original courses

(Image credit: Swank, Eve Album Cover, 2019. Digital Photograph)

Critics have described popular culture as what appeals to the masses and what they take pleasure in doing. Thinking with this definition, this course explores how Black culture became a part of, and significant influence to, broader popular culture. This is a media-focused course— we will engage with a variety of genres, platforms, and modalities to better understand how Black popular culture functions and spreads across the globe. This includes a variety of music, literature, movies, documentaries, and even ‘Black Twitter.’  Course texts include works by scholars Kiese Laymon, Tavia Nyong’o, and Emily Lordi as well as work by musicians such as J.Cole, Beyoncé, Rapsody, and Janelle Monae. This course will prepare students to recognize, analyze, and critique popular culture and its productions. 

(Image Credit: Kehinde Wiley, Shantavia Beale II, 2012. Oil on canvas)

What does it mean to be black in the 21st century? How does the political, social, and cultural climate of the new millennium situate and construct Blackness? Despite differences across geographic locations and origins, socioeconomic statuses, gender identities, and sexual orientations, religions, generations, and education levels, are there any collective experiences in Blackness? How do modern and contemporary literary cultures represent Blackness? In this course, we will examine multiple genres of Black literature—novels, essays, and poetry, as well as music, movies, and 'Black Twitter’ in order to engage these questions. Course texts include works by writers ZZ Packer, Zadie Smith, Kiese Laymon, as well as work by musicians such as J.Cole, OutKast, and Janelle Monae. This course will also explore a number of contemporary cultural critics to analyze and contextualize our understanding of the course works and Blackness in general. 

(Image credit: Wangechi Mutu, You Are My Sunshire, 2015. Collage.)

Using space as a metaphor, this course explores how Black feminist theory is built through, and subsequently helps build, both poetry and political writing/theory. Students will become familiarized with academic, popular, and emerging works in Black feminist theory and poetry. Each week covers a specific theme and  includes topics like justice, womanism, queerness, art/visual culture, inheritance, hip hop/music, ecology, and the digital humanities.  This course defines “poetry” broadly in terms of material and genre— there will be a wide variety forms of poetry assigned in this course. This includes traditional poets like Sonia Sanchez, Camille T. Dungy, and Danez Smith, as well as spoken word poets such as Aja Monet and Porsha Olayiwola, filmmakers like Marlon Riggs and Julie Dash, and musicians such as Lauryn Hill and Mos Def.   

(Image credit: Scipio Moorhead, 1773. etching.)

This course follows eighteenth and nineteenth century writings of the Black diaspora in the United States and the places they travel, including the Caribbean, Africa, and the United Kingdom. Central to this course is understanding the contexts in which these figures lived, the history that impacts their lives and how that connects to our present. Important themes through this course include: art, social and class dynamics, environmentalism, print culture, law, gender and sexuality, abolition, and freedom. We will work through a variety of literary and media genres including poetry, biographies, speeches, essays, letters, slave narratives, and periodicals. Course authors include Phillis Wheatley, Maria Stewart, Fredrick Douglas, and David Walker.