Minkah Makalani

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

In this course we will explore some of the central themes and problems of Black Studies in the United States and the Black Diaspora. We will ask: What is race and how has it functioned in the constitution of modernity, space, and selfhood? What is blackness and how is it lived and expressed? What is the relationship of slavery to capitalism, empire, war, and democracy, and what are the ideological, performative, and cognitive legacies of slavery? Finally, what formations of imagination and sociability have (dis)organized Black communal life, and which remain vital?

To ask these questions, of course, requires that we simultaneously engage more basic inquiries about the very dynamic nature, constitution, and aim of Black Studies. What is Black studies? Who are its subjects? What is its object? These, and the opening questions, are rendered even more complex when we recognize that Black Studies – in the United States as in its Black diaspora versions – is defined by unstable, shifting, and contested genealogies, boundaries, and projects. Black Studies is as contested, unstable, and vulnerable as the social life/social death it portrays, and as such defies – although certainly encourages – final categorizations. 

We will pursue these and other questions emerging out of our seminar by following the intellectual path W.E.B. Du Bois marked in his The Souls of Black Folk. As the achievement of a highly dedicated yet quite often parochial man of his time, Souls reflects an intellectual terrain that is, on the one hand, quite generative, and on the other, fraught and sometimes perilous. To grapple with Du Bois is to engage the larger field of Black Studies; to grapple with the field of Black Studies is to engage Du Bois. An attentive reading of Du Bois will engender propositions that both address the text and extrapolate it. This resulting set of propositions, in turn, gives us an entry into the ever-shifting conceptual assemblage that is Black Diasporic Studies. 

Course assignments and expectations

This is an intensive, collective theoretical conversation. It requires consistency of reading and participation over the entire semester. Students must be prepared to actively engage in seminar discussions during every session. Attendance and active participation are mandatory, and are a considerable portion of your evaluation.

The seminar space must be respected. Please take care of your health and rest needs so that you are not tempted to nap or doze off during our sessions. If agreed, we will have a 15 minute break at the halfway point of our seminar. Please turn off any electronic device that might produce distracting sounds. 

Grading

Research Paper (15-20 pages): 50%                                                                   

Leading Class Discussion: 25%

Class participation (including freethinking weekly piece): 25%

Description:

It can be said that Black people have engaged in a centuries-long, global struggle for freedom. Some might consider the high tide of this struggle as having occurred in the United States, extending from the 1950s into the 1970s. Others might look to the national independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean, which created a series of autonomous Black nations, as the watermark of black freedom. But the global currency of Black Lives Matter suggests that the quest for freedom continues. This course explores the history of Black people’s twentieth century struggles for freedom, taking as its focus the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, African and Caribbean anticolonial movements, and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement. This course will ask and seek to answer several questions, including: What is freedom? How have Black people thought about freedom? Is there a difference between liberation and freedom? How has this differed from or challenged dominant western notions of the liberal individual? Is it fair to view Black Lives Matter as suggesting black people are not free? This course will examine key historical events and figures in the U.S., Africa, and Caribbean, with particular attention to intellectual currents, organizational formations, and mass political movements. We will also consider how culture, religion, and social deviance inform how we might think about Black political conceptions of freedom.

Sample Texts: 

• Eric Duke, Building a Nation: Caribbean Federation in the Black Diaspora
• Françoise Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II
• Chimamanda Negozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun.
• Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations
• Kenanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

In this course we will explore some of the central themes and problems of Black Studies in the United States and the Black Diaspora. We will ask: What is race and how has it functioned in the constitution of modernity, space, and selfhood? What is blackness and how is it lived and expressed? What is the relationship of slavery to capitalism, empire, war, and democracy, and what are the ideological, performative, and cognitive legacies of slavery? Finally, what formations of imagination and sociability have (dis)organized Black communal life, and which remain vital?

To ask these questions, of course, requires that we simultaneously engage more basic inquiries about the very dynamic nature, constitution, and aim of Black Studies. What is Black studies? Who are its subjects? What is its object? These, and the opening questions, are rendered even more complex when we recognize that Black Studies – in the United States as in its Black diaspora versions – is defined by unstable, shifting, and contested genealogies, boundaries, and projects. Black Studies is as contested, unstable, and vulnerable as the social life/social death it portrays, and as such defies – although certainly encourages – final categorizations. 

We will pursue these and other questions emerging out of our seminar by following the intellectual path W.E.B. Du Bois marked in his The Souls of Black Folk. As the achievement of a highly dedicated yet quite often parochial man of his time, Souls reflects an intellectual terrain that is, on the one hand, quite generative, and on the other, fraught and sometimes perilous. To grapple with Du Bois is to engage the larger field of Black Studies; to grapple with the field of Black Studies is to engage Du Bois. An attentive reading of Du Bois will engender propositions that both address the text and extrapolate it. This resulting set of propositions, in turn, gives us an entry into the ever-shifting conceptual assemblage that is Black Diasporic Studies. 

Course assignments and expectations

This is an intensive, collective theoretical conversation. It requires consistency of reading and participation over the entire semester. Students must be prepared to actively engage in seminar discussions during every session. Attendance and active participation are mandatory, and are a considerable portion of your evaluation.

The seminar space must be respected. Please take care of your health and rest needs so that you are not tempted to nap or doze off during our sessions. If agreed, we will have a 15 minute break at the halfway point of our seminar. Please turn off any electronic device that might produce distracting sounds. 

Grading

Research Paper (15-20 pages): 50%                                                                   

Leading Class Discussion: 25%

Class participation (including freethinking weekly piece): 25%

A capstone course fpr AFR majors focusing on black intellectual traditions.

Please check back for updates.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Description:

The core artistic practice in Hip-Hop is the break beat, more commonly known as the sample. In the early days of the musical genre, the sample was a source of contention, as artists and record companies sued hip-hop artist for copyright infringement for the use of samples. This course approaches hip-hop as a cultural arts movement that thrived on and produced its art through modes of theft. From the break beat/sample, graffiti, the ability of sound systems to sonically invade private space, and thus allow the very words of the rapper to robbed non-hip-hop heads of their ability to not listen, theft has been a long standing artistic practice of hip-hop.

This course will explore the central artistic forms of hip-hop — the break beat, graffiti, b-boying, and its sonic levels — as practices of theft that outlined a new, radical black art form. Students in this course will analyze songs, films, and music videos as their primary texts in this course. Students will be graded on class discussions, three quizzes, two short (4-page) paper, and a final project on one of the core art forms that constitute hip-hop.

Sample Texts:

• Jeff Chang, "Can't Stop, Won't Stop." (book)
• Course packet of readings

Grading:

Class discussion: 20%

Three quizzes: 30%

Two short paper: 20%

Final Project: 30%

Description:

It can be said that Black people have engaged in a centuries-long, global struggle for freedom. Some might consider the high tide of this struggle as having occurred in the United States, extending from the 1950s into the 1970s. Others might look to the national independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean, which created a series of autonomous Black nations, as the watermark of black freedom. But the global currency of Black Lives Matter suggests that the quest for freedom continues. This course explores the history of Black people’s twentieth century struggles for freedom, taking as its focus the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, African and Caribbean anticolonial movements, and the more recent Black Lives Matter movement. This course will ask and seek to answer several questions, including: What is freedom? How have Black people thought about freedom? Is there a difference between liberation and freedom? How has this differed from or challenged dominant western notions of the liberal individual? Is it fair to view Black Lives Matter as suggesting black people are not free? This course will examine key historical events and figures in the U.S., Africa, and Caribbean, with particular attention to intellectual currents, organizational formations, and mass political movements. We will also consider how culture, religion, and social deviance inform how we might think about Black political conceptions of freedom.

Sample Texts: 

• Eric Duke, Building a Nation: Caribbean Federation in the Black Diaspora
• Françoise Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II
• Chimamanda Negozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun.
• Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations
• Kenanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

The Black Radical Tradition is centuries long, spanning various regions, national formations, and political currents and sensibilities. In one form or another, its central problematic is the question of freedom, though it has taken up considerably more that just this single issue. In this course, we are focused on what might be called the Black radical imaginary. As such, among the questions we will broach in the weekly seminar are: What, precisely, is the Black radical tradition? What is the function of an intellectual or political tradition? What are the bodies of thought, practices, and movements that revolve in various ways around, and delve into foundational questions tied to, experience, the human, the state, nation, race, citizenship, coloniality, rights, and modernity? While beginning from the assumption that the Black radical tradition is a diasporic project marked by a series of political, intellectual, and epistemological concerns about modern society, we will take up how the question of imagination has informed historical figures, and how a preoccupation with the imaginary shapes contemporary notions of politics, social life, and freedom. What work does the imagination do in the realm of thought? Might imagination, by which we might be able to conceptualize an alternative to the political present, present certain limitations and problems for how we approach liberation, freedom, and the human? What is the relationship between the Black radical tradition, imagination, the fantastic, and futurity?

