Syllabus

You may download the syllabus at this link or review it below. Note: This syllabus has not been edited since our first class.  All updates to the syllabus AFTER the first day of class will appear below.

 

Critical RAce Theory and Your Education

IDSEM-UG 1986/NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Fall 2018
Thursdays, 6:20 to 7:35pm
Location: 1 Washington Place, Rm. 527
Instructors: https://wp.nyu.edu/crtfall2018/instructors/
Course Web Site: http://wp.nyu.edu/CRTfall2018/

 

Your Responsibilities and Grading

This is a Pass/Fail course.  To pass the course, you will need to meet the following expectations.

Class Attendance and Participation:

The success of the seminar turns on your steady and generous attention to the work at hand and to our ongoing conversations.  There will be a sign-in sheet to keep track of attendance.  We do not monitor the distinction between excused and unexcused absences: if you are not present one week, we will assume you have good cause.  That said, because the seminar has relatively few requirements, missing more than one seminar and one weekly write up will jeopardize your passing grade. 

Annotated Bibliography:

A important weekly assignment for the class is an annotated bibliography that you will create, using the readings for that week, due by 5pm the Wednesday before class and uploaded through the course website. By the end of the course, your weekly entries will lead to the creation of an annotated bibliography of all the readings in the class. The goal of this assignment is to help you engage the concepts in the readings, keep track of ideas, thinkers, disciplines and approaches that enable you to think about the subject of the course. More generally, the assignment is intended to develop skills in creating such bibliographies as part of your critical reading skills as you move through your concentration. These skills can be applied to any kind of text you encounter that might work its way into your booklist for your colloquium and rationale.

Missing more than one weekly assignment will jeopardize your passing this class.

After you have read the assigned reading for class, you will then submit a paragraph-long description of each reading you do. That description should include five things:

1) A subject heading for your submission that will give the reader an idea of what the main topic of the source is. It cannot simply be the title of the reading; it must be a subject heading that extracts some sense of the topic of the reading in your own words. 

2) The full bibliographical information of the source, using whatever style you choose. Please be consistent across the weeks in terms of style.

3) A few sentence description of the context for the source. Is the reading a part of a book, an article, a book chapter in an edited volume? Is the text visual, a poem, fiction, academic (if so what kind of discipline does it seem to come out of?).

4) A summary of its content and/or an explanation of its argument.

5) Finally, answer some combination of the following questions. How does this source help you to understand something new, or help you understand something in a new way?  What did you find interesting about it?. Why is this work important to you and/or your concentration?

readings and speakers

a provisional itinerary

 

Week 1, 9/6                

Vasuki Nesiah, Sybil Cooksey, AB Huber (Intro on Race and the University)                           

Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle“

                                                                                          

Week 2, 9/13              

Sybil Cooksey (black studies)

& AB Huber (critical theory, comparative literature)                                 

Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality”

                                              

Week 3, 9/20              

Kim DaCosta (sociology)

& Lisa Daily (cultural studies, visual culture, political economy)

Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America”

Loïc Wacquant, “For an Analytic of Racial Domination”

Wendell Berry, “Higher Education & Home Defense”

 

Week 4, 9/27             

Marie Cruz Soto (history, americas)

& Becky Amato (U.S. history, public history)                       

Alex Carp, “Slavery and the American University”

Ieuan Hopkins, “Places From Which to Speak”

Diana Taylor, “Performance and/as History”  

                                              

Week 5, 10/4             

Valerie Forman (comparative literature, economic history, cinema of latin america and the caribbean)

& Alejandro Velasco (history, latin american studies)                                      

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, The Last Supper (La Ultima Cena, film)

Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados excerpt.

 

Week 6, 10/11          

Sinan Antoon  (comparative literature, arab and islamic studies)

& Sara Murphy (comparative literature and culture, gender studies)                                            

Mariano Siskind, “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature”

Aamir Mufti, “Where in the World is World Literature”                                          

                                              

Week 7, 10/18           

Eugenia Kisin (anthropology, indigenous studies)

& Anne De Witt (literary studies, history of science)                                         

Charles Darwin, “Tierra del Fuego”                                              

Kim TallBear,  “Genomic articulations of indigeneity”

Traci Brynne Voyles,  “In Search of Treasure”

 

Week 8, 10/25           

George Shulman (political theory, american studies)

& Hannah Gurman (U.S. history, literature)

Kimberlé Crenshaw & Gary Peller, “Reel Time/Real Justice”

              

Week 9, 11/1              

Vasuki Nesiah (public international law, critical legal studies)

& Frank Roberts (U.S. social movements; black studies; black performance)

Meghan G. McDowell & Luis A. Fernandez, “Disband, Disempower, and_Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition”

Cornel West, “The Role of Law in Progressive Politics” 

        

Week 10, 11/8            

Ritty Lukose (anthropology, feminist/gender/sexuality studies)

& Meleko Mokgosi (visual arts, psychoanalytic theory, postcolonial studies)

Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture”

Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?: Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others”

Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?”

Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “Couple in the Cage” (short film screening in class)

 

Week 11, 11/15         

Kwami Coleman (musicology, aesthetics, cultural studies)

& Michael Dinwiddie (african american culture, theater)

Pierpaolo Polzonetti, “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars,” MusicologyNow Blog

Bonnie Gordon, “The Perils of Public Musicology,” MusicologyNow Blog

William Cheng, “Musicology, Freedom, and the Uses of Anger,” MusicologyNow Blog

Burke Stanton, “Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies” Philosophy of Music Education Review

 

Special Seminar, Friday 11/16 with Lisa Lowe

 

Week 12, 11/22         

University Recess

No class meeting

 

Week 13, 11/29         

Kristin Horton (theater directing)

& Kristoffer Diaz (performance studies, dramatic writing)

& Leila Buck (theater, participatory performance, Arab-American history and culture)

Dias, Annalisa and Sayet, Madeline. “Decolonizing Theatre: an Introduction.” Howlround, Emerson College, 27 May 2018. www.howlround.com/decolonizing-theatre-an-introduction

Goodwin, Robert and Nagle, Mary Kathryn. “Decolonizing Creation Processes by Reclaiming Narratives.” Howlround, Emerson College, 28 May 2018. http://howlround.com/decolonizing-creation-processes-by-reclaiming-narratives

Dias, Annalisa; Saeed, Issa; Ramanan, Amrita; and Shrestha, Abhi. “Colonization is Global, but Brown Has No Borders.” Howlround, Emerson College, 29 May 2018. http://howlround.com/colonization-is-global-but-brown-has-no-borders

Lawton, Jacqueline E.; Ravensbergen, Lisa C.; amir, mia susan; and George-Warren, DeLesslin. “Decolonizing Texts, Words, and Communication.” Howlround, Emerson College, 30 May 2018.

http://howlround.com/decolonizing-texts-words-and-communication

 

Week 14, 12/6            

Rosanne Kennedy (feminist theory, political theory)

& Myisha Priest (literature, african american studies, black feminist theory)

Harriet Jacobs,  “Letter from a Fugitive Slave: Slaves Sold under Peculiar Circumstances” (Letter to New York Daily Tribune, 1853)

“Combahee River Collective Statement”

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

Sara Ahmed, “Black Feminism as Life-line”

Carrie Mae Weems’ series “Not Manet’s Type”

                                              

Week 15, 12/13         

Concluding Class: Critical Race Theory and Your Education

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons”

Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle“