Lee Baker
AAAS 251/CultAnth208/ICS239/RIGHTS 208
Spring 2020
Human variation and the historical development of concepts of race; science and scientific racism; folk-concepts of race; and the political and economic causes of racism; ethics of racism.
Category: African & African-American Studies Page 1 of 2
Eileen Chow
AMES 335/HISTORY 228/AMI 337/ICS 336
Fall 2019
Explores the intersection of space and ethnicity through the myriad ways Chinatown has circulated as memory, fantasy, narrative, myth, in the dominant cultural imagination, and how lived realities of overseas Chinese communities, Asian American history, andchanging conceptions of “Chineseness” have productively engaged with real and phantom Chinatowns. Research will emphasize multi-disciplinary approaches, such as urban history, architecture, ethnography, economics; or engagement in a creative project.
Eduardo de Silva or Tyson Haywood Brown
SOCIOL215, AAAS246, LSGS316, RIGHTS215
Fall 2019
Examines social history of major racial groups in the US and relationships to contemporary standing. Discusses central concepts sociologists use to analyze racial matters. Central theme: “racism” is not mere “prejudice,” “ignorance,” or “intolerance,” but a comprehensive historical system of racial domination organized around the logic of white supremacy. Discussion of “whiteness” in the USA—how whiteness emerged as a social category, an identity based on experiences of variety of European “peoples;” how it dominated the racial structure of the US since the 17th century, how wealth has been distributed along racial lines, racialization of Asians and Latinos, and color blind racism.
Ashley E. Jardina
AAAS 257
Fall 2020
This course focuses on the continued significance of race and ethnicity in the United States, paying careful attention to the way in which institutions, political actors, and historical factors influence the circumstances and experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. In particular, it provides an overview of challenges, controversies, and political outcomes facing blacks, Latinos, Asians, and American Indians as they navigate the political world. The course will examine how the organization and structures of the American political system disadvantage members of these groups, as well as how racial attitudes and group conflict play out in the socio-political arena.
Mbaye Lo and Carl Ernst (UNC)
AMES 490S; REL 681 at UNC
Fall 2019
This course will specifically explore Arabic writings of enslaved Africans, particularly Omar ibn Said ( 1770-1864), who in 1831 wrote an autobiography in Arabic while enslaved in Bladen County, North Carolina.
Sucheta Mazumdar (Course also taught by Susan Bramley Thananopavarn in Writing Program)
HISTORY 183S/AMES 187S/RIGHTS 183S/AAAS 133S/ICS 183S/PUBPOL 175S
Spring 2020
Study of crucial legal and political moments in the struggle for equal civil rights of minorities, beginning with the laws of Chinese Exclusion, the struggle to define who was “White,” the Asian Immigration Exclusion Acts, the relationships of Asians and African Americans and the struggle for equal schooling in the American South, the Japanese Concentration camps, the Redress and Reparations Civil Rights struggle, and the involvement of Asians Americans in the African American-led Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, including working with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and Asian Americans in the anti-sweatshop unionization movement.
Adam Rosenblatt
AAAS 283S
Spring 2020
This interdisciplinary course explores the phenomenon of necroviolence: attacks on the dignity, integrity, and memory of the dead. Cases come from the United States, Latin America, and Canada. Topics include the rights of the dead, cultural attitudes towards the dead, and the ambiguous loss experienced by loved ones of the disappeared. We also explore the activism of family members, volunteer cemetery reclamation groups, and forensic scientists who exhume mass graves to identify bodies. Students will interact with guest speakers, spend time in a local African American cemetery with ties to Duke, and do community work and research on behalf of the marginalized dead.
Charmaine Royal
AAAS 261D/SCISOC 258D/GLHLTH 258D/CULANTH 261D/BIOLOGY 261D/RIGHTS 261D
Fall 2019
The field of genetics has been at the forefront of discourse concerning the concept of “race” in humans. This course explores human origins, human variation, human identity, and human health through a broad range of enduring and emerging themes and challenging questions related to race and genetics (and now, genomics) on a global scale. Students will acquire knowledge and skills required for integrative analyses of the relevant scientific, ethical, legal, societal, cultural, and psychosocial issues. Open to students at all levels from any discipline in the arts, humanities, and sciences (natural, social, formal, and applied).
Omid Safi
AMES317/RELIGION234/AAAS249/PUBPOL253/RIGHTS249
Spring 2020
Perhaps more than any other figure in 20th century America, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is usually presented as an iconic solitary figure who floats above history and represents the fulfillment of the American “Dream.”This course charts a different path, insisting that King has to be read as a situated historical figure who must be engaged within multiple contexts of the segregated American South, a decades long struggle against racism, and also a global discourse of anti-colonialism.The emphasis will be on Dr. King as one key component of a wider black liberationist tradition.The course will consist of a unit in which we will examine the *movement* that produced Dr. King and Dr. King in turn contributed to. We will examine the significant writings and events in Dr. King’s life, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the March on Washington, Riverside Church, and Poor People’s Campaign. In the second section, we will examine movements that trace themselves to Dr. King’s legacy, including Rev. Barber and Cornel West today.In the third section we will look at parallel (and at times competing black liberationist traditions of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and other figures.
Anne-Maria B. Makhulu & Joseph Winters
AAAS 503S
Fall 2019
From #BlackLivesMatter to #RhodesMustFall, from the demonstrations against the Silent Sam monument to the endeavor to remove Julian Carr’s name from the history department building at Duke University, we have witnessed a global/local resurgence of political activism and energy in the “streets” and on college campuses. In addition, we are in a moment where black studies is generating exciting ideas in response to coloniality, the after-life of slavery, the violence of settlement, and the cross-cutting relationships between blackness, gender, sexuality, and class.
The time for black (radical) theory is now! This course introduces students to a series of thinkers connected less by any particular canon, tradition, or genealogy and more so by a set of moments and locations that demand black radical theorizing. Conjoining black radical traditions in the US and South Africa, students are asked to think about contemporary political deadlocks on campuses, in campus struggles, in the extension of those politics to the streets in the Movement for Black Lives, #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, and varied organizing around the removal of monuments to colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and the Confederacy. Together such moments and locations make evident the linkages between the US and South Africa and the parallel sets of demands being made in each, in the face of their convergent-divergent histories of black struggle.