Sample Texts: 

• Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
• C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary.
• Claudia Jones, Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment.
• George Lamming, Sovereignty of the Imagination.
• Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breakers.
• Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism.
• Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic.
• Kelly Baker Josephs, Disturbers of the Peace.
• Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership.
• Mimi Cheller, Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom.
• Gary Wilder, Freedom Dreams.
• Nahum Dimitri Chandler, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams.

DIASPORA: RACE, NATION & RESISTANCE

This course offers students a comparative study in the makings and meanings of diaspora. We

begin by defining the differences and similarities between diaspora and related concepts such as

race, nation and cultural identity. Focusing specifically on black folk in the Americas, our

concerns will revolve around how different groups in diaspora have understood themselves, and

their relationships to others in the diaspora, their place within the nation, and how a sense of

their ties to one another has fostered alternative ways of being. In turn, how those in the African

diaspora have responded to their place within various nation-states (the United States, Haiti,

Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, etc.) has entailed various forms of resistance. Along these

lines, we will explore how African diasporic populations have responded to slavery, colonialism,

racial oppression, and modernity as they articulated notions of democracy that challenged

dominant structures of citizenship. We explore these ideas through looking at slave revolts,

anticolonial and Afro-Asian liberation struggles, Black/Third World Feminism, globalization,

and the sexual politics of diaspora. Across each of these themes, we work under the premise that

diaspora is an open and fluid space through which its participants “make our world anew.” (This

is a lower division undergrad course).

Requirements:

Students are expected to complete the course readings and to arrive prepared for

discussion based on the readings. Students are expected to maintain regular attendance. After

your third absence (your fourth absence), your grade will be lowered one letter grade (i.e., you

will receive a zero for Attendance). Class assignments include one take-home essay (4-pages,

typed and doubled spaced), an in-class midterm exam (identifications and short essay) and a final.

Grading:

• Attendance: 10%
• Participation: 15%
• Essay Assignment 20%
• Midterm: 20%
• Final: 35%

• Extra Credit opportunities will be made available to students. Guidelines will be discussed in class

• Guidelines for all assignments, including the midterm and final exam, will be distributed throughout the course of

the semester.

Required Texts:

Available at the University Co-op Bookstore

• Cathy J. Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics.
• W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (2008 Oxford edition; Intro. by Brent Hayes
• Edwards)
• George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile.
• Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
• All other readings available on blackboard, or as Electronic book from UT library.

Over the past thirty years, hip-hop as a cultural form has transformed from a local South Bronx cultural phenomenon into a global arts movement. While its most notable element remains rap music, many will argue for a distinction between rap and hip-hop. The World of Hip-Hop will explore the contours of Hip-Hop as a cultural arts movement that entails important political elements. We will examine the history of this movement from DJing, rapping, b-boying, and graffiti art in the South Bronx in the 1970s, track its movement across the United States to the west coast, south, and mid-west, and then globally, focusing largely on its appearance in the Caribbean, Brazil, and as hip-life in Ghana.

The focus on the artistry of hip-hop entails a consideration of its political valences, most dynamically in the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, its relay with Rastafari, and new youth social movements, particularly contemporary concerns about police violence and the rise of the carceral state. What claims about justice, freedom, the good life, and community do we find in hip-hop? While it is considered a largely masculine space, how have women, queer, and trans people operated within its cultural and political spaces? Can we see a correspondence between the political and social values articulted within hip-hop, and current political discourses around electoral politics, a post-racial world, and black death?

While there will be some reading, the primary texts for this course will consist of music, videos, and film. Students will write a fiftee page research paper, and take a weekly quiz. 

Grading Breakdown:

Four Quizzes 40%

Journals 15%

Participation 10%

Research Paper 35%

Examination of liberation and freedom struggles in the African diaspora, focusing on common intellectual, political, and social currents among the diaspora's various groups. Course focuses on three major themes: abolitionism, Pan-Africanism and national liberation, and hip hop. Particular emphasis will be on the ideas associated with these movements, and the major organizations and intellectual currents in all three.

A capstone course fpr AFR majors focusing on black intellectual traditions.

