AFR 338 - Concepts & Methods of Africana Studies

In Concepts & Methods in Africana Studies we will read and discuss the contributions of five contemporary thinkers in the field: Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers. Our discussions will be attentive to the following question: how does each thinker conceptualize her/his object of analysis? This question contains two concerns: how and what? The question how Africana thinkers do what they do is a concern of method. How does the field of Africana Studies (and Africana intellectual practices generally) bring its objects of study into being? How does any singular object of study (e.g., freedom or desire or diaspora) shape the methodology of the field? Our seminar will focus on core concepts, objects of analyses, and evolving research practices used for working in Africana Studies. This focus will require us to grapple with the difficulties of interdisciplinarity; namely, the demand to be open to multi-methodological practice as well as the demand to think consciously and nimbly about the relation between methodological practice and object of study. We will begin the seminar with two key texts of Africana Studies: Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Du Bois and Fanon formulate and grapple with important problematics in the history of Africana Studies. These problematics (e.g., the fecundity of cultural and political contact, exchange, and struggle) continue to occupy contemporary contributors to the field. This course fulfills the Cultural Studies foundations course requirement and counts towards the Africana Studies certificate, the American Studies concentration and the Hemispheric and Transnational Studies concentration.
Units: 4
Course Type: Seminar