12/21/2024 10:19:21 PM	ETHST 21 Course Outline as of Spring 2023	Changed Course
CATALOG INFORMATION
Discipline and Nbr:  ETHST 21	Title:  INT. AFRICAN-AMERICAN ST
Full Title:  Introduction to African-American Studies
Last Reviewed:10/25/2021

Units		Course Hours per Week			Nbr of Weeks	Course Hours Total
Maximum	3.00	Lecture Scheduled	3.00		17.5 max.	Lecture Scheduled	52.50
Minimum	3.00	Lab Scheduled	0		6 min.	Lab Scheduled	0
		Contact DHR	0			Contact DHR	0
		Contact Total	3.00			Contact Total	52.50
		Non-contact DHR	0			Non-contact DHR Total	0

Total Out of Class Hours:  105.00

Total Student Learning Hours: 157.50

Title 5 Category:  AA Degree Applicable
Grading:  Grade or P/NP
Repeatability:  00 - Two Repeats if Grade was D, F, NC, or NP
Also Listed As: 
Formerly:  ETHST 76

Catalog Description:

This Ethnic Studies course is an introduction to African-American Studies centered on black lives and experiences. Drawing from the humanities, the performing arts, the social sciences and cinema, students will examine the profound contributions of African-American cultures that are central to America. This multidisciplinary course approaches African-American Studies as simultaneously authentically American while also embedded with a global black diaspora stretching from the Caribbean to Europe to Asia. Students will use an ethnic studies lens to examine themes like black resistance, white supremacy, large-scale migration and multiracial coalition building are examined to illustrate the multifaceted dimensions of African-American cultures and black lives, inside and outside of America.

Prerequisites/Corequisites:

Recommended Preparation:

Limits on Enrollment:

Schedule of Classes Information
Description:

This Ethnic Studies course is an introduction to African-American Studies centered on black lives and experiences. Drawing from the humanities, the performing arts, the social sciences and cinema, students will examine the profound contributions of African-American cultures that are central to America. This multidisciplinary course approaches African-American Studies as simultaneously authentically American while also embedded with a global black diaspora stretching from the Caribbean to Europe to Asia. Students will use an ethnic studies lens to examine themes like black resistance, white supremacy, large-scale migration and multiracial coalition building are examined to illustrate the multifaceted dimensions of African-American cultures and black lives, inside and outside of America.

(Grade or P/NP)
Prerequisites:
Recommended:
Limits on Enrollment:
Transfer Credit:CSU;UC.
Repeatability:00 - Two Repeats if Grade was D, F, NC, or NP

ARTICULATION, MAJOR, and CERTIFICATION INFORMATION

Associate Degree:		Effective:	Fall 2022	Inactive:
Area:	G	American Cultures/Ethnic Studies
CSU GE:	Transfer Area			Effective:	Inactive:
	F	Ethnic Studies		Fall 2022
IGETC:	Transfer Area			Effective:	Inactive:
	7A	Ethnic Studies		Fall 2023
CSU Transfer:	Transferable	Effective:	Fall 2022	Inactive:
UC Transfer:	Transferable	Effective:	Fall 2022	Inactive:
C-ID:

Certificate/Major Applicable: Major Applicable Course

COURSE CONTENT

Student Learning Outcomes:
At the conclusion of this course, the student should be able to:

1. Identify figures, moments, and periods in African-American cultures and the global diaspora.

2. Demonstrate an understanding of how African-American cultures developed in the U.S.

3. Explain the range of diverse experiences in the black diaspora from the U.S. to the Caribbean to Europe.

4. Explain the influence of African-American cultures to Western "civilization" and America.

5. Identify instances of multiracial coalition building and solidarity.

 

Objectives:

At the conclusion of this course, the student should be able to:

1. Discuss key figures, moments, and periods in African-American cultures and the global black diaspora.

2. Explain the development of African-American culture as the product of black labor and creativity despite white supremacy, racial violence, and structural inequities.

3. Analyze the influence of African-American culture in the United States and the world.

4. Evaluate the degree to which the African-American quest for equality and civil rights are intertwined with the struggle of other ethnic groups as well as those whose ties are not based on race such as the working poor to queer liberation activists to refugees.

5. Identify strategies and avenues for multiracial coalition building and solidarity.

 

Ethnic Studies Objectives:

1. Analyze and articulate concepts such as race and racism, racialization, ethnicity, equity, ethno-centrism, eurocentrism, white supremacy, self-determination, liberation, decolonization, sovereignty, imperialism, settler colonialism, and anti-racism as analyzed in African American Studies.

2. Apply theory and knowledge produced by African American communities to describe the critical events, histories, cultures, intellectual traditions, contributions, lived-experiences and social struggles of those groups with a particular emphasis on agency and group-affirmation. 

3. Critically analyze the intersection of race and racism as they relate to class, gender, sexuality, religion, spirituality, national origin, immigration status, ability, tribal citizenship, sovereignty, language, and/or age in African American communities. 

4. Critically review how struggle, resistance, racial and social justice, solidarity, and liberation, as experienced and enacted by African Americans are relevant to current and structural issues such as communal, national, international, and transnational politics as, for example, in immigration, reparations, settler-colonialism, multiculturalism, language policies. 

5. Describe and actively engage with anti-racist and anti-colonial issues and the practices and movements in African American communities to build a just and equitable society.

Topics and Scope

I. Diaspora: Roots and Routes

    A. Community and survival in African-American cultures

    B. Black Bodies and Black Lives

    C. Afrofuturism

    D. Black Atlanticism

II. The Black Atlantic

    A. Nation and Community

    B. The Great Atlantic Slave Trade and Western modernity

    C. The Carceral State: The prison pipeline and mass incarceration

    D. Police States, Surveillance and Brutality: From the War on Drugs to the War on Terror

    E. The Global South and the "new" South

III. America

    A. White Supremacy

    B. Figures and symbols of white supremacy

    C. Miscegenation, sexual danger and racial impurity

    D. Du Bois' "color line" and "double consciousness"

    E. Anti-Blackness, Colorism and Racism

    F. Black Liberation

    G. Black Nationalism in America

    H. The Black Arts Movement

    I. Black Organizing and Community Building: Black Panther community programs in the 1970s

    J. The Long Civil Rights Movement and Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC)

    K. Intersectionality

IV. Blood

    A. Blood, Kin and Chosen Connections

    B. Color-blind

    C. What is "Black"?

    D. Who is African-American?

    E. Essentialism, Biology and Eugenics

    F. Multiraciality and Afrocentrism

V. Technology

    A. Genetic ancestry

    B. Human exhibitions

    C. Medical experiments

    D. Cultural ancestry

    E. The Racial Biases of Artificial Intelligence

    F. Access to technological equipment from phones to high speed internet

Assignments:

1. Reading and written analysis of assigned primary texts (30-50 pgs. per week).

 

2. Examinations, such as quizzes, mid-term, final, and/or take-home exam.

 

3. 3-5 essays (each essay is 500 words) requiring students to analyze representative works.

 

4. Optional participation in cultural activities, including museum visits, concerts, poetry readings, lectures, and field trips.

 

5. Optional creative projects (e.g. debates, visual journals).

 

6. Written homework.

Methods of Evaluation/Basis of Grade.

Writing: Assessment tools that demonstrate writing skill and/or require students to select, organize and explain ideas in writing.		Writing 50 - 90%
Written homework and/or essays
Problem solving: Assessment tools, other than exams, that demonstrate competence in computational or non-computational problem solving skills.		Problem Solving 0 - 0%
None
Skill Demonstrations: All skill-based and physical demonstrations used for assessment purposes including skill performance exams.		Skill Demonstrations 0 - 0%
None
Exams: All forms of formal testing, other than skill performance exams.		Exams 10 - 30%
Exams
Other: Includes any assessment tools that do not logically fit into the above categories.		Other Category 0 - 30%
Field trips, activities, creative projects (debates. visual journals)

Representative Textbooks and Materials:

Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text by Alondra Nelson. Social Text. 2002 (Classic)

 

Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology and Things to Come. Steinskog, Etic. Palgrave. 2017

 

Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. Ahad-Legardy, Badia. University of Illinois Press. 2021

 

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Vintage. 2011 (Classic)

 

Between the World and Me. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Penguin Random House. 2015 (Classic)

 

Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life. Freeburg, Christopher. University of Virginia Press. 2017

 

Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. Zamalin, Alex. Columbia University Press. 2019

 

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Apartheid. University of Minnesota Press. 2013 (Classic)

 

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press. 2019

 

Brown Girl in the Ring. Hopkinson, Nalo. 1998 (Classic)

 

Color Matters: Skin Tone Bias and the Myth of a Postracial America. Norwood, Kimberly Jade. Routledge. 2013 (Classic)

 

EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest. Whitted, Qiana. Rutgers University Press. 2019

 

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African-America, 1619-2019. Ibrahim, Kendi X. and Keisha N. Blain. One World. 2021

 

From #BLACKLIVESMATTER to Black Liberation. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Haymarket Books. 2016

 

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus and Opposition in Globalizing California. Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. University of California Press. 2007 (Classic)

 

Hip-Hop Architecture. Cooke, Sekou. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. 2021

 

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot. Kendall, Mikki. Penguin Books. 2021

 

Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940. Holloway, Jonathan Scott. University of North Carolina Press. 2013 (Classic)

 

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. Vintage. 1998 (Classic)

 

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2008 (Classic)

 

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. University of North Carolina Press. 2019

 

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Gilroy, Paul. Harvard University Press. 1993 (Classic)

 

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America. Gibran Muhammad, Khalil. Harvard University Press. 2019

 

Liner Notes from the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Brooks, Daphne A. Belknap/Harvard University Press. 2021

 

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. Woolcott, Victoria W. University of Chicago Press. 2022

 

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Washington, Harriet A. Anchor. 2008 (Classic)

 

Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance. Bailey, Moya. NYU Press. 2021

 

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership.Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. University of North Carolina Press. 2019

 

Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Blain, Keisha N. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019

 

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon, Douglas. Anchor. 2009 (Classic)

 

Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. Dinnerstein, Joel. 2003 (Classic)

 

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Benjamin, Ruha. Polity Press. 2019

 

Relational Formation of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice. Molina, Natalia and Martinez HoSang, Daniel, and Guiterez, Ramon A. University of California Press. 2019

 

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labor After the Civil War. Hunter, Tera W. Harvard University Press. 1998 (Classic)

 

The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism, and the National Body. Meeta, Jiha. Routledge. 2015 (Classic)

 

The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition. Sinclair, Upton. Sharp Press. 2003 (Classic)

 

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. Alexander, Michelle. New Press. 2020 (Classic)

 

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Nelson, Alondra. Beacon Press. 2016 (Classic)

 

Vexy Thing. Perry, Imani. Duke University Press. 2018

 

What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Pascoe, Peggy. Oxford University Press. 2010 (Classic)

 

We Can't Go Home Again: A Discourse About Afrocentrism. Walker, Clarence E. Oxford University Press. 2001 (Classic)

 

"Who Set You Flowin'?" The African-American Migration Narrative. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. Oxford University Press. 1995 (Classic)

 

Women, Race and Class. Davis, Angela. Knopf-Doubleday Publishing. 1983 (Classic)

Print PDF