propelled black political movements and shaped larger ideas about race, nation, diaspora, and the meaning of "the Caribbean" itself. No prior musical knowledge is required for this course.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: LAST240
Prereq: None

AFAM241 Ebony Singers: Gospel Music

This course will be a study of African American religious music through the medium of performance. The areas of study will consist of traditional gospel, contemporary gospel, spirituals, and hymns in the African American tradition. The members of the group will be chosen through a rigorous audition (with certain voice qualities and characteristics).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC448
Prereq: None

AFAM242 Intimate Histories: Black Women's Sexuality

Black feminist theory teaches us that African American women have historically confronted racism and sexism in addition to other forms of oppression. How has this experience shaped the sexual lives of everyday black women and famous figures? This course places the sexual at the center of African American women's history. It will examine how regimes of violence have intervened in black women's sexual freedom, from intimate bonds to reproduction to same-sex desire. It will cover black women's resistance to these regimes; to their sexual agency in diverse spaces from the plantation to the porn industry. This course will also tackle the enduring impact of the Jezebel stereotype in the history of black women's sexuality. Using primary and secondary sources, this class will fundamentally investigate the significance of African American women's sexual history in the histories of American sexual, racial, gender, and class politics.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: FGSS242, HIST258
Prereq: None

AFAM243 Caribbean Writers in the U.S. Diaspora

The Caribbean cloaks a complex history in a Club Med exterior. While white sands and palm trees proclaim it the "antidote to civilization," Caribbean writers undertake to represent a fuller picture of the individual in a world shaped by colonialism, slavery, nationalism, and cultural striving. This course will examine selected literary texts as part of an ongoing dialogue among the region's history, mythology, and aesthetics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: GSAS247, ENGL243, LAST247, AMST247
Prereq: None

AFAM244 Girlfriend, Sister, Self: 20th-c. Black Women's Writing

This course will examine textual and visual constructions of the girlfriend, sister, cousin, and daughter in 20th-century black women's writing. We will read works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Veronica Chambers, and Marita Golden as narratives of women loving women (sexually and not) and as sites through which to engage black women's subjectivity more generally. In this course we will attend to the interior landscapes of individual black female subjects as well as the social landscapes that produce and/or complicate notions of love, kinship, friendship, and self. We will draw on African American literary theory, queer and affect theory, and black cultural memory as well as turn to influential works by bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Kevin Quashie, and Valerie Smith, among others. How do writers of the period imagine and articulate the relationship between black women and their others?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: FGSS246
Prereq: None

AFAM246 Black Feminisms in the Americas: Politics, Representation, and Queer Ruminations of Elsewhere

This course will explore Black feminist intellectual productions, highlighting the many theoretical, political, and critically imaginative elements found throughout early and contemporary works. Our discussions will reflect on power, the production of knowledge, identity, inequality, and the politics and perils of Black feminist struggle. Relying on a variety of texts and media--such as writings, visual & performance arts, poetry, music, and film--students should expect to engage with key issues and debates, along with the epistemological challenges offered by queer of color critique, trans/national perspectives, and social alternatives emerging from across the Black (feminist) diaspora.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: FGSS264
Prereq: None

AFAM248 Race, Ethnicity, and Popular Music

This course explores race and ethnicity in the United States through sound and song. By studying diverse topics--from the Boston Tea Party, blackface minstrelsy, and the rise of Jim Crow, to Native Hawaiian influences on the Mississippi Delta blues, to the unexpected connection between elevator music and the Spanish American War--we will learn about the history of settler colonialism, anti-black racism, U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy. We will also remain attentive to music as a transgressive and revolutionary force, one that facilitates hybrid identities and movements that celebrate difference, offering alternate visions for what it means to be and sound free. Investigating primary sources will demonstrate how musical genres may act as reservoirs of shared history and collective identity. As Ronald Radano has argued, discussions about music can have tangible influences because debates about music are a proxy for larger social issues with real-life consequences. Can music make (or unmake) race? Can a song change the world?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM249 Sacred and Secular African American Musics

A fluid, multiconceptual approach to musicology will be introduced to view African American sacred and secular music traditions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC269
Prereq: None

AFAM250 Integrative Learning Project 1: Crafting Your Digital Identity

Wondering about how you will explain your Wesleyan experience to someone who doesn't get what it is like to attend an eclectic liberal arts institution? Worried about how your experiences at Wesleyan will translate to your post-graduate life? Want to practice talking about yourself so you are ready to enter the job market or apply for graduate school? This course is for you! Throughout the semester, you will practice writing about yourself and will ultimately place what you write in WordPress, the world's most popular platform for website design. Along the way, you will learn about user experience (UX) design principles and research methodologies, so that the website you create draws in your audience and makes them want to learn more about you. Throughout the semester, we will meet once a week to do all of these things in a relaxed, collaborative environment. Join us and bring along some friends!
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: WRCT200, RL&L250, CSPL200, IDEA200
Prereq: None

AFAM251 Communicating Racial Justice

This course is focused on racial justice and how it relates to society. It is designed to and will facilitate conversations about racial justice work that foster authentic engagement with learners. In our time together we will discuss how diversity, race, and racism impact the work we do and explore the benefits and challenges associated with diversity in society. We will discuss biases and discriminatory practices' effects on families and talk about the factors that cause a disproportionate representation of minorities. Other areas that will be discussed and explored are cultural competency, cultural humility, disproportionality, disparity, and how they relate to the impact of culture and perceptions that can communicate multiple messages.



This course will allow students to use and communicate what they know about racial justice and equity to build understanding and agreement. Students will learn how to have conversations about race with presence, grace, and authority.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM254 The History of Race and Sex in America

Everything in our contemporary moment has a historical precedent. This course explores the ways that race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have intersected to shape American lives and group identities. Focusing on the concept of intersectionality, this course looks at the relationship between power, rights, and citizenship; namely who is included and who is excluded at a given time and why. Thinking about how sex has factored into these dynamics, we'll be covering topics such as sexual coercion and consent, interracial marriage, and civil rights in historical perspective. Spanning the early American period through to the present, we will focus specifically on how the understanding of blackness and whiteness, manhood and womanhood, and heterosexuality and homosexuality changed over time.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM257 System Mapping for Social and Environmental Impact

In recent years, growing interest in social entrepreneurship has pushed students to "solve" complex social and environmental problems with new ventures of their own design. Unfortunately, this approach often overlooks a critical foundation of social change: understanding the root causes of problems and the contexts that surround them before seeking solutions.



In this six-week, half-credit class, students will study a problem and the systems that surround it. By the end of the course, students will create a "systems map" that documents the economic, political, and cultural factors behind their problem, as well as the current "solutions landscape."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL257, ENVS208
Prereq: None

AFAM258 Beyond the Vote: Race and American Democracy

The ideals of civic equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment have rarely applied to African Americans. Yet African Americans continue to challenge the United States to live up to its own ideals of civic equality. This course will explore the ways in which African Americans and the issue of race have shaped the twin concepts of American democracy and American citizenship from the U.S. Constitution to the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST248
Prereq: None

AFAM259 Queer of Color Critique

This course will serve as an introduction to the debates, theoretical interventions, and methodological concerns that frame and inform a "queer of color critique." In this course we will observe how the scholarly contributions of LGBTQ people of color complicate, revise and/or reimagine the fundamental presumptions of queer theory. We will be exploring the emergence and development of "queer of color" knowledge production and activism in relation to the field(s) of black studies, film studies, queer theory, and African American literary production. This course will cover specific topics like gender, sexuality, culture, diaspora, and mutuality, paying special attention to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of race and racial difference.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM260 On Evidence: Archives, Museums, and Prisons

This course introduces an interdisciplinary study of the idea of evidence in connection to the modern development of archives, museums, and prisons, by setting this in a contemporary dialog with the discourses on state violence, incarceration, and refugeetude. This course will firstly establish historical and theoretical connections between carcerality, Western archival record-keeping practices (e.g., scientific grids, mugshots, taxonomies, and forms of surveillance), and museological frameworks developed during the transition from the 19th to the 20th century.



Furthermore, it considers how records, artifacts, digital data, bones, sites of "memories," oral traditions, embodied knowledge, or intergenerational trauma can become evidentiary material. Such inquiries are central to decolonial archival studies as they are critical for historically marginalized, racialized, and gendered subjects, whose claims to social justice, human rights, and cultural heritage are tied to the aftermaths of slavery, genocides, and colonialism. Our readings and discussions will specifically draw upon decolonial archival studies, digital humanities, visual studies, human rights discourse, Asian American studies, Black studies, and Indigenous studies, which have continuously challenged what constitutes evidence.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST270, AMST271
Prereq: None

AFAM261 Beyond the Talking Book: Reading African American Literature in the Newspapers

The majority of late-nineteenth and early twentieth century African American writers, such as Frances Harper, Martin Delany, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Cyril Briggs, published their work in African American periodicals. In this course, we will examine the works of these canonical authors (as well as some lesser known ones) in their original publication context, the magazine archives of The Christian Recorder; The Anglo-African Magazine; The Colored American Magazine; The Crisis; The Crusader; Opportunity; and Fire!! The guiding question in our readings is this: how does our understanding of these canonical texts change when we read them in their original context--as either serial novels, or as components of a larger composite magazine, consisting of multiple different texts and images? In addition to honing students' literary close-readings skills, this course aims to teach students how to do original research and critically engage with multi-genre, mixed forms like the magazine.



Authors we will read include: Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois. In order to get a better understanding of the literary conventions of the serial form, students will read one of the assigned serialized novels (Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood) in its original installment-format, week-by-week. Reading these works serially will also enable them to play closer attention to each installment's relationship to its surrounding texts and images.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL262, AMST262
Prereq: None

AFAM262 Jazz Technique

This course is an introduction to the African American jazz dance vernacular through the embodied practice of Simonson jazz. It will cover basic principles of alignment, centering, and technique through the context of jazz's African roots. Class sessions will principally consist of movement exploration including a comprehensive warm-up and will be supplemented by online discussions and media to better understand the place of jazz dance in society and culture at large.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC213
Prereq: None

AFAM263 Critical Race and Art History: Theories and Methods

How does the study of art shift if we begin with questions of race, power, and colonialism, rather than treating them as secondary? Concepts such as mastery, familiarity, strangeness, taste, and beauty are formed by conditions of domination and subjugation. Moreover, the histories of material production and cultural expression are fundamentally entwined with the circuits of enslavement, forced migration, and the extraction of resources, people, goods, and "styles."



For the bulk of the semester, we will focus on a series of case studies drawn from the 15th to 20th centuries, a period of intense European contact and conquest in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Topics will include: representations of Africans in Renaissance Germany; African depictions of the Portuguese circa 1492; the appearance of parrots, kraak (Chinese) porcelain, and other goods from "exotic" locales in 17th-century Dutch still lifes; the taxonomies of racial difference in Spanish casta paintings; debates about sculptural polychromy and the "whiteness" of marble; the relationship between expansionism, empire, and the genre of landscape; "primitivism" and European artists' "discovery" of African artistic forms; the critical interest in "racial art" in the interwar U.S.; and contemporary conversations about museums and restitution, among others.



Throughout, works of art are primary sources with which to study the specificities of periods, places, and their social arrangements. While we will emphasize difference and historical contingency, our longue durée approach will enable us to draw connections about art's role in processes of primitive accumulation, dispossession, and racial capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ART
Identical With: ARHA295, AMST239
Prereq: None

AFAM264 "Before the 'Body' there is the 'Flesh'": Reading Hortense Spillers

This course will introduce students to the major works of the black feminist theorist and literary critic Hortense J. Spillers (b. April 24, 1942), one of the greatest essayists and most gifted intellectuals of our times. While her published writings are legion, Spillers is perhaps best known for her scholarly article titled "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" (originally published by Diacritics in 1987). In addition to "Mama's Baby," then, together we will read and engage at close range with the essays collected in "Black, White, and in Color" (published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003) in order to reveal the extraordinary complexity and clarity of her thought.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL261, FGSS262
Prereq: None

AFAM265 Music and Downtown New York

This course will explore the history and flourishing of four distinct music communities that inhabited and shaped downtown New York City during two especially rich decades (the 1950s and 60s): urban blues and folk revivalists; an African American jazz-based avant-garde; Euro-American experimentalists; and Lower East Side rock groups. These four vanguard musical movements--at the heart of major cultural shifts at the time, with reverberations and legacies that remain relevant up to the present day--are an essential part of U.S. history. We will uncover their points of convergence and divergence, especially in conversation with broader contemporaneous currents, including the Civil Rights Movement and related notions of freedom, shifting youth cultures, music and politics, and avant-garde aesthetics. Drawing from primary sources, we will read about and discuss recordings of a wide variety of musicians, view a broad cross-section of film, identify aesthetic and cultural trends, and study the local industry that supported them. A key theme will be the importance of a place. Projects throughout the semester can include written papers, recordings, artwork, culture mapping, or other creative endeavors somehow related to each of the four topics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC275
Prereq: None

AFAM266 Black Performance Theory

What does it mean to perform identity, to perform race, to perform blackness? How is blackness defined as both a radical aesthetic and an identity? In this course, we will focus on theater and performance as a resource for thinking about black history, identity, and radical politics in excess of the written word. Following recent work in Black Studies and Performance Studies, this class will pay particular attention to the doing of blackness, the visible, sonic, and haptic performances that give over to a radical way of seeing, feeling, and being in an anti-black world. Plays, films, and texts might include works by Fred Moten, Alexander Weheilye, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Suzan Lori-Parks, Danai Gurira, Shane Vogel, Adrienne Kennedy, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Dee Rees, Celiné Sciamma, Saidiya Hartman, Huey P. Copeland, Darby English, Lorraine Hansberry, Hilton Als, Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, Martine Syms, Tavia Nyong'o, and Daphne Brooks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-THEA
Identical With: THEA266, ENGL263, FGSS276
Prereq: None

AFAM267 The Caribbean in Relation

"For through this experience made you, original victim floating toward the sea's abysses, an exception, it became something shared and made us, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange." --Glissant, 1997



In this seminar, we will think with Glissant as well as others on how the Caribbean is a space of "relation." One of the main questions that we will address throughout the course is what are the historical, social, and physical mechanisms that define the Caribbean and its relationship to other geographies produced through slavery and colonialism? To answer this question we will engage the work of geographers, historians, and anthropologists, interested in the formation of political, cultural, and economic life in the Caribbean.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM268 Caribbean Geographies

This course will explore how human and non-human encounters induced through slavery, indentureship and colonialism have been imagined and contested by Caribbean geographers, ecologists, artists, and poets. Students will gain an immense understanding of how Caribbean communities have experienced and countered geographic problems like uneven development, vaccine apartheid and gender-based violence. Students will think through concepts that define Caribbean geographies, such as 'the plot,' 'the bounty,' 'black land,' and the 'kala pani.'
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM269 Pessimism, Nihilism, and Black Literature

This course considers Black literature's interventions into philosophical discourses of pessimism and nihilism. In contrast to the pathologization and dismissal with which they are often met, we will take both seriously as schools of thought. How are pessimism and nihilism distinct from each other? What do they offer as interpretative lenses for and approaches to Black art and Black existence? How are they reflected in literary form? We will closely consider these, and related, questions, looking to the work of authors such as Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Dambudzo Marechera, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Gayl Jones.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL267
Prereq: None

AFAM270 Carceral Connecticut: Policing Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the "Land of Steady Habits"

Often considered a progressive bastion, Connecticut in fact has been at the forefront of carceral practices since the eighteenth century. In 1773, the colony converted a copper mine into the below-ground Newgate Prison. Half a century later, the state constructed one of the nation's first penitentiaries, in operation in Wethersfield, Connecticut, until its demolition in the 1960s. In each of its iterations, Connecticut's carceral system has policed, shaped, and disciplined its subjects along lines of race, class, and gender, constructing the normative and punishing deviation. Through engagement with rich state and local archives, this course will use several case studies to examine how Connecticut's carceral practices have made and re-made the state's legacy of slavery and policed the borders of accepted gender and sexuality in this place nicknamed "the land of steady habits."



The Middlesex County Historical Society's rich collection of late-19th and early-20th-century Middletown police logs, county jail records, and police court proceedings will enable students to analyze on-the-ground carceral practices in Connecticut. The Connecticut State Archives's extensive state penitentiary records, pardon petitions, and other state-level records will enrich and contextualize the local picture in Middletown. In this service learning course, students will share their research with the community through public presentations, online, and by planning exhibits at the historical society and on campus. This course, and students' public-facing research in this course, is part of the Carceral Connecticut Project based at Wesleyan University. See: https://carceralconnecticut.com
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM271 The Prison State: Race, Law, and Mass Incarceration in U.S. History

This course explores the history and effects of the United States' mass incarceration crisis. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. And people of color make up a highly disproportionate number of the over 2 million individuals incarcerated in the U.S. today. Beginning with slavery and continuing through the rise of prisons, debt peonage, Jim Crow, and the Black Lives Matter movement, the course will explore how efforts to police, detain, and control black bodies have been at the center of U.S. law and legal practice since the nation's founding. At the same time, we will compare and contrast how race, gender, and sexual orientation have been policed, controlled, and shaped through incarceration practices throughout U.S. history.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM272 History of Jazz in American Culture

This course will provide students with a broad-based literacy in the history of jazz while examining its significance and impact within American culture. As a musical style, jazz has been a staging ground for working out some of the most defining issues and aspects of American culture, including the dynamics of race relations, the articulation of gender roles and class distinctions, artistic expressions of freedom and democracy, the creative possibilities of the encounter of European- and African-based cultures on American soil, assimilation versus appropriation, and an extraordinarily influential aesthetic of cool. Jazz was the dance and listening music of choice for most Americans from the 1920s through the '50s, until it was displaced and pushed to the margins by rock and soul in the 1960s. But it has remained an inspiration for diverse artists in rock and rap up to the present day, including Kendrick Lamar's jazz-drenched "To Pimp A Butterfly" and Janelle Monae's 21st-century Afrofuturism deeply indebted to Sun Ra.



We will explore the early 20th-century origins of jazz in New Orleans, its rise as America's popular dance music in the 1920s and '30s, a shift to a more concert art-oriented form in the 1940s and '50s (representing the epitome of cool and hipness), avant-garde expressions of the 1960s (representing a new kind of universal spirituality), its move into rock and the growth of artist-based collectives of the 1970s, and its emergence in hip-hop samples in the 1990s. We will learn about major artists and their classic recordings, including Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, among many others, as well as new directions from recent generations (bringing in guest music department faculty). We will immerse ourselves in a combination of listening to recordings, viewing videos, reading, discussion, and in-class performances. Throughout the semester we will pursue the parallel goals of using jazz history to understand American history and vice versa. This is a jazz history course with a difference, able to accommodate curious newcomers as well as aficionados and those interested in social and cultural dynamics as well as the musical materials.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC272, AMST283
Prereq: None

AFAM273 BlaQueer Sounds: Queer Negotiations in African American Music

The term "BlaQueer," first coined by Tabais Wilson, is an invention of the intersectionality era; an acknowledgment of the unique and multifaceted experiences/identities formed at the nexus of racial, gendered, and sexual marginalization. In creating the portmanteau BlaQueer, Wilson underscores that, for people who are both Black and queer, these identities are inseparable, immutable, and irreducible. While the term BlaQueer, and by extension the concept it represents, is fairly new, there are long histories of Black queer people navigating and negotiating identity, revolutionizing and contributing to discourses on race, class, and gender. This course offers an exploration of the BlaQueer expressions, movements, and (most importantly) people that transformed American culture through music. While this course follows a historical arc, the primary aim of this course is to engage BlaQueer musical lineages through a critical interdisciplinary academic lens; accordingly, this course incorporates gender/women's studies, African American studies, performance studies, queer studies, and musicology.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: MUSC273, THEA273
Prereq: None

AFAM274 Feeling Black Feminism

In this course we will explore the connected histories of the "felt life of black feminism" (Nash 2019) and black feminist contributions to empower movements both inside and outside the academy. Our class proceeds by reading some of the seminal texts that circulate as theory in US academic black feminism alongside 20th and 21st century novels, memoir, and poetry to explore how black feminists articulate the relationship between their politics and the everyday psychic negotiations that comprise moments of anxiety, rage, tenderness, joy, melancholy, blackness, etc. This course engages in the study of collective minoritarian affect, feelings, and emotions as well as outlines their relationship to black and/or women's liberation movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS275
Prereq: None

AFAM276 Intertextual Aesthetics in African American Culture: From Signifyin(g) to Sampling

Intertextuality, the integration of references to multiple texts into a single artistic work, has long been considered a hallmark of postmodern aesthetics. This course will begin from the premise that this intertextual approach was a foundational aesthetic technique for African American cultural producers long before any discourse around postmodernism entered the lexicon. From David Walker¿s "sampling" of the Declaration of Independence in making his 1830 anti-slavery Appeal, to Kara Walker¿s incorporations of imageries and artistic techniques of the antebellum South to comment on contemporary realities of blackness, African American artists have long made use of intertextual aesthetics not merely in the service of postmodern indirection, but in order to represent the realities of black lived experience in America. This course will investigate the transmedial history of this intertextual black aesthetic, examining African American literature, music, film, and visual art, and will consider various ways in which black intertextual aesthetics have been theorized, from Henry Louis Gates' notion of "signifyin(g)," to discussions of hip hop sampling and Black Twitter. As mass-mediated technologies have proliferated in the 20th and 21st centuries and representations of "Blackness" writ large have exponentially multiplied in the popular imagery, contemporary artists increasingly sample and signify on these representations themselves. So a significant piece of our work in the course will be in analyzing the ways that the intertextual aesthetic is mobilized in the contemporary moment to speak to material realities of postmodern blackness, and to articulate nuanced black subjectivities in the face of subjection.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL289
Prereq: None

AFAM277 Defining Black Repair

Black Reparations is a concept that refers to claims for reparations made by African descendants in the United States as defined in Boris Bittker's (1973) "The Case for Black Reparations." However, the term is not exclusive to the experiences of slavery and other forms of racial violence in the U.S. As demonstrated by reparation activists of the African diaspora, the concept unifies the experiences of all African descendants.



In this seminar students will explore both national and regional movements for reparations, primarily in the context of the Caribbean and the U.S. Students will compare the formation of reparatory struggles in both geographies, from post-emancipation to the present, which is instrumental to understanding the concept of Black Reparations. What constitutes Black Reparations? What are the frictions and connections between reparative struggles in the Caribbean and the U.S.? These are the questions that students will be asked to consider throughout the course. Building on scholarship on Black Reparations and reparation policies, students will be asked to design their own proposals for how Middlesex County could implement practices of Black repair.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM278 Race & Slavery in New England

This course examines struggles over black and Native American slavery, freedom, and community formation in New England. We will explore the lived experiences and freedom struggles of people of color from the beginning of European colonization through the national abolition of slavery in 1865. The course, which satisfies the Early AFAM History requirement for the major, will particularly grapple with Wesleyan's and Middletown's complex relationships to slavery and emancipation. As we will learn, slavery and the slave trade played central roles in New England's culture and economy, especially here in Middletown. Like in other New England ports, Middletown merchants made a fortune from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economy that supported it, even selling enslaved people of African and Native American descent on Middletown's Main Street. And southern slaveholders were among the first Wesleyan students in the 1830s. At the same time, free African Americans and their allies made Middletown a stop on the Underground Railroad and a center of the antislavery movement, laying the groundwork for Connecticut's eventual abolition of slavery and for high-profile court cases like the Amistad trial. Complicating popular images of the "free North," this course will examine the central roles of slavery and settler colonialism in New England history, while also exploring how the Connecticut River tied Connecticut to regional and even global currents of slavery and antislavery movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM278F Race & Slavery in New England (FYS)

This course examines struggles over black and Native American slavery, freedom, and community formation in New England. We will explore the lived experiences and freedom struggles of people of color from the beginning of European colonization through the national abolition of slavery in 1865. The course, which satisfies the Early AFAM History requirement for the major, will particularly grapple with Wesleyan's and Middletown's complex relationships to slavery and emancipation. As we will learn, slavery and the slave trade played central roles in New England's culture and economy, especially here in Middletown. Like in other New England ports, Middletown merchants made a fortune from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the plantation economy that supported it, even selling enslaved people of African and Native American descent on Middletown's Main Street. And southern slaveholders were among the first Wesleyan students in the 1830s. At the same time, free African Americans and their allies made Middletown a stop on the Underground Railroad and a center of the antislavery movement, laying the groundwork for Connecticut's eventual abolition of slavery and for high-profile court cases like the Amistad trial. Complicating popular images of the "free North," this course will examine the central roles of slavery and settler colonialism in New England history, while also exploring how the Connecticut River tied Connecticut to regional and even global currents of slavery and antislavery movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM279 Award-Winning Playwrights

With textual analysis and intellectual criticism at its core, this course examines the dramatic work of award-winning playwrights through theoretical, performative, and aesthetic frames. The first half of our investigation explores companion texts written by premier playwrights. In the latter end of the course, we examine singular texts written by acclaimed newcomers. A select range of reviews and popular press publications help to supplement our discussions. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these playwrights work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, disability, gender, locale, nationality, race, and/or sexuality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL281, THEA280
Prereq: None

AFAM280 Religion and the Social Construction of Race

In this course we examine aspects of the intersections between race and religion in a number of historical and social contexts. We place at the center of our discussions the question of how race and religion are co-constructed categories that function as a prism through which people come to understand and experience their own identities and those of others. We will privilege interpretations that emphasize (a) the intersections of race and religion as a process in which power plays a pivotal role; and (b) the means through which communities form collective identities. We will read a range of historical analysis and primary source materials from the U.S. and the Caribbean. After a theory module, we will examine a colonial-era captivity narrative, antebellum pro-slavery document, missionary works, analyses of anti-Semitism, works on Father Divine, the Nation of Islam, Rastafari, Haitian Vodou, Jonestown, the Christian White Supremacy movement, as well as the contemporary U.S. relationship to the Middle East.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI391
Prereq: None

AFAM281 Writing Fiction

Chinua Achebe was famous for his quote "If you don't like another person's story, write your own." Although disliking another's story could inspire creative writing, there are various reasons why people write, ranging from the basic human desire to understand the world through storytelling down to the desire to respond to the issues of the day--be it moral, political, religious--through fiction. The course is designed to help students gain skills in writing fiction; recognizing the literary conventions of fiction; reading and critiquing published work from a writer's perspective; making deliberate creative choices; engaging the work of others in a workshop setting; and revising their work using feedback from their peers and other writing strategies. As such, our reading list will be diverse in scope, cutting across various continents, races, and creeds. We will hope to use the work on the reading list as stepping points for creating our own stories whether in response to various prompts or as original stories to be discussed in workshops. At the end of the semester, you will not only have read a good chunk of fiction and have a good sense of how fiction works, you will also have produced--and substantially revised--some of that writing.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT270, COL370, ENGL277
Prereq: None

AFAM282 Mixed in America: Race, Religion, and Memoir

This course examines the history of mixed-race and interfaith identities in America. Using the genre of the memoir as a focusing lens, we will look at the various ways that Americans of mixed heritage have found a place, crafted an identity, and made meaning out of being considered "mixed." How has being multiracial or bi-religious changed in the course of history in this country? What has occasioned these changes, and what patterns can we observe? We will explore questions of racial construction; religious boundary-making; rites of passage; gender, sexuality, and marriage; and some literary and media representations of mixed-heritage people.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI280
Prereq: None

AFAM282F Mixed in America: Race, Religion, and Memoir (FYS)

This first-year seminar course examines the history of mixed-race and interfaith identities in America. Using the genre of the memoir as a focusing lens, we will look at the various ways that Americans of mixed heritage have found a place, crafted an identity, and made meaning out of being considered "mixed." How has being multiracial or bi-religious changed in the course of history in this country? What has occasioned these changes, and what patterns can we observe? We will explore questions of racial construction; religious boundary-making; rites of passage; gender, sexuality, and marriage; and some literary and media representations of mixed-heritage people.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI280F
Prereq: None

AFAM283 Reading Against "The Propaganda of History": Reading W. E. B. Du Bois

This course will introduce students to the major works of the Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), one of the most profound thinkers and prolific writers in American history. While his published writings are legion, Du Bois is perhaps best known for his early collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk (originally published by A. C. McClurg and Company of Chicago in 1903). In addition to Souls, we will read across Du Bois's oeuvre in order to reveal the extraordinary profundity and historical evolution of his thought. Readings will include (in order): (i) The Philadelphia Negro (1899); (ii) The Souls of Black Folk (1903); (iii) Black Reconstruction (1935); (iv) Color and Democracy (1945); and (v) The World and Africa (1947).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM284 The Sociology of Reality TV: Race, Colorism, and Xenophobia

The course will explore the ways in which reality television can help us reflect on how different social identifiers such as race, skin complexion, and ethnicity operate within American culture. For many, reality TV can be easily dismissed as a guilty pleasure, escapism, or "trashy" (e.g., Dehnart, n.d.). While reality television can be labeled as an innocuous pastime, its importance and impact in American culture cannot be overlooked or denied. Moreover, the way this form of entertainment reflects American behaviors and shapes or reaffirms thinking within our society around sociological descriptors like race and culture should be studied. Through a critical lens, we will delve into the ways this genre of television portrays women of color, the audiences who watch reality TV, and whether responsibility exists on the networks who help create these shows.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: SOC285, CSPL285
Prereq: None

AFAM285 Gender and Slavery in the Atlantic World

For most of the 20th century, historians of slavery in the Atlantic world overlooked the critical role of gender in shaping the marketplace, culture, and experience of the institution. Slaveholding and its attendant violence were presumed to be the domain of men. With a tragically limited archive, the popularity of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" (1845) reveal how the voices and perspectives of men have dominated our understanding of the enslaved experience. Since the 1980s, the work of black feminist historians such as Deborah Gray White's, "Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South" (1985) have unpacked the profoundly gendered nature of slavery in colonial America, the United States, and the Caribbean. This course embarks on an exploration of this important intervention. We will engage primary sources to illuminate the voices of enslaved women and debunk some of the historical myths of slavery and slaveholding. We will also visit classic and fresh secondary literature to understand the evolution of the field. Major themes include but are not limited to the Middle Passage experience, gendered violence, fertility, reproduction and motherhood, the Southern Belle archetype and slaveholding mistresses, notions of beauty and purity in black and white, and fugitivity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: FGSS285
Prereq: None

AFAM286 Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

This course will examine the aesthetics and politics of the first modern African American literary movement, known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Students will learn about the national and global contexts of this movement as well as the various debates that it generated, many of which still reverberate with Black writers today. These include the relationship between Black art and propaganda, the burdens of racial representation and the constraints of respectability politics placed on the individual Black artist, the right to opacity, and the relationship between race and form.



In this course, students will become familiar with some of the key texts of the Harlem Renaissance, its national and international contexts, and its recurring themes and debates. Furthermore, by reading and writing across a wide range of texts from this movement--including poems, short stories, novels, essays and manifestos--students will learn how to engage with a variety of genres. The assignments for this course are thus designed to teach students to write about not only specific genres, but also recurring themes in works from the Harlem Renaissance. By the final project, students will be able to pivot from writing about discrete forms and themes to writing to specific audiences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL286, AMST282
Prereq: None

AFAM287 Psychology and the Law

This course will offer an introduction to the range of topics that are of concern both to psychologists and to members of the legal profession. We will investigate how psychologists may enter the legal arena as social scientists, consultants, and expert witnesses, as well as how the theory, data, and methods of the social sciences can enhance and contribute to our understanding of the judicial system. We will focus on what social psychology can offer the legal system in terms of its research and expertise with an examination of the state of the social science research on topics such as juries and decision making, eyewitness testimony, mental illness, the nature of voluntary confession, competency/insanity, child testimony, repressed memory, and sentencing guidelines. In addition, this course will look at the new and exciting ways legal scholars and psychologists/social scientists are now collaborating on research that looks at topics such as the role of education in prison, cultural definitions of responsibility, media accounts and social representations of crime and criminals, death penalty mitigation, and gender/race discrimination within the criminal justice system. This course will introduce students to this field, especially to the growing body of applied and theoretical work and resources available for study and review. Students will be encouraged to explore the connections between issues of social science and the law, translating legal issues into social scientific research questions that can then be examined more closely in the literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PSYC
Identical With: PSYC277
Prereq: PSYC105

AFAM288Z "Writing Should Do Something": The Essays of James Baldwin

Baldwin's essays, both deeply personal and political, speak of a divided self in a divided country. As a Black man, he saw himself as a problem for America; as a gay man, he was a problem for many; and as a self-described "maverick," he resisted any identification other than "writer." He wrote frankly of hating, and being hated, while insisting that without love and compassion, even for those who hated him, a decent life was unattainable. In this course, we will consider Baldwin as one of the greatest essayists of his century, a social critic who believed that "writing should do something," in the words of a letter he wrote to his brother.



Baldwin began publishing to acclaim in the 1950s; he was a celebrated public figure in the fight for racial equality in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s, however, his complicated relationship both with white liberals and leaders of the Black Power movement diminished his political stature. With the Obama presidency and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, his work experienced a renaissance: almost 30 years after Baldwin's death, Ta-Nehisi Coates acknowledged "The Fire Next Time," published in 1962, as the inspiration for "Between the World and Me."



This is not a theory course, either social or literary. While our supplementary material will place Baldwin's essays within their historical and social context, our focus will be on the narrative nonfiction techniques Baldwin used to such startling and timeless effect. We will read Baldwin's most famous essays, and some that are less well known. Our supplementary readings and viewings will explore his continuing influence, and the influence of Black music on Baldwin.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL286Z
Prereq: None

AFAM291 Afro-Asian Intersections in the Americas

This course explores a range of historical, cultural, and political intersections between African and Asian diasporic people in the Americas from the late 19th century to the present. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine key moments in the history of Afro-Asian encounters in the Americas, including the importation of slave and coolie labor in the 19th century, the formation of anticolonial and antiracist "Third World" movements in the United States and abroad, and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. We will also study forms of cultural interracialism, from African Americans' mania for kung fu in the 1970s, to interracial buddy films like Rush Hour (1998), to the contemporary fiction of writers such as Patricia Powell and Charles Johnson.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: ENGL293, AMST291
Prereq: None

AFAM291Z Afro-Asian Intersections in the Americas

This course explores a range of historical, cultural, and political intersections between African Americans and Asian Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine key moments in the history of Afro-Asian encounters in the Americas, including the importation of slave and coolie labor in the 19th century, the formation of anticolonial and antiracist "Third World" movements in the U.S., and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992. We will also study forms of cultural interracialism, from African Americans' mania for kung fu in the 1970s, to the interracial buddy film Rush Hour (1998), and from the contemporary fiction of writers such as Patricia Powell and Charles Johnson to the sounds of hip hop. As this brief overview suggests, we will be examining a diverse selection of texts including history, fiction, ethnography, cultural studies, and film.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST291Z
Prereq: None

AFAM292 Doing Blackness: Performance Studies and Theorizing Black Identity

The idea of blackness is one that is ever shifting, sometimes in conflict with itself, and constantly accommodating new contexts. This course addresses the concept of blackness through performance, through the various methods of doing, being, and feeling that mark bodies, gestures, and places as black. It should be noted that performance, in this context, not only encompasses the framed/staged productions that have come to evoke blackness symbolically in the public imagination, but also performative approaches to evoking blackness in scholarship and the mundane negotiations of black identity in everyday life. This course centers on performance studies, but also pulls from African American studies, gender/women's studies, musicology, and literary theory in order to address both performance and blackness from an interdisciplinary perspective. Ultimately, this is a course that revels in the gray areas that exist between various competing constructions of authentic blackness and offers performance as a useful frame for understanding the simultaneous fixity and fluidity of blackness as a concept.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM298 Richard Wright and Company

This course offers an in-depth consideration of the work and career of Richard Wright, a defining figure in 20th-century African American literature, and seeks to understand Wright's interactions with a wide array of mentors, proteges, and enemies. By placing Wright amid the network of supporters, admirers, and detractors who surrounded him, we will gain a deepened understanding of Wright's development and a useful map of 20th-century African American literary expression and American literary history more broadly. Writers to be covered in the course may include, along with Wright, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin,Gwendolyn Brooks, Horace Cayton, Ralph Ellison, James T. Farrell, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Chester Himes, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Walker, John Williams, and Frank Yerby.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL298
Prereq: None

AFAM299 Medicine and Healing in the Black Atlantic

This course examines the ways in which Black people have conceived of health, healing, and the body since 1500. Readings, lectures, and documentary films will focus on historical case studies in Western Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. We will cover topics such as herbal and environmental medicine; the intersections of religion and healing; gendered medical knowledge and labor; medical racism and exploitation; health disparities; and health activism. To help us situate these topics in the lived experiences of historical actors, we will use a variety of primary sources, including narratives of formerly enslaved people, court cases, correspondence, interviews, and print culture. The goal of this course is not simply to show how Black people have used healing practices to endure racism, slavery, imperialism, and racial capitalism: We will also emphasize how medicine and healing have been sources of joy, conflict, knowledge production, and entrepreneurship within Black communities. Lastly, we will consider the present and future of Black health and think about what it would take to make medicine and health care for all.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: STS299
Prereq: None

AFAM300 Black Phoenix Rising: Death and Resurrection of Black Lives

The Black Lives Matter Movement has renewed our collective need to theorize the value of black lives within a deluge of death and disappearance in black communities. This movement is part of a deep transnational tradition in black radical praxis that aims to transform scholarly, activist, and public discourse and public policies concerning the systemic and epistemic effects of institutional racisms and the prospects for antiracist futures. How might we envision a black radical praxis that simultaneously recognizes the vitality of black lives and challenges the cultural ideas and social practices that generate and justify black people's death and suffering? This seminar traces a genealogy of black radical praxis that interrogates the necropolitics of race and positions this system of power against the prospect of thriving black people. In doing so, the course erects an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that features scholarship in critical race science studies, intersectionality, and transnational cultural studies as they inform how a black radical praxis can contribute to the uprising and raising up of black communities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: SISP300
Prereq: None

AFAM301 Junior Colloquium: The Possibilities of Diaspora

In this course, we will explore the concept of "diaspora" as a way of conceptualizing and understanding the contours of African American cultural and political history. We will read a series of studies of diaspora as a concept for apprehending the historical experience of people of African descent dispersed from an original homeland. We will see in what ways these books are in dialogue with each other, what prior conceptualizations they are contesting, and what creative possibilities they offer for those of us engaged in African American studies. We will also read autobiographies, memoirs, travelogues, and novels that deal with the issues of diaspora. It is our hope, then, to understand how "diaspora" as a concept, metaphor, or condition can be applied to the historical knowledge we need to bring to contemporary political issues.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM303 1492: States of War

This course approaches 1492 as a signifier and time-stamp of modernity. It signifies and time-stamps an ongoing war against people of African descent. It grounds systems of representation, racialization, and colonization with which we must reckon. By reading richly symptomatic, primary, historical documents about "blood," race, geography, and slavery in Saint Domingue/Santo Domingo, as well as some contemporary fiction, art, and critical theory that re-narrate and theorize Caribbean history, we will focus on the historical frame of 1440 into the 18th century. This frame holds with specific reference to Frank B. Wilderson III's notion of when the "gratuitous violence" of the Middle Ages begins "to mark the Black ontologically." We will read sometimes for imperial notions of sovereignty, Man, selfhood, force, race, land, property, and labor, and other times for Caribbean notions and narratives that are at war with said imperial, Christian, Western onto-epistemological schemata. Conceptually, the course thinks from and about Caribbean literary studies, Black critical theory, aspects of Enlightenment thought, and deconstruction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL301
Prereq: None

AFAM304 Black Feminist and Trans Theories of the Hu/Man

This seminar provides an introduction to Black feminist and trans theories' interventions into the modern Western category of the human and its violent exclusions. Since their inception, Black feminist and trans theories have brought attention to the violence of what Sylvia Wynter has called our "genres of the human," and in so doing, have laid bare the very preoccupations of power that condemn the non-white, non-cisgender being to sub-Human status and death in the material and discursive economies of racial capitalism. Students will develop broad knowledge of Black feminist and trans theories' provocations regarding the intersecting identity categories that organize our world, and will be encouraged to develop their own critical approaches that are attentive to the hegemony of racialized gender and its attendant violences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS306
Prereq: None

AFAM305 Lyric Poetry and Music: The Color and Politics of Cry, Sound, and Voice

Lyric poetry may be the most musical of literary forms. In one of its basic definitions, the lyric poem begins after the overhearing of a sound. This sound may be familiar and pleasant, like the timbre and cadence of a lover's voice. Or it may be unrecognizable and terrifying. It may be imbricated with other senses and feelings, provoking a memory that stimulates a sense of touch or smell. Or it may stimulate a sense of horror at the inevitability of death. In any of these cases, sound is thought to reveal an attachment, a memory, and to give rise to composition in the poet's effort to reshape memory and feeling in lyric form. But such articulations do not always come out as evenly as this description may imply. Indeed, moans, screams, stutters, cries, and the madness of possession by the Muses are part of lyric's history and practice. In this course, we will read from African American, African diasporic, Caribbean, Latina/o/x, and Indigenous poetics, and we will consider their relation to myth and musical forms, such as the blues, son, bomba, biguine, jazz, reggae, hip-hop, salsa, among others. The dynamics between lyric speakers and musicians, sound and story, seen and voiced language will play out.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL304, AMST302
Prereq: None

AFAM306 Black Middletown Lives: Documenting and Commemorating Those Enslaved Here

In this service learning course, students will do hands-on history by uncovering, preserving, and sharing Middletown's rich African American past. In particular, we will focus on the lives of the hundreds of African Americans enslaved in Middletown- an international river port built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade- in the 1700s, as well as the neighborhood that their free descendants built in the early 1800s. This early African American neighborhood (the Beman Triangle), now part of Wesleyan's campus, served as a regional and national antislavery and Underground Railroad center and home to one of the nation's first handful of independent Black churches. Students will partner with local archives, libraries, and museums to help preserve and share Middletown's remarkable 18th- and 19th-century African American past, illuminating this community's connections to regional, national, and global slavery and antislavery movements.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM307 Black Middletown Lives: The Future of Middletown's African American Past

In this service learning course, students will do hands-on history by uncovering, preserving, and sharing Middletown's rich African American past. We will focus on the history of the Beman Triangle. This African American neighborhood, now part of Wesleyan's campus, served as a regional and national antislavery and Underground Railroad center and home to one of the nation's first handful of independent Black churches. Students will partner with local archives, libraries, and museums to help preserve and share this neighborhood's remarkable history. Our projects will include building a website and an exhibit to share this history with the Wesleyan and Middletown communities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM309 Indentured Spatialities

Inspired by many political and intellectual traditions, such as Caribbean Studies and Black Feminism, Indo-Caribbean scholars, activists, and artists have long grappled with the spatial entanglements of indentureship, slavery, and colonialism both in and beyond the Caribbean (Persadie, 2022; Hosein, 2016; Goesine, 2016). However, this canon of thought and practice needs more visibility. So, in this course, students will explore the spatial identities and experiences of "Indo-Caribbeans," descendants of "Coolie" indentureship, but IN RELATION to Black and Indigenous spatial realities that constitute the Indo-Caribbean. Through guest lectures and formal and informal written assignments, students will engage intellectually and creatively, fostering a deeper understanding of indentured spatialities. This course will require students to ground their contributions in the work of Indo-Caribbean thinkers like Patricia Mohammed and Andil Gosine and the activism of organizations such as the Caribbean Equality Project.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM311 Vitalism and Black Aesthetics

What is the relationship between Black art and Black life? Does Black art, broadly construed, serve a mimetic function-merely re-presenting reality-or is it a vital expression of the essence of Blackness? These questions are at the root of Black Cultural Studies' engagements with the problem of the aesthetic. In the current conjuncture, reacting to the theorization of Black social death, many theorists have (re)turned to the aesthetic as "proof" of the mattering of Black life and "evidence" of a vibrant sociality. This course will consider the connection between (the theorization of) Black aesthetics and (the affirmation of) Black life. In so doing, we will question the political stakes of Black aesthetics, as well as the value placed upon the concept of life as such, in and through the aesthetic encounter. Additionally, we will explore ways of thinking of the aesthetic that challenge presumptions of its innate liveliness. Readings will include canonical texts in aesthetic theory and vitalist philosophy, as well as more contemporary engagements with these questions from the perspective of Black performance theory, literary theory, and Afro-pessimism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL312
Prereq: None

AFAM312 Black Speculative Fictions and the Anthropocene

The genre of black speculative fiction--in the form of literature, art, music, and theory--provides a generative framework through which to (re)think understandings of race, gender, sexuality, class, the body, disability, citizenship, and the human. Often couched as taking place in the "future," black speculative fictions also engage the past and critique the present. This makes the genre a critical resource for addressing the Anthropocene. The term "Anthropocene" first emerged from the discipline of geology in 2000. Scientists proposed that Earth had entered a new epoch (following the Holocene) in which "humans" had become geological forces, impacting the planet itself. However, the term Anthropocene raises numerous questions. What does it mean to think about the human at the level of a "species"? What constitutes evidence of the Anthropocene and when did it begin? Who is responsible for the Anthropocene's attendant catastrophes, which include earthquakes, altered ocean waters, and massive storms? Does the Anthropocene overemphasize the human and thus downplay other interspecies and human-nonhuman, animate-inanimate relations? Or does it demand a (potentially fruitful) reconceptualization of the human? Further, how does artificial intelligence complicate definitions of the human and, by extension, of the Anthropocene? Centering the work of black speculative thinkers and placing it in conversation with scientific studies ranging from marine biology and geology to cybernetics, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene that endeavors to (re)conceptualize the human, ecological relations, and Earth itself. Texts engaged will include: novels, art, music, theory, and scientific studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM302, E&ES125, FGSS301
Prereq: None

AFAM314 The Black Charismatic

In this course we will explore the interplay between black politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era. More specifically, we will examine the aesthetics of affective (commonly called "charismatic") black political leadership by attending to Tavis Smiley's yearly "State of the Black Union" address, 2000-2010. We will rely almost entirely on film, video, and digital archives in order to trace the eleven-year-long evolution of Smiley's annual event, while focusing our hermeneutic attention on the racialized and gendered performances of Louis Farrakhan, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and others. Through close readings of their televised performances, then, this course will require students to think and write about the practice and rhetoric of the black charismatic. How might the black charismatic threaten to undermine the political opportunities afforded by the success of the modern civil rights movement? How did Smiley's yearly event create the illusion of a black public sphere? What are the unintended consequences of substituting affect for political action? Similarly, what are the potential perils of a politics that results in ephemeral catharsis without dangerous political consequences? While participating in the general discussion across the semester, students will be searching out specific research topics of their own, topics relating the seminar conversation to original research questions about: the new liberalism of black politics; the crisis of the black public intellectual; the importance of technology (particularly the ways in which new media have changed, even upended the political habitus itself); and the relationship between gender (particularly black masculinity), charismatic leadership, and respectability politics. Authors will include (in no particular order): Adolph Reed, Richard Iton, Hazel Carby, Hortense Spillers, Houston Baker, Erica Edwards, Melissa Harris-Perry, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS313, RELI323
Prereq: None

AFAM315 Black Literary Theory

This course will bring together readings both literary and critical/theoretical, beginning with Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952). Taking Fanon as its point of departure, then, this course will necessarily turn to a discussion of the recent discourse on Afro-pessimism and Black optimism, attempting to introduce students to important issues and questions of race, race relations, anti-Black racism, Black sociality, the universality of whiteness and white supremacy, the fungibility of the Black body, and the vulnerability and precarity of Black life; and together we will think more closely about how the complex and "unthinkable" histories and afterlives of chattel slavery, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the Middle Passage, for examples, continue to challenge the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres and modes of emplotment. In addition to Fanon, authors will include Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: ENGL318
Prereq: None

AFAM316 Carceral Connecticut: Middletown Stories of Race and Redevelopment

In the 1970s, during nationwide "urban renewal" or Redevelopment, the city of Middletown demolished an entire African American neighborhood to make parking lots and Route 9 on-ramps. Called the South End, this neighborhood had been Middletown's Black business and community center for decades.



Why did city officials see this neighborhood as disposable and its residents as displaceable? When, why, and how did this Black neighborhood form, and how did its residents experience, respond to, and navigate the displacement of urban renewal? What can this lost neighborhood--less than half a mile from Wesleyan University's campus--teach us about the history of race, inequality, housing, carcerality, segregation, and Black community and community resilience and resistance in the 20th century, and what lessons can this history teach us today?



In this Community-Engaged Learning course, you will not only read assigned primary and secondary sources. You will also conduct your own archival research and interview former South End residents to record, preserve, and share the largely undocumented history of this neighborhood and its legacies.



Although this course is entitled Carceral Connecticut and is one of the courses associated with the Carceral Connecticut Project (carceralconnecticut.com), of which Prof. Nasta is one of four Wesleyan faculty investigators, we will not focus primarily on prisons or incarceration. Rather, we will explore carcerality as a broader set of practices and policies that have structured the world--including 20th-century Middletown--in ways that reinforce racism and racial inequality, including policing, segregation, and displacement. At the same time, we will pay equal attention to how Middletown's Black community has created institutions and neighborhoods that have resisted and responded to displacement, containment, and other carceral practices.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM320 Integrative Learning Project 2: Website Incubator

Have you developed knowledge or expertise about a topic through an internship, engagement in a student organization, time studying abroad, or through some other experience that you would now like to share with the world? This is the class for you! Throughout out the semester, you will work to translate your experience into a website. I will help you do this by asking you to think about the content you would like to share, the audience with whom you would like to share it, and the goal you have for that audience. Ultimately, you will share your experience through WordPress, the world's most popular platform for website design. Along the way, you will learn about user experience (UX) design principles and research methodologies, so that the website you create draws in your audience and makes them want to learn more about your chosen topic. Throughout the semester, we will meet once a week to do all of these things in a relaxed, collaborative environment. Join us and bring along some friends!
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: WRCT300, RL&L350, CSPL300, IDEA300
Prereq: None

AFAM322 Black Girl Magic?: Survival and Speculative Fiction in the Social World

"Black Girl Magic?" explores and examines the sociological origins, usages, and deployments of the now-popular hashtag. Shortened from "#BlackGirlsAreMagic," coined by CaShawn Thompson in 2013, #BlackGirlMagic has seen its share of celebration and controversy. Used by and for figures such as former First Lady Michelle Obama and Janelle Monae, the hashtag appears almost everywhere to provide exemplars for the resilience of Black women and girls. However, some critics have questioned trending characteristics among those who have been branded with the hashtag--cisgender, well-to-do, fit/thin, non-disabled, and/or famous--and have asked since the beginning: To whom exactly does this phrase belong? Who does it include? And why should we use it? This course aims to survey all those questions and more. It will highlight Black women, trans and gender non-conforming writers, as well as sociologists and those not officially affiliated with the field, to deepen our understanding of Black life experiences in a global social world. We will dive into and deconstruct what we know about concepts such as "survival," "joy," "imagination," and "community" via Black feminist thought, queer/quare studies, popular culture, political science, speculative fiction, and cultural sociology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM324, SOC324
Prereq: SOC151 OR AFAM151

AFAM323 Staging Blackness: African American Theater

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of African American dramatic and performance traditions. We begin with a deep historical examination of 19th century blackface minstrelsy that then progresses into a long-view of how black American dramatists and theater-makers have self-fashioned black dramatic narratives, black aesthetics, and black representations into the twenty-first century. In all cases, we are interested in surveying the ways in which these artists work within varying modes of dramatic expression and focus their plays and performances on such topics as class, ethnicity, era, fragmentation, gender, history, region, revolution, nationality, race, sexuality, and spectatorship.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL385, THEA323, FGSS323
Prereq: None

AFAM324 Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

The historical moment immediately after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements saw an explosion of African American writing about slavery. In the past half-century, black writers wrote award-winning novels that gave unprecedented attention to the intricacies of the life of people who are enslaved and to slavery as a system that they suggested could help us better understand late-20th-century American culture. We will read some of the most important works written by contemporary African American writers to see how and why they transformed the first autobiographical form for black writers--the slave narrative--into a fictional form that has served them as they dissect their own cultural moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL324, AMST334
Prereq: None

AFAM324Z Black Power and the Modern Narrative of Slavery

The historical moment immediately after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements saw an explosion of African American writing about slavery. In the past half-century, black writers wrote award-winning novels that gave unprecedented attention to the intricacies of the life of people who are enslaved and to slavery as a system that they suggested could help us better understand late-20th-century American culture. We will read some of the most important works written by contemporary African American writers to see how and why they transformed the first autobiographical form for black writers--the slave narrative--into a fictional form that has served them as they dissect their own cultural moment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL324Z, AMST334Z
Prereq: None

AFAM325 Blackness and Affect

Critical theory and the humanities are in the throes of what has been termed "the affective turn," wherein scholars theorize affect--broadly construed as social feeling or bodily intensity--as central to understanding (post/human) relationality, the social, ethics, and the political. Haunting this field of inquiry is a series of questions: Can a turn to affect account for the figure of the Slave? Can an embrace of affectivity, as potential, bring Blackness into the realm of our understanding "without trying to fill in the void" (Hartman)? Rather than conceptualizing affect as the connective thread between bodies and worlds, or as a purely relational force, how might we think about affect and non-relationality; affect outside of and against the world; affect without the body? This seminar will engage these, and related, questions through extended explorations of the relationship between affect theory and Blackness. Readings will include: Frantz Fanon, Lauren Berlant, Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Rizvana Bradley, Xine Yao, Sianne Ngai, and Darieck Scott, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM335, ENGL389
Prereq: None

AFAM326 Litanies for Survival, Plots for Revolution

This seminar centers black-feminist and queer-of-color theory, literature, and art from the 1970s to the present in order to interrogate and reimagine revolution and revolutionary praxes. We will examine the interrelatedness of art and activism, hope and despair, collaboration and erotics. Key questions include: How does "survival" put pressure on "revolution," and vice versa, particularly in light of contemporary and imminent catastrophes, local and planetary? How does a joint consideration of survival and revolution affect interpretations of the past, understandings of the present, and imaginings of the future? What political work might intellectual and creative labor perform? Is revolution an event, a practice, or both? A useful term or a ruse?



This seminar is offered in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities' Fall 2018-Spring 2019 theme, "Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures." Assigned readings will include the work of scholars participating in the Center's Monday night lecture series, and students will be required to attend several lectures over the course of the semester.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS327
Prereq: None

AFAM327 Biopolitics, Blackness and Spirit Baptism: The Birth of American Pentecostalism

American Pentecostalism is a conservative, Protestant, Evangelical revival movement that emerges in and through Black practices that constitute an exclusion in the racialized religious, social, cultural, and political formations of early 20th-century United States. Rather than examining Pentecostalism through a single lens called "religion," this course will use the themes of Biopolitics and Blackness to examine Pentecostalism through its most commonly known feature--an experience called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostals were narrated in popular and critical accounts in the late 19th and early 20th century as exhibiting criminality, insanity, and raced, gendered, and sexed Black pathology. These marks of abnormality were all part of a formation of power in America known as biopolitics. As an idea, biopolitics is popularized by French historian/philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault's concept attempts to explain how different intellectual and professional disciplines emerge in nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to best create a thriving population, which could be made to live. The power of the nation-state had traditionally been expressed in and through the power to kill. As a revival movement, Pentecostalism rehearses these themes, as early adherents fight over what it means to be made alive when racial Blackness is almost often seen as a mark of and for death. The course will study original accounts and sources from the historical period, read critical, interpretive accounts, and use a variety of media. All resources will be provided in class or via Moodle.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI324, AMST324
Prereq: None

AFAM331 Queer and Trans Aesthetics

This seminar will consider contemporary trans and queer theory foregrounding race, class, disability, migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and colonization alongside the work of BIPOC queer and trans artists in particular. The course's animating (and unfixable!) questions include: How do artists produce and intervene in understandings of gender and/or sexuality through their work? What does it mean for an artist or viewer to describe an image, object, or performance as "queer" or "trans"? What constitutes a "queer" or "trans" reading of visual culture? How might various formulations of "queer" and "trans" relate to, put pressure on, and/or resist "aesthetics"? What is the relationship between an artist's self-identification and/or their resistance to categorization (e.g., in terms of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, nationality) on the one hand, and audiences' efforts to engage and interpret their art on the other? Put another way: What, if anything, does an artist's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with their art? And what does a viewer's "identity" (asserted and/or imposed) have to do with how they approach and interpret visual culture? Several artist talks and/or class visits (all virtual) are being organized in conjunction with the seminar.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS331, THEA311, SOC300, AMST326
Prereq: None

AFAM334 Special Topic: Something in the Air: Mining the Oral/Aural Tradition in African American Poetry

In his book-length manifesto, Poetry as an Insurgent Act, Lawrence Ferlinghetti claims that "the printing press killed poetry." What he seems to be lamenting--at least, in part--is the privileging of the written word to the detriment of poetry's musical, or aural, qualities. In this advanced-level workshop, we will focus on the poem as something intended to be read aloud and listened to. This course will also examine the roots and evolution of the African American oral poetic tradition with special attention paid to the rhetorical strategies derived from the black church, adopted by civil rights leaders and speech writers, and used to varying degrees by poets ranging from those of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s to practitioners of contemporary hip-hop and spoken word. Some of the poets under consideration include Amiri Baraka, Oscar Brown Jr., Jayne Cortez, Gil-Scott Heron, June Jordan, The Last Poets, Carl Hancock Rux, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Jessica Care Moore, Laini Mataka, and Saul Williams.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL334
Prereq: ENGL216 OR ENGL336 OR ENGL337

AFAM335 Fugitives and Freedman: The Politics of Slavery in the Civil War Era

The actions of fugitive slaves and newly-freed people turned the crisis of American union into a war for emancipation. Questions of slavery's expansion, permanence, and end dominated the political discourse of the United States from 1848 through 1877. This course will examine the ways in which political actors, especially African Americans, kept the twin issues of slavery and emancipation in the public sphere to restructure American society in the middle of the 19th century.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST325
Prereq: None

AFAM336 Black Texts, Lost and Found

This course examines histories of loss and recovery of black texts in the US and the Atlantic world more broadly. We will bring a three-pronged approach to our subject matter. We will analyze first the constitutive silences of the archive: epistemic and material neglect, or what Michel Trouillot has termed the "silencing of the past"; second, the preservation efforts of black newspaper editors, librarians, and bibliophiles; and third, the "counter-archiving" work of Afro-diasporic historical and speculative fiction. As we traverse different periods and empires we will consider what the concepts of the "black archive" and "black ephemera" mean to different disciplines. We will study the repressions of black Arabic writing practices in the US South and our fragmentary recovery of them in the late 20th century, unfinished novels about Black Atlantic revolutions such as Martin Delany's "Blake," incomplete runs of historic black newspapers, debates about the illusions and desires of "recovery," and the criteria that determine what counts as ephemeral and when.



We will move across different media, from print--"I, Tituba," "M Archive," "Blake," "(Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular"--to films--"The Watermelon Woman," "Looking for Langston," "The Last Angel of History"--and from digitized databases of photographs at the ongoing archiving project The Missing Chapter: Black Chronicles to digitized newspaper archives.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL357, CHUM336
Prereq: None

AFAM343 Empires of Captivity: The Resurgence of Atlantic Slavery in the Age of Emancipations

The dawn of the 19th century was marked by a series of challenges to Atlantic slavery, epitomized first by the unprecedented victories of the Haitian Revolution and then by the implementation of municipal bans and bilateral treaties that sought to limit the international trade in African captives. Yet seemingly paradoxically, this same period saw the rapid expansion of new zones of enslavement stretching from the U.S. South to Cuba, Brazil, and beyond. Proslavery forces mobilized across these jurisdictions in order to reverse the tide of abolition and to participate in (or simply to profit from) a burgeoning illegal trade in captives. Meanwhile, people of African descent who were enslaved or re-enslaved during this period built upon the precedent of emancipation in Haiti and other antislavery jurisdictions as they mounted claims to freedom for themselves, their families, and their communities. They continuously pushed forward the halting pace of general emancipation, laying the foundations for struggles for recognition and restitution that continue to the present day.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-LAST, SBS-LAST
Identical With: LAST343
Prereq: None

AFAM344 The Haitian Revolution Beyond Borders

In 1791, enslaved people rose up against their masters in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, at the time the most profitable plantation society in the world. Thirteen years later, their efforts would culminate in the declaration of independence of Haiti, a nation founded on the pillars of antislavery, anticolonialism, and racial equality. This course investigates the regional and global significance of this revolution through its interconnections with Haiti's neighbors in the Caribbean and across Latin America. First, we will look at the immediate implications of Haiti's founding for the fate of New World slavery during the Age of Revolutions. Next, we will consider Haiti's long-term impact on national identities, racial formations, and future revolutionary struggles in the Americas over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-LAST
Identical With: LAST344
Prereq: None

AFAM345 Writing Against Racism

You are millennials, comfortable with greater diversity than older generations. You are anti-racist and against other interrelated forms of oppression. How will you make your voice heard? This seminar will explore writing that supports students in deploying their academic knowledge in public debates about immigration, abolition, feminism, and in particular, race and anti-racism. Such writing may include op-eds and letters to the editor; book, film, and music reviews; blogs; and interviews with scholars, artists, and activists. Students will write weekly and revise their work in response to comments from the instructor and their peers.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Prereq: None

AFAM347 Black Grammars

In her text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe argues that Blackness, due its rearrangement of and resistance to hegemonic modes of meaning making, is "anagrammatical." As a concept, anagrammatical Blackness points to "the failure of words and concepts to hold in and on Black flesh." Taking this provocation as a point of departure, this course will consider the relationship between Blackness and the grammatical, with a particular focus on rhetoric and poetics. Each week will focus on a particular rhetorical figure or grammatical concept: subject, metaphor, metonymy, apostrophe, tense, irony, catachresis, parataxis, etc., considering how Blackness shifts our understandings of their operations. Readings will include Ronald Judy, Barbara Johnson, Jacques Derrida, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Fred Moten, and Paul de Man, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL347
Prereq: None

AFAM350 The Law, the Citizen, and the Literary and Cinematic Imaginations

In this course, we will study several major legal events that highlight the contradictions and injustices in the history of U.S. citizenship and the ways this history has been reimagined in literature and cinema. Among the topics discussed will be the slave codes, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Jim Crow order, the Bracero program, sodomy laws, and SB 1070. We will consider theories of citizen, state, race, and sexuality implicit in these legal structures, with an eye for who may be incorporated into the body politic and who is unassimilable by design, and on what terms. In addition, we will consider the way literary and cinematic texts engage the rhetoric and psychic effects of the law and the way they present different imaginaries of human bodies, communities, and temporalities. Our focus will be on African American, African diasporic, Latina/o/x and Indigenous literatures and cinemas, as they reveal the rifts and conjunctions among the categories citizen, "savage," "gente sin razón," slave, illegal, pervert, and deviant.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL350, AMST350
Prereq: None

AFAM351 Queer of Color Critique

This course will examine and interrogate the field of queer studies with particular focus on the ways in which queer scholarship and queer political movements function alongside critical race theory, ethnic studies, and sociopolitical antiracist efforts. Students will be asked to consider the history of queer studies and queer politics, the contemporary state of queer movements, and future visions of queer life. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, and we will rely upon a diverse range of theoretical, historical, and cultural studies texts. We will explore the normative parameters of both sexual and racial identities, probing the terms of identification to consider their meaning in the contemporary moment and in relationship to various cultural, social, legal, and political milieus. Throughout the course we will consider, What does it mean to study queerness and to study race? How do institutions--religious, legal, and scientific--shape our understandings of both queer and racial identities? In what ways do sexuality and race interact, and how does this interaction inform the meanings of each of these identity categories? Furthermore, how have queer movement and scholarship both supported antiracist efforts and, also, how have they been complicit in cultural and institutional forms of racial oppression? How do other social categories of identification such as gender, ethnicity, and class, shape the ways in which we understand expressions of race and queerness?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST351, FGSS351
Prereq: None

AFAM352 Black Thought and Critical Theory

This course follows Stuart Hall's insistence in "What is this 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" that the theoretical articulations of "blackness" are always "conjunctural." We will investigate how black thought has been conjoined with critical theory through phenomenology, pragmatism, Marxism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. In our readings of a variety of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers, we will elaborate the philosophical richness and contradictory tensions embedded in the notion of "blackness" at specific historical and theoretical conjunctions. How is "blackness" useful for social theory? Must we assume there is a transhistorical identity to "blackness"? In what ways does "blackness" conjoin with the conceptualizations of gender, sexuality, class, and religion? Black thought and critical theory is the provocation that we attend to the tensions these questions raise. In this course, we will read the works of James H. Cone, Cornel West, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Frank Wilderson, Calvin Warren, Tommy J. Curry, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL352, FGSS352
Prereq: None

AFAM353 Blackness in the Anthropocene

To deny the "unprecedented" geological impact of humans' force on nature is now practically untenable. Theorists in the humanities, nonetheless, remain unimpressed with what this "new era" has afforded us in terms of critical potential. From accusations that what we now call the "Anthropocene" has merely established a hegemony of brute facts at the expense of critique, to concerns about the multiple ways in which the term continues to obscure catastrophic socio-ecological relations, it is fair to say that the scenes of the "Anthropocene" are still contested terrains. The aim of this course is to investigate the Anthropecene's many forms of socio-political erasures and theoretical "blind-sights." We will examine the ways in which Anthropocenean discourses have been powerful at disavowing racial antagonism in our current ecological crisis. More specifically, in this course, will study the ecological negative effects on black communities around the globe with the aim to questions the shortcomings of ethics in Anthropocenean times. We will explore questions like "who are 'recognizable/legitimate' victims in environmental disasters," "do events like hurricane Katrina or the migration crisis teach us anything about our human condition," and "what is the 'post' in post-humanism." We will read philosophical works ranging from Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza to Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL353
Prereq: None

AFAM354 Social Science, Black Life: Wells-Barnett, Du Bois, and Hurston's Empirical Experiments

This class has two interrelated areas of focus: first, the racist habits of imag(in)ing blackness's presumed racial-sexual difference that preoccupied social science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and second, the formative role that social scientific research and methods played in black people's quests for institutional inclusion during this same period. In their early years, canonical sociology and anthropology consistently proved unable to capture the beauty and complexity in black life, instead lending empirical authority to cultural ways of seeing blackness as inherently pathological. A counter-discourse of black expression took shape, attempting to overcome the negative impact that dominant empirical thought might have on black peoples' struggle for normative citizenship. Focusing particularly on the careers of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, we will explore the contradictory relationship that subsequently emerged between blackness and institutional power--discernible in empiricism's primacy during the long era of postbellum black inclusion. Rather than seeking evidence of black intellectuals' departure from empiricism and its attendant violences, we will explore the messiness of their efforts to experiment with and imagine beyond their misrepresentation and erasure in dominant empirical discourses. Indeed, black artists and intellectuals sometimes recapitulated the violence of empiricist paradigms and their enabling truth claims despite their sound political intentions. In considering the nexus of social science and black life in this period, then, we will also consider the intramural politics of racialized gender, the myriad costs of institutional incorporation, and the stubborn durability of epistemological authority. Secondary texts include works by Hazel Carby, Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Gaines, Julian Go, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Reiland Rabaka, Michel-Rolph Truillot, Autumn Womack, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS354, SOC318
Prereq: None

AFAM358 Fugitive Perspectives on Education and Civil Society

In 1946, the African American novelist Ann Petry imagined what a white schoolteacher might think about working with black students in Harlem, New York: "Working in this school was like being in a jungle. It was filled with the smell of the jungle, she thought: tainted food, rank, unwashed bodies." Petry had herself worked in Harlem schools. She also held credentials from well-heeled white schools in Connecticut. Despite her own academic success, she questioned the inherent value of schools that regarded black children as if they were untamed savages. Challenging prevailing narratives of excellence and achievement, this course examines fugitive perspectives of black, Indigenous, LBGTQ, and poor folks who resisted compulsory schooling and avoided conscription into so-called civilized society. If, as historian Michael B. Katz has argued, US schools "are imperial institutions designed to civilize the natives; they exist to do something to poor children, especially, now, children who are black or brown," then why should any self-respecting black or brown child endure such schooling? What might so-called truants, illiterates, failures, burnouts, dropouts, and delinquents teach us about education and civil society? The history of education, however, has largely been interpreted from a biased perspective--namely, those who have been successfully schooled. We will therefore search for contrary voices in fragments of oral culture, ranging from slave narratives to folktales and recorded music. Contemporary scholarship will inform our analysis. Interdisciplinary scholars such as James Scott, Eric Hobsbawm, Tera Hunter, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Brooks, and Audra Simpson will illustrate how to read against the grain and unearth hidden transcripts from classic authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Anna Julia Cooper, and Gertrude Simmons Bonin.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-AFAM
Identical With: EDST358
Prereq: None

AFAM361 The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination

This seminar offers a social psychological analysis of different forms of prejudice and discrimination, including racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, and less recognized forms of bias, such as the exploitation and control of indigenous peoples, animals, and the natural environment.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PSYC
Identical With: PSYC361
Prereq: PSYC260

AFAM363 Visualizing Black Remains

This advanced seminar engages African Diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (visual art, performance, film, literature) that grapple with the appetite, effects, and stakes of representing Black remains. What does this visual reproduction make possible or obscure, and what is its relationship to violence? The class will also encourage students to think about the ethics of reparation/repatriation in relation to forms of loss and dispossession that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor visually evidenced (in conventional ways). In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, objecthood, violence, empathy, and reparation?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM362, ANTH362, ENGL363, FGSS362, THEA362
Prereq: None

AFAM369 Performance Remains: Slavery in the Black Dramatic Imagination

As sociologist Orlando Patterson notes, "In the absence of historical records, one way to explore the inner lives of slaves is to exercise one's literary imagination" (Slavery and Social Death, 2018). Taking direction from Patterson, this course is interested in mining the literary imagination of contemporary Black playwrights who are interested in recovering, reconstructing, rewriting, repairing and, in some cases, revolting against the fragmented and muted histories of the African slave trade and the lost experiences of the Black lives therein. From Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), a bold postcolonial adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest, to Winsome Pinnock's Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), an examination of British history inspired by two 19th-century paintings by the English romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, our plays originate from the Caribbean, England, and the United States. As African diasporic texts, these plays are exercises in the dramatic power of Sankofa, a principle derived from the Akan people of Ghana, meaning that the plays become the vessels through which audiences, readers, and characters return to the past in order to better understand and move forward in the present. We will engage in a thorough exploration of form, region, dialect, adaptation, and aesthetics, among other aspects, as we align lost and documented histories with dramatic conjuring.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL369, THEA369
Prereq: None

AFAM370 Afro-pessimism, Gender, and Performance

This class engages African and African diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (dance, visual art, performance art, installation, film) to think about colonial dispossession, objectification, and reparation. We will address topics such as the repatriation of artifacts and other ephemera taken from Europe's colonies that are housed in the archives of European cultural institutions. The objects in question have been described as either artwork, artifacts, or anthropological fetish objects (depending on which field one engages with). How can we rethink our understanding of objecthood as irreducible to "inanimate" things but as also signaling a regime of imperial domination and enslavement that violently turned African personality into a status of objecthood? What does it mean to think about the object (broadly defined) in relation to loss and the (im)possibilities of repatriation and reparation? How does the Black performer's body's disappearance/remains endow the Western art institution? The course will encourage students to think about repatriation as well as certain losses that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor evidenced in conventional ways. In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, as well as the promises and ends of reparation? The assigned readings offer ways to think about colonial archives not merely as neutral repositories of past events, but also as performances; as enactments of power, aesthetic value judgment, and hierarchical arrangements of knowledge production. The theoretical, art historical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and creative reading materials engage contemporary scholars', artists', and activists' response to both the recorded and ephemeral archives of Black dispossession. Students are encouraged to engage in events and workshops outside of the classroom, such as visiting library archives, attending performances, gallery exhibits, and film screenings.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM371, FGSS381, THEA373
Prereq: None

AFAM371 Sister Acts: Black Feminist/Womanist Theater of the African Diaspora

This course surveys the dynamism and scope of contemporary feminist/womanist drama written by black women playwrights of the African Diaspora. Reading select plays from Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, England, and the United States, alongside theory and criticism, we examine the impact of race, gender, identity, and sexuality politics on black feminist/womanist theater. Throughout our study of these dramatic texts, their performances, and their subsequent critiques, we are equally invested in the bridges and the gaps, the audibles and the silences, and the overlaps and the divides, as they are formed. Significantly, this analytic undertaking involves a simultaneous critique of the role of the playwright, the spectator, and the critic of black feminist/womanist theater. At all times, consideration is given to the ways in which these playwrights collectively use theater as a platform to explore black and female and diasporic subjectivities across regional, national, and, at times, linguistic differences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL371, FGSS371, THEA371
Prereq: None

AFAM372 Negativity in Black Critical Thought

Lack, nothingness, negation, the void, the abyssal, absence, wretchedness these and other corollary terms are omnipresent grammars within Black critical thought's attempts to explicate the singularity of Blackness. Conversant with philosophical genealogies of pessimism, nihilism, and negativity, this course will examine various theorizations of the relationship between Blackness and the negative. Rather than framing negativity as essentially apolitical or unproductive, this course will consider what a fidelity to the negative portends for questions of Black politics, Black theorizing, and revolutionary action. In so doing we will pay particular attention to questions of affect, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and psycho-politics.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL376
Prereq: None

AFAM375 Black Global Cities

In this course, we will analyze representations of cities and Black urban modernity in Afro- diasporic literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Placing special emphasis on the global hubs of London, Cape Town, Kinshasa Lagos, New York, Marseilles, and Kingston, we will ask what makes these former imperial sites Black global cities? We will read literary works on and from Black Global Cities alongside sociological texts on urbanization, globalization and discuss the extent to which literary representations either collude with or challenge dominant national and transnational narratives about Black urban modernity. Although each week's readings will focus on a different location, we will approach these locales as nodes in larger global networks of people, texts, and goods rather than as discreet, bounded places. To this end, we will trace how histories of racial formation move across borders and are transposed onto different spaces, and to what effect. Authors we will read include: Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Gabeba Baderoon, Petina Gappah, Kei Miller, and Teju Cole. We will also watch films such as Girlhood (2014), Black Panther (2018), The Harder They Come (1972), Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens (2011), Welcome to Nollywood (2007).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL375, AMST375
Prereq: None

AFAM379 The Fire Next Time: The Modern Black Freedom Struggle

The Fire Next Time explores the spectrum of African American politics in the mid-20th century United States. It will examine not only the nonviolent social movement against the Jim Crow South but will scrutinize expanding notions of black militancy against racial oppression in modern America. We will complete and discuss readings on the "short" and "long" civil rights movements; the position of women in movements for black equality; the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X; the work of civil rights activists in the urban North; and the movement for Black Power. This course seeks to provide students with an understanding of the major themes and contexts of the most important social movement of the 20th-century United States.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST379
Prereq: None

AFAM385 Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent

Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent will focus on the early 19th century through to the Progressive Era. It will explore racialized sexual markets, from what Black feminist historian Adrienne Davis has called "The Sexual Economy of American Slavery," to the Victorian-era marriage market, to continuing and emerging sex work and pleasure economies. This course will focus on areas of overlap, tension, and reinforcement within and between these racialized sexual markets. Fundamental to this class will be the question of if/how sexual consent is configured within these markets, and what this means in the broader evolution of American liberalism in the 19th- and early 20th-century U.S.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM385, FGSS385, HIST332
Prereq: None

AFAM386 Theory of Jazz Improvisation

This course concentrates on the vocabulary of improvisation in the African American classical tradition. Rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic knowledge will be approached through the study of scales, chords, modes, ear training, and transcription. Theoretical information will be applied to instruments in a workshop setting. Intensive practice and listening are required. This course may not be repeated for credit.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC210
Prereq: MUSC103

AFAM387 Black Religions in the Americas

This course will focus on the African-based religious systems that cultivated traditional ways to survive slavery, white supremacy, and state violence. We will focus on Vodou in Haiti, Regla de Ocha (Santeria) and Palo Mayombe in Cuba, Obeah in Jamaica, and aspects of Black religions in the US. We will discuss questions of method and themes of political resistance, orality, secrecy, magic, "authenticity," commodification, and the ethics of representation. We will also look at the Black church and especially the rise of the Pentecostal movement in African and Afro-Caribbean spaces, as well as visionary Black religious thought.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI268, LAST268, ANTH267, AMST258
Prereq: None

AFAM390 Jazz Improvisation Performance

In this extension of MUSC210, Theory of Jazz Improvisation, all materials previously explored will be applied to instruments in a workshop setting. Intensive practice and listening are required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC456
Prereq: None

AFAM391 Unsovereign Elements, Caribbean Poetics

This course aims to study and question sovereignty, begin to theorize "unsovereignty," and stake out what may be meant by "anticolonial imagination" in literary and other aesthetic forms, as well in the theories of history that it arranges under its name, "Unsovereign, Caribbean." Unsovereignty and the anticolonial will not be imagined as exact and liberated opposites of sovereignty and colonialism, but rather as epistemically and linguistically entangled therewith, and inviting further thought from Afro-Caribbean historical and deconstructive vantages. By reading richly symptomatic, primary, historical documents about race, geography, and slavery in San Domingue/Santo Domingo, as well as contemporary fiction, art, and criticism that re-narrate and theorize Caribbean history, we will focus on the historical frame of ~1492 into the 19th century. This frame holds with specific reference to Sara E. Johnson's notion of a foundational "state of war" against black people in the Americas and Frank B. Wilderson III's notion of when the "gratuitous violence" of the Middle Ages begins "to mark the Black ontologically." The 19th century will be studied comparatively, and not as the era of heralded "emancipation," but of abduction, re-enslavement, "travestied freedom" (Hartman), anti-emancipation (Eller), and white psychosis. We will read sometimes for imperial notions of sovereignty, force, race, property, and labor, and other times for Caribbean notions and narratives that are sometimes at war with and sometimes in bed with said imperial schema and this episteme. In the face of some contemporary critical theoretical tendencies to use terms like "fugitivity," "resistance," "freedom," "abolition," "the commons," etc., as ones that are equally at stake for all, or that signify one shared known, fixed, and agreed-upon meaning, we will, rather (and especially), attend to the historical specificity and signifying work of marronage in the Caribbean region and the complex tropology of unsovereignty and "unruliness" in the Caribbean. Conceptually, the course thinks from and about Caribbean studies, Black critical theory, Black studies, Enlightenment thought, and Deconstruction. Students who want to nerd-out on critical theory, history, and Caribbean aesthetics are encouraged to apply.



We will study digitized versions of imperial naval and commercial maps held at the John Carter Brown Library, Archivo de Indias, and in other archives, as well as primary texts of different genres (e.g., pilotes, ledgers, letters, legal documents), including the writing and thinking of Christopher Columbus, Moreau de Saint Mery, Baudry des Lozieres, María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel. We will also read selections from some of the following scholars, artists, writers: Colin Dayan, Sara E. Johnson, Evelynne Trouillot, Jacques Derrida, Robin Derby, Maryse Conde, Alejo Carpentier, Demetrius Eudell, Anne Eller, Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo, Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Frank Wilderson III, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Aimé Césaire, Beatriz Santiago Munoz, Joiri Minaya, Jean Rhys, and others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM391, ENGL391, AMST381
Prereq: None

AFAM392 Black Grief Geographies

This course introduces students to literature and practices centered on post-slavery and post-colonial bereavement. Employing an interdisciplinary framework of Black Geography, Feminist Geography, and Post-colonial thought, students will examine the spatial orientations of Black grief and mourning. Here students will also evaluate the connections and frictions between queries on emotional geographies and Black grief. What are the affective and material forces of Black grief and mourning and do they vary by place? How can we read Black grief and mourning beyond narratives of dispossession? What are the human and non-human assemblages that constitute Black grief and mourning? Is it possible to repair infrastructures that mark Black death? This course invites students to meditate on the above questions as well as to apply Black framings on grief to their own research by developing a 15-page visual essay or a 30-minute in-class lecture that draws on any of these questions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM390
Prereq: None

AFAM393 The Library: Its Past, Present, and Future

The library is both a repository and a site for disciplining information. It is, at once, a space for democratizing knowledge and a locus of exclusion. A lifeline and a tomb. A place of radicalization and community, but also the handmaiden of state power. Indeed, the library's vexed role in the history of Western colonization has prompted scholars of African and postcolonial literature like Simon Gikandi to ask whether one can be a revolutionary in the library. This question has shaped the archiving sensibilities of African American collectors and librarians like Arthur Schomburg and Dorothy Porter Wesley as well as those of contemporary Black librarians and artists. This will be one of the central questions we explore in this course, too. We will examine artistic and literary representations of libraries, archives, and museums ("The Library of Babel," The Shadow Book, Lote, The Name of the Rose, Voyage of the Sable Venus, Yinka Shonibare's "The British Museum"), paying special attention to the fantasies, nightmares, and cultural narratives that cohere around the idea of the library. We will pay special attention to the place of the library in the Black literary imagination and to the theoretical and political interventions that Black librarians and bibliophiles brought into systems for categorizing and recovering knowledge.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM392, ENGL343
Prereq: None

AFAM395 Black Cinema in the U.S.

What is Black Cinema? Is it, as Tommy Lott has claimed, a critical intervention that resists the "Hollywood master narrative"? Or, as Michael Gillespie claims, does it enact and perform the visual possibilities beyond any commitment to a "Black lifeworld"? This class does not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, it turns the lens of these questions onto the stakes, creativity, and possibilities of what we will encounter as Black Cinema. This class explores Black Cinema in the United States, examining the works of Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, Melvin Van Peebles, Kathleen Collins, Boots Riley, Terrance Nance, and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FILM
Identical With: FILM396
Prereq: FILM304 OR FILM307

AFAM396 Jazz Orchestra I

This course is for those with commitment to the American musical tradition called jazz. Skill and experience are highly desirable but, consistent practice is the biggest prerequisite. Small and large-ensemble repertoire composed by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Thad Jones, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Fletcher Henderson, John Coltrane and many other composers will be deeply engaged. Intensive practice and rehearsal of the compositions, as well as class presentations of readings, will lead to development of ensemble and solo skill. The commitment to rehearsal of the compositions, as well as listening and reading assignments, will culminate in an end of semester public concert.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC457
Prereq: None

AFAM397 Jazz Orchestra II

A continuation of MUSC 457, this course is for those with commitment to the American musical tradition called jazz. Skill and experience are highly desirable but, consistent practice is the biggest prerequisite. Small and large-ensemble repertoire composed by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Thad Jones, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Fletcher Henderson, John Coltrane, and many other composers will be deeply engaged. Intensive practice and rehearsal of the compositions, as well as class presentations of readings, will lead to development of ensemble and solo skill. The commitment to rehearsal of the compositions, as well as listening and reading assignments, will culminate in an end of semester public concert.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC458
Prereq: None

AFAM401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AFAM404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AFAM407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AFAM408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

AFAM409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AFAM420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AFAM420A Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AFAM420B Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

AFAM450 Steelband

This is an ensemble course in the musical arts of the Trinidadian steelband. Students learn to perform on steelband instruments and study the social, historical, and cultural context of the ensemble. We also address issues of theory, acoustics, arranging, and composing. Readings, recordings, and video viewings supplement in-class instruction. The ensemble will present public performances.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC450
Prereq: None

AFAM469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

AFAM470 Independent Study, Undergraduate

Credit may be earned for an independent study during a summer or authorized leave of absence provided that (1) plans have been approved in advance, and (2) all specified requirements have been satisfied.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

AFAM491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

AFAM492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT