The spring semester will bring a new course with Prof. Aaron Pride and two with Prof. V. N. Trinh.
AFS 235: An Urban Crisis in History and Film
Fridays 1:10-4 p.m.
Professor V. N. Trinh
“An Urban Crisis in History and Film” serves as a cultural and political study of the 20th-century United States city. The term “urban crisis” alludes to Thomas J. Sugrue’s argument that racial segregation, economic austerity, and deindustrialization decimated the country’s once-flourishing manufacturing metropolises. To make sense of that tragedy, policymakers and pundits alike depicted the resultant “inner cities”—the country’s blackest and poorest neighborhoods—as corrupt, diseased dens of moral decay and seedy criminality. Using academic texts and popular films, students consider the urban crisis not just as an actual lived reality for Black and poor urbanites, but also as a canvas for voyeuristic fantasies and a window into the country’s most extreme conditions.
AFS 245: Race, Policing, and Justice in U.S. Cities
MW 11 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Professor V. N. Trinh
“Race, Policing, and Justice in U.S. Cities” is a reading- and discussion-intensive seminar on race, policing, and cities in the United States from the 1890s to the present. Topics include Progressive Era panics around the criminality of racialized undesirables; an urban crisis that provided the underlying impetus for an expansive War on Crime; contemporary law-and-order policing and its troubled relationship with neoliberal social policy; and the human ramifications of draconian enforcement, surveillance, and incarceration.
AFS 307: African American Political Thought
TR 1:15-2:30 p.m.
Professor Aaron Pride
This course surveys the development and maturation of Black social and political thought in the context of the experiences of African-descended peoples and communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from the inception of the Transatlantic slave trade to the present. Black political thought in the African American experience is the primary focus of the course with some consideration of the interactions of this community with the broader Black diaspora. In undertaking this task, this course concentrates on the meaning and practice of politics in the African America experience. By centering on debates, discussions, and conversations within African American political thought, this course explores Black political engagement in the context of the initial exclusion of Blacks from the political sphere to their eventual integration into the body politic of the United States. In recounting and describing this process, this course aims to expose students to the motives, means, and aspirations Black thinkers attributed to both the possibility of the potential of multiracial democracy in the United States and probability of the necessity to consider leaving the United States to establish a Black nation in another country. This course charts the contours of these debates and discussions as they molded and informed the character and disposition of African American political thought over time. This course explores the process of the melding of Black politics with intellectual ideals and theories that sustained successive waves of Black freedom movements that left an indelible mark on American history.
Also offered in the spring:
AFS 330 Cowboys in Africa taught by Professor Wendy Wilson-Fall and AFS 220 Race and Technology taught by Professor Jennifer Rossmann. AFS 102 and 211 are also being offered.