Race and empire are central features of the modern world that have shaped social life, political structures, power relationships, and modes of governance across space and time. Modernity as a marker of historical progress is seen to mark an age of scientific discovery, economic development, and democratic governance that holds the potential for moving humanity beyond racial and national oppression. This seminar asks how might we understand race, empire, and modernity if they are viewed as deeply imbricated, mutually constitutive structures and modes of thought ordering the social world. If they emerged together, how have they taken shape historically? What is gained by viewing them together? What are the theoretical and methodological demands made of such an inquiry? This seminar begins with the rise of those empires that issued from the “discovery” of the Americas and the inauguration of the European slave trade and plantation slavery, and examines how slavery, race and racial oppression, genocide, and colonialism proved central to the major leaps in science, industry, and the dawn of democracy. With a theoretically rich reading schedule that will touch on the colonial period but largely focus on the twentieth century, we will read across the disciplines in history, literature, political theory, and anthropology, and pay particular attention to how those subjected to racialized modernity within the African diaspora (the Caribbean, Africa, the U.S., and Europe) thought about, debated, and approached modernity, empire, racial slavery, what it means to be human, and the nature of freedom.

Potential books for this course include:

Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives on Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito.

Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage.

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era.

Omise’eke Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature.

Christina Sharpe, Montrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects.

David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice.

Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica.

Over the past thirty years, hip-hop as a cultural form has transformed from a local South Bronx cultural phenomenon into a global arts movement. While its most notable element remains rap music, many will argue for a distinction between rap and hip-hop. The World of Hip-Hop will explore the contours of Hip-Hop as a cultural arts movement that entails important political elements. We will examine the history of this movement from DJing, rapping, b-boying, and graffiti art in the South Bronx in the 1970s, track its movement across the United States to the west coast, south, and mid-west, and then globally, focusing largely on its appearance in the Caribbean, Brazil, and as hip-life in Ghana.

The focus on the artistry of hip-hop entails a consideration of its political valences, most dynamically in the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, its relay with Rastafari, and new youth social movements, particularly contemporary concerns about police violence and the rise of the carceral state. What claims about justice, freedom, the good life, and community do we find in hip-hop? While it is considered a largely masculine space, how have women, queer, and trans people operated within its cultural and political spaces? Can we see a correspondence between the political and social values articulted within hip-hop, and current political discourses around electoral politics, a post-racial world, and black death?

While there will be some reading, the primary texts for this course will consist of music, videos, and film. Students will write a fiftee page research paper, and take a weekly quiz. 

Grading Breakdown:

Four Quizzes 40%

Journals 15%

Participation 10%

Research Paper 35%

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States to many signaled the culmination of the mid-century American Civil Rights Movement. Making sense of such a claim, however, begs the question, what were CRM’s goals. This course will focus on what scholars are now calling the Black Freedom Movement — the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movement — to understand precisely what the goals and objectives were, that would help explain the sense that this movement has finally realized its goal with the election of the nation’s first black president. It also brings into question whether the Black Freedom Movement’s impulse was toward mere integration, or a more fundamental interrogation and critique of the American democratic experiment.

Among the topics covered in this course, we will consider what motivated black people, in the face of extreme violence and often the certainty of death, to mount a movement to reshape society. Along with exploring their motivations, this course will consider the forms of activism they pursued, what the various groups of people envisioned as the socially just and free society; in other words, what kind of world did they hope to bring into existence? Was it merely a world free of racism? Was it a new world entirely? We will approach these questions by looking at political struggles around culture, aesthetics, and identity. In addition, we will give attention to the international, how Civil Rights and Black Power activists worked to link their struggles to African and non-African liberation movements, with special attention to their efforts to build linkages with the liberation struggles of other oppressed groups (e.g., Puerto Ricans, Chicanas/os, Asian Americans, women, students, etc.), and how these movements themselves had international dimensions (organizations and activism in Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe).

Sample Texts:

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt.

Peniel Joseph, Waiting Till the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.

Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America.

Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations.

Description:

Modernity is generally seen to involve a narrative of historical progress away from periods of human development characterized by the entanglements of tradition, myth, despotism, oppressive governments, and religious dogma. It reflects a web of assumed cultural, political, philosophical, and technological discoveries and advancements that have benefited humanity. Yet this story takes on a different narrative arc when we consider that race and racial oppression only emerged as social categories and systems of domination, with the dawn of modernity. What does it mean to study modernity from the perspective of the colonization of the Americas, the rise of plantation slavery, genocide against native peoples, and the systems of racial domination that have persisted since slavery? Why has empire been the dominant mode of world organizations from the dawn of modernity until the mid-20th century? What are we to make of such notions of liberty, justice, and democracy, when those terms were explicitly denied enslaved Africans and their descendants?

This course will examine race and empire as central features of modernity and enlightenment thought, with particular attention to how the enslaved, colonized, and those others, often explicitly excluded from dominant conceptions of the nation-state, engaged with modernist thought and political structures, often expanding its core concepts, and at times moving beyond those terms of order to articulate alternative notions of freedom and liberation. We will examine how empire, race and racial oppression, and the structures of colonialism have been central to modernity, and how those caught within this web of cultural, political, philosophical, and scientific advancements have challenged those structures.

Texts:

Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom.

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.

Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. 

Examination of liberation and freedom struggles in the African diaspora, focusing on common intellectual, political, and social currents among the diaspora's various groups. Course focuses on three major themes: abolitionism, Pan-Africanism and national liberation, and hip hop. Particular emphasis will be on the ideas associated with these movements, and the major organizations and intellectual currents in all three.

May be counted toward the global cultures flag requirement.

Description

Race and sex remain controversial topics of public debate, with interracial sexual unions and their (“mixed-race”) progeny constituting one of the more troublesome features of the American democratic experiment. It therefore seems hardly coincidental that Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, is the son of a Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas. How did his mixed-racial parentage impact his election? Did it render him less black and thus palatable to whites? Do black people still consider him black, or question his authenticity? And how important is it that Obama identifies as black, not biracial?

This course examines the history of mixed-race and interracial sex in America, with particular attention to the racial ideologies, legal structures, policies, and social categories that have defined people of mixed-racial parentage as belonging to, or not belonging to, a given racial group. While people of mixed parentage (parents from two different racial groups) have grown over the past two decades, these have been long standing realities in American history. Given the history of race and racial oppression in America, we will explore the stereotypes and anxieties around interracial sex (black rapists/sluts; submissive Asian women/effeminate Asian men; exotic Latin@s, etc.), and how political power, property, and sexual violence informed such views. Though much of the course will center on people of mixed-black/white parentage/ancestry, we will also examine similar themes involved Asian/white, black/Asian, Latin@/black, Latin@/white, and Middle Eastern/black interracial unions and parentage/ancestry over the course of American history.

Texts:

Shirley Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Harvard U. Press)

Gerg Carter, The United States of the united Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York U. Press)

Kimberley McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford U. Press)

Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Penguin)

DIASPORA: RACE, NATION & RESISTANCE

Instructor: Dr. Minkah Makalani

Course Description

This course offers students a comparative study in the makings and meanings of diaspora. We

begin by defining the differences and similarities between diaspora and related concepts such as

race, nation and cultural identity. Focusing specifically on black folk in the Americas, our

concerns will revolve around how different groups in diaspora have understood themselves, and

their relationships to others in the diaspora, their place within the nation, and how a sense of

their ties to one another has fostered alternative ways of being. In turn, how those in the African

diaspora have responded to their place within various nation-states (the United States, Haiti,

Brazil, Dominican Republic, England, etc.) has entailed various forms of resistance. Along these

lines, we will explore how African diasporic populations have responded to slavery, colonialism,

racial oppression, and modernity as they articulated notions of democracy that challenged

dominant structures of citizenship. We explore these ideas through looking at slave revolts,

anticolonial and Afro-Asian liberation struggles, Black/Third World Feminism, globalization,

and the sexual politics of diaspora. Across each of these themes, we work under the premise that

diaspora is an open and fluid space through which its participants “make our world anew.” (This

is a lower division undergrad course).

Requirements: Students are expected to complete the course readings and to arrive prepared for

discussion based on the readings. Students are expected to maintain regular attendance. After

your third absence (your fourth absence), your grade will be lowered one letter grade (i.e., you

will receive a zero for Attendance). Class assignments include one take-home essay (4-pages,

typed and doubled spaced), an in-class midterm exam (identifications and short essay) and a final.

Grading:

Attendance: 10%

Participation: 15%

Essay Assignment 20%

Midterm: 20%

Final: 35%

• Extra Credit opportunities will be made available to students. Guidelines will be discussed in class

• Guidelines for all assignments, including the midterm and final exam, will be distributed throughout the course of

the semester.

• The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified

students with disabilities. For more information, contact.

2

Academic Integrity

Students are advised to familiarize themselves with the University of Texas’ policies on academic

integrity, and the penalty for plagiarism and other forms of cheating. Please note, any instance of

plagiarism in this course will result in an automatic “F” for the assignment; the final disposition of

a penalty will follow the University’s guidelines. Please follow the links below for more

information:

http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs/for_students.php

http://deanofstudents.utexas.edu/sjs/acadint_whatis.php

Required Texts

Available at the University Co-op Bookstore

• Cathy J. Cohen,

Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics.

• W.E.B Du Bois,

The Souls of Black Folk. (2008 Oxford edition; Intro. by Brent Hayes

Edwards)

• George Lamming,

The Pleasures of Exile.

• Audre Lorde,

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

• All other readings available on blackboard, or as Electronic book from UT library.

Please check back for updates.

This course examines the liberation movements in the African diaspora, from political activities to cultural production, and the circulation of ideas among people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Though the course will concentrate on maroonage, nationalism, anti-colonial liberation, music, and studying the major figures and intellectual currents of liberation, it will also explore how African diasporic movements have impacted world history and have expanded the meanings of such concepts as freedom, enlightenment, and rights. The course will also consider how travel and internationalism informed various movements. In thinking about what constitutes the African diaspora and how a liberation movement takes shape within it, the course will explore major political and intellectual trends in the African diaspora. For example, how did the Haitian revolution (the only successful slave revolt in history) inspire Black people during slavery and after? How did it challenge enlightenment thinking and what it means to be human? How did Black nationalism articulate the bonds between African liberation movements and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement? What are Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, and Cuba important sites in the political imaginary?

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States to many signaled the culmination of the mid-century American Civil Rights Movement. Making sense of such a claim, however, begs the question, what were CRM’s goals. This course will focus on what scholars are now calling the Black Freedom Movement — the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movement — to understand precisely what the goals and objectives were, that would help explain the sense that this movement has finally realized its goal with the election of the nation’s first black president. It also brings into question whether the Black Freedom Movement’s impulse was toward mere integration, or a more fundamental interrogation and critique of the American democratic experiment.

Among the topics covered in this course, we will consider what motivated black people, in the face of extreme violence and often the certainty of death, to mount a movement to reshape society. Along with exploring their motivations, this course will consider the forms of activism they pursued, what the various groups of people envisioned as the socially just and free society; in other words, what kind of world did they hope to bring into existence? Was it merely a world free of racism? Was it a new world entirely? We will approach these questions by looking at political struggles around culture, aesthetics, and identity. In addition, we will give attention to the international, how Civil Rights and Black Power activists worked to link their struggles to African and non-African liberation movements, with special attention to their efforts to build linkages with the liberation struggles of other oppressed groups (e.g., Puerto Ricans, Chicanas/os, Asian Americans, women, students, etc.), and how these movements themselves had international dimensions (organizations and activism in Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe).

This course offers students a comparative study in the makings and meanings of diaspora. We begin by defining the differences and similarities between diaspora and related concepts such as race, nation and cultural identity. Focusing specifically on the making of the Black Atlantic world, we then draw a comparative analysis between black diasporic life and that of other global dispersals, particularly among Asian and indigenous populations. Resistance serves as a key link in this comparative study.  As such, we focus on themes such as slavery and colonialism, black revolt in the modern world, Third World/Afro-Asian liberation, Black/Third World Feminism, globalization, the sexual politics of diaspora, Across each of these themes, we work with the premise that diaspora is an open and fluid space through which its participants “make our world anew.” (This is a lower division undergrad course) 

Texts:

1. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
2. W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
3. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections & The Myth Of Cultural Purity
4. C.L.R James, A History of Pan African Revolt
5. Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney

At a fundamental level, historians tell stories, though not necessarily fictions. They build stories through research in archives, newspapers and magazines, organizational records, and even oral interviews. Yet history rarely involves the detailing of a “truth,” simply revealing what happened as it happened, which all future generations merely accept. The production of historical scholarship —deciding what to include, what to leave out, what to say and what not to say — involves a series of choices about how to tell a story. Drawing on the methodological concerns guiding historical scholarship, and theoretical work out of anthropology and literary studies, this course examines how narration shapes the study of the African diaspora.

The course begins with theoretical works that contemplate narrative and narration, which provide a theoretical baseline for exploring some of the core conceptual and methodological concerns guiding African Diaspora studies. Our weekly meetings will focus on how a new way of narrating a story about the African diaspora shapes the field’s growth. 

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A capstone course fpr AFR majors focusing on black intellectual traditions.