[Black]/Human

Catalog description

As part of ongoing struggle against police brutality, environmental injustice, mass incarceration and white supremacist violence, activists, artists, academics and everyday folk are wondering aloud about how antiblackness shapes the world we live in. Both plea and protest, the insistence that black lives matter activates and animates an older, yet enduring concern that centers the vexed relationship between blackness and the (properly) human. In this course we will consider what it means to treat the question of the relation between the black and the human as a radically open one. We will read widely in black studies, with an emphasis on recent literature that forwards urgent and profound critiques of humanism. Our readings--which include essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, João Vargas, Zakiyyah Jackson and Joshua Bennett--provide us with an occasion to consider what modes of being, politics, aesthetics and sociality are enabled or dis-abled by thinking blackness outside of the category of the human. Some of the inquiries to be foregrounded here are: What are the stakes in decoupling our study of blackness from humanism? Do the models of thinking "beyond" the human offered by post-humanism, new materialism, and animal studies inadequately incorporate a racial history that posits blacks as sub- or inhuman? What do we make of new works that rethink this history of black life alongside the live(lines)s of objects, machines and animals? Over the course of the semester we will devote much time to exploring the intricacies of this new and exciting literature, thereby deepening our awareness of why it has sparked such intense and lively discussion and debate.