Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 693B - S-Geographies/the "Imaginaire"

This course will explore the spatiality of African descendant people in the United States and in the larger Black diaspora, rethinking power, society & culture, knowledge production, and social movement through Blackness. It enters Blackness as a mode of political identification in memoir, folklore, ethnography, speculative fiction, essay, hybrids, photographs, and maps. As a conceptual apparatus for the course, ?the imaginaire? concerns counter-canonical forms of knowledge, our daily existence, as well as our most fundamental relationships ? precisely, our relationships with nature, other human beings, non-humans, and the spiritual, broadly conceived. How might entering the imaginative spaces of the Black diaspora defy anthropocentric perspectives of history, violence, and justice; of pleasure and intimacy? And how might ?the imaginaire? transform our understandings of race and race-making in the U.S., of intergenerational poverty and trauma, of futurity, of cross-cultural politics of solidarity, healing, and transformation? What analytics might be invoked to integrate the dead, the far, the demonic, the unknown, and the less-than-human in reimagining existing sociopolitical structures? Building on a rich tradition of transnational Black feminist and queer Marxist theorizing this interdisciplinary seminar will engage pioneering and cutting-edge contributions including those of Saidiya Hartman, Oyeronke Oy?wumi, Fred Moten, Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Dionne Brand, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz Fanon. Participants will be encouraged to pursue projects related to their own interests and graduate study, and the content of the course will also be shaped in part by those interests and projects.