Africana Studies 366 - SEM: BLACKNESS, BEING/BECOMING

Topics course.: This class uses canonical literature, as well as cultural productions and critical theory, in order to explore blackness as a modern racial formation (i.e. an idea with material consequences) and an identity. Beginning with the 19th century slave narrative tradition, and moving through the 20th and 21st centuries, we will explore how African Americans use written, sonic and visual languages to resist Eurocentric projections of otherness onto black bodies. Using theoretical frames—such as fugitive and unmoored subjectivity, demonic grounds, and the black interior—students will critically engage representational works that meditate on “blackness” not only in terms of nonbeing, but also in terms of becoming. In other words, we will treat the black imagination as a critical site of inquiry because of its construction of racialized subjectivity as varied, complex, and evolving. Examples from sonic and visual culture will be drawn from multiple sources. Readings may include Douglass, Jacobs,

Instructor Permission. Not open to first-years, sophomores