Topics In Anthropology (390-0-8)

Topic

Black Queer Diaspora

Instructors

LaShandra Sullivan

Meeting Info

ANTHRO Sem Rm B07 - 1810 Hinmn: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

This course focuses on LGBTQ+ cultures and lifeways across the Black Diaspora. Through ethnography, cinema, historiography, music, photography, podcasts, performance studies, and other scholarly, artistic, and cultural forms, we explore both interlinked and locally variant sexual cultures across the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The course queries the creativity and variety with which Black LGBTQ+ people have been shaped by and continuously reshape histories of movements and migrations, while also confronting often oppressive norms of race, gender, and sexuality. These studies include political, social, and cultural movements within and across national boundaries. Moreover, we interrogate how conceptions of race, gender, sex, and sexuality shift across time and space, as well as get reworked by Black social actors in myriad political and economic milieus towards notions of freedom and flourishing.

Learning Objectives

• Engage with scholarship describing the historical and contemporary structures, processes, and practices that shape global intercultural relations among groups, cultural traditions, and/or nations, focusing especially on those outside the United States. • Explore the social, political, and cultural bases of these groups, traditions, and/or nations, and how they constitute themselves and are constituted by others. • Generate the knowledge and develop the skills necessary to grapple with issues like colonialism, diaspora, empire, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, migration, nationality, cultural diffusions and divergences. • Analyze how these and other terms intersect and overlap, with attention to the dynamism and variety of experiences and expressions. • Recognize and articulate reciprocal relationships between societal forces (e.g., norms, laws, organizational structures), psychological forces (e.g., traits, motives, attitudes), and the behaviors of individuals and groups • Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of social science theories related to the influence of culture and power on the behavior of individuals, interpersonal relationships, and/or group dynamics • Develop and deepen the ability to critique theories and claims in the social and behavioral sciences through careful evaluation of an argument's major assertions, assumptions, evidential basis, and explanatory utility • Reflect upon the way in which theories and research from the social and behavioral sciences help elucidate the factors underlying contemporary social issues, social problems, and/or ethical dilemmas in the U.S. and abroad, as well as inform potential solutions to societal problems

Class Materials (Required)

All course materials will be provided electronically via the course website or the library.