This is an introductory course in Black studies that surveys a range of Black social, historical, and political constructions, epistemologies, institutions, and protests from around the globe. Students will examine foundational texts from the field of Black studies, which may include speeches, narratives, and media. Coursework is designed to help students survey and critically consider major theories and social movements that give rise to the academic study of Black societies and to experience contemporary institutions firsthand through site visits, participation, and observations.
BLKST 102Introduction to Black Arts, Culture, and Literature0.50 units
This course examines the evolution and development of Black Peoples' artistic, cultural, and literary experiences from a global perspective including art and design, theatre and performance, literature, music, spoken word, and other modes of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice. Coursework is designed to immerse students in analyzing Black art, culture, and literature through intersectional, feminist, and queer lenses. The course is designed for both thinkers and creators. Students will engage in the course material through readings, viewings, and field trips around film, comics, anime, popular culture events, plus the visual and performing arts.
This course examines historical and contemporary practices, theories, principles, figures, and allies of anti-racism. