Black Studies 288 - Sex, Race, and Empire: The Global Politics of Gender and Sexuality

(Offered as SWAG 188 and BLST 288[US, D]) How might we connect the U.S.’s current economic, social, and military dominance over much of the world to empires of the past such as the nineteenth century British empire in India, Africa and the Caribbean? What does the existence of human zoos of the nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us about how empires thought of colonized peoples? How might we connect imperial legacies to the current immigrant crisis in the U.S.? How have the gendered performances of American military women during the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan been instrumentalized for counterinsurgency warfare? This course looks at a global range of responses to empire and colonization by activists, writers and filmmakers–from the early Indian proto-feminist novella Sultana’s Dream (1905) to the contemporary American film BlacKkKlansman (2018), and the classic anti-colonial film Battle of Algiers (1967), among others.

Fall semester. Co-taught by Professors Polk and Shandilya.

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Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Written work, readings, independent research, oral presentations, group work, and visual analysis.