Graduate Topics in African American Studies (480-0-21)
Instructors
John David Marquez
847 491 5122
1860 Campus Dr Crowe 5-135
Meeting Info
Locy Hall 110: Mon 4:00PM - 6:50PM
Overview of class
Mass incarceration, gentrification, right-wing nationalism, border militarization, police brutality, massive debt, the prison industrial complex, mass deportation campaigns, domestic warfare against anti-racist movements, war in the Middle East, growing class division, attacks on public education and healthcare, climate change, civil wars in African and Latin America, and attacks on affirmative action. These are all conditions that can be analyzed within the advent and context of late global capitalism which is also often referred to as neoliberalism, or post-Fordism. The first part of this course will analyze the impetus and structural characteristics of neoliberalism or late global capitalism to better understand how it has been manifested in many of the crises already mentioned. In this section, we will scrutinize the function and logics of capitalism to identify how and why the shift from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist political economy transpired. Special attention will be paid to how capitalism interacts with and is informed by racial, colonial, and gender logics to exacerbate the vulnerability of Black, Indigenous, Brown, and other racialized groups to exploitation, removal, and premature death. We will also focus on how the situations that racialized groups in the global north face are relationally tied to the precarity that racialized populations in the global south endure. The second section of the seminar will scrutinize the ideological and psychosocial components of neoliberalism. It will focus on how neoliberalism is a corresponding ethic or mode of governance intended to atomize a polity, emphasize individualism, and thus disrupt nodes of solidarity and mutual aid. In this sense, neoliberalism influences how concepts such as liberation, freedom, or justice are theorized, imagined, taught, and organized around. This section of the seminar also foregrounds the university as an integral location for the study of neoliberalism. It focuses on how insurgent critiques of power once associated with the Third World Left of the Cold War era have been de-emphasized in favor of a growing emphasis on therapeutic adjustment, bourgeoise performances of excellence, recognition, safe space, and care.