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Fall 2012 Undergraduate CoursesAFASW3030: Section 001 This course focuses on a central question: how do we define “African American music”? In attempting to answer this question, we will be thinking through concepts such as authenticity, representation, recognition, cultural ownership, appropriation, and origin(s). These concepts have structured the ways in which critics, musicians and audiences have addressed the various social, political and aesthetic contexts in which African American music has been composed (produced), performed (re-produced) and heard (consumed). AFASC3930: Section 001 This course uses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding contemporary social ills through the lens of Hip-Hop culture. Issues like race, class, gender, poverty and sexuality are common concerns in the wider social world, but Hip-Hop has provided unique articulations of and responses to these issues. Hip-Hop often “gives voice” to the voiceless, at the same time, Hip-Hop has been a site for inequality. We will explore the degree to which Hip-Hop is or can be a social change agent. This course will expose students to the field of Hip-Hop Studies, issues in urban America, and international perspectives on Hip-Hop culture. AFASC3930: Section 003 This seminar examines the intersection of race, gender and nation in the formation of hierarchical social systems and their legitimating ideologies. A leading premise of this course is that racial ideologies are, foundationally, claims about the heritability of social produced and imagined differences-claims that muster, mimic and articulate notions of differences associated with a variety of social distinctions, including sex/gender, class and nation-based identities. This seminar will situate the process of racialization within the wider problematic of political subjectivity and direct attention to the symbolic and structural organization of modern, hierarchical social systems. AFASC3936: Section 001 "This undergraduate seminar examines a diverse group of black intellectuals' formulations of ideologies and theories relative to racial, economic and gender oppression within the context of dominant intellectual trends. The intellectuals featured in the course each contributed to the evolution of black political thought, and posited social criticisms designed to undermine racial and gender oppression, and labor exploitation around the world. This group of black intellectuals' work will be analyzed paying close attention to the way that each intellectual inverts dominant intellectual trends, and/or uses emerging social scientific disciplines to counter racism, sexism, and classism. This seminar is designed to facilitate an understanding of the black intellectual tradition that has emerged as a result of African American thinkers attempts to develop of a unified response to, and understanding of the black condition. This course explores of a wide range of primary and secondary sources from several different periods, offering students opportunity to explore the lives and works some of the most important black intellectuals. We will also consider the way that period-specific intellectual phenomenon—such as Modernism, Marxism, Pan-Africanism and Feminism—combined with a host of social realities to shape and reshape black thought." |
