AFRO 597

Fall 2021 All Classes

All Classes

Problems in African-Am Studies

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Credit: 4 hours.

Focused reading and study of special problems in African American Studies.

May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Prerequisite: Graduate standing, AFRO 500 or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

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AFRO 597 class schedule data for fall 2021
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	46593	Lecture-Discussion	B	12:00PM -2:20PM	W	312 Davenport Hall	Jenkins, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/23/21-12/08/21 Section Info: AFRO 597 - Thinking Blackness in the Long Contemporary - This course is an experiment in Black thought. Through readings of (primarily) 21st century literary and cultural criticism, as well as a sampling of recent fiction and film, we will consider how African American creatives and scholars have theorized Black existence. Our inquiry, while centered in the now, will attend in part to temporal and political shifts in the “contemporary moment” from the disorderly post-Civil Rights past to the “post-racial” fantasies of the Obama era to today’s restive and insurgent Black Lives Matter present. The critical path to and through Blackness that we follow, led by the works under study, will be intersectional, dynamic, and polymorphous; it will push us into encounters with the queer, the melancholy, the satirical, and the surreal. Reading widely, yet deliberating with care and in depth, we will hold space for Blackness as struggle and refusal, as pleasure and joy, as collective grief, as power, and, most crucially, as possibility. Primary texts may include work from, among others: Danzy Senna, Claudia Rankine, Kiese Laymon, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Paul Beatty, Robert Jones, Jr., Barry Jenkins, and Jesmyn Ward; critical readings may include work from, among others: Hortense Spillers, Darieck Scott, Elizabeth Alexander, Kevin Quashie, C. Riley Snorton, Fred Moten, Frank Wilderson, Margo Crawford, Therí Pickens, Saidiya Hartman, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Robert Reid-Pharr, Jayna Brown, Christina Sharpe, and Erica Edwards. Attendance and participation; two mini-essays and a presentation; final seminar paper. (Same as ENGL 559) Restriction(s): Restricted to students with Graduate class standing. Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.