Topics in the Black Experience

This seminar will focus on theories, practices, and literature of Black thought and Black feminist imaginaries. We will read some of the significant Black feminist scholarship and literature that have emerged over the past three centuries with particular attention to Black feminist theorizing of the intersections of race and gender. The bulk of our reading will concentrate on 20th and 21st century texts with particular attention to the ways that Black feminists (even those retroactively so-named) have long insisted on the material, social, and spiritual significance of Black lives, Black life, and Black thought. In this course, we will read across genre and field to consider the myriad discourses in which Black feminist theorizing has intervened. The list of writers, artists, and thinkers whose work will guide our interrogations include Phillis Wheatley, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Zora Neale Hurston, Fanny Lou Hamer, Johnetta B. Cole, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, Susan Lori Parks, Saidiya Hartman, Adrienne Piper, Daphne Brooks, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. Central to the course investigations is Carolyn Martin Shaw’s description in “Disciplining the Black Female Body: Learning Feminism in Africa and the United States”: “The individual, the social agent or actor, is a product of culture and produces culture. An individual's subjectivity is determined by that which he or she is subject to (such as laws, language, and stories) and that which he or she is subject of (such as personal decisions, actions, and stories). What holds together fragmentary cultures and part societies? I find the term discourse useful for thinking about linkages and articulations within and across “part societies.”” And across fields. Black feminist imaginaries offer discourses which intervene in dominating narrative, language, image, and knowledge structures. Multiple areas of knowledge and knowledge production must be brought to bear. We will read and think through how Black feminist imaginaries may reframe our understandings of the individual, the state, and the state of things