How Blackness Thinks

Catalog description

This course examines current directions in conceptualizing black social life and performance. Examples are 'black feminist theory and practice,' 'queer of color discourse,' and more recently 'Afro-pessimism' and 'Black Optimism.' The guiding premise of the course is that when understood as exceeding racial category, blackness emerges as out(sider)ness, as differentiated social practice internal to which is a mode of thinking, a practice of study, perhaps even a certain performance of the sacred that is at once connected with the religious and the secular but that cannot be equated with either. In considering this outness of black thinking, authors we may read include: Fanon, Wynter, Spillers.