Critical Race & Political Econ 308 - Luminous Darkness: African American Social Thought After DuBois

Examines the life, work, and legacies of WEB DuBois. Drawing on domestic and diasporic fictional and nonfictional meditations on black life and progress in and beyond the 'DuBoisian century,' the course considers the changing meanings of and movements for global racial justice for people of African descent. The course also confronts the globalization of the color line in the post-Civil Rights/Black Power era. Due to increasing precarity for the masses, emphasis is given to more recent ideas like afro-pessimism, racial capitalism, and afro-futurism, as contemporary responses to DuBois's 1903 question, 'How does it feel to be a problem?' Readings by Jemisin, Gyasi, Robinson, Fields, Butler, Davis, Ransby, Hartman, Wilderson, Fanon, YamahttaTaylor, among others form the core of the course.

Prereq: 8 credits in Africana Studies, Critical Social Thought, or Critical Race and Political Economy.