Africana Studies 366 - SEM: CONTEMP TOPICS AFR-AM ST

Topics course. How have the experiences of black subjects in urban locations shaped our understandings of both blackness and the city? What does it mean to think about the dialectic of American blackness as moving between southerness and urbanity? And how do Caribbean and African (im)migrations to the metropole imagine the city in terms of colonial relations and postcolonial dreams? This course focuses primarily on literary, visual and musical productions of and about the transnational black city, situating these texts within their historical and cultural contexts. Central to this study is the idea of rupture, the effects of travel and transformation on the language, form and themes of black texts-on ideas of blackness itself. Ultimately, this course centers on questions of identity as understood through theories of intersectionality, migration and globalization. We explore blackness as an idiom of place, a site of belonging, abjection and freedom.

Topic: Ruptures in Time: Blackness and the City (Capstone Course) Instructor permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores