ClassInfo

This graduate seminar is a survey of the rich field of Black cultural studies. We will read classic and emergent scholarship in Black cultural studies in order to chart the genealogy of the field as well as explore how Black culture helps us theorize (among other things): historical consciousness, political transformation, the triangulation of the human/non-human/otherly human, and interpersonal and institutional antagonisms along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and other axes of power, difference, and belonging. Importantly, we will look to as well as beyond the U.S. in order to chart how patterns of migration and movement complicate our understandings of Blackness and Black culture. In other words, this course seeks to develop an approach to Black cultural studies that is transnational and diasporic, that is multiple and multi-directional. In the end, this course serves as an interdisciplinary study of the historical and contemporary importance of Black cultural studies in helping us engage entrenched forms of marginalization and state-sanctioned violence and instead proffer tactics and modes of living and imagining otherwise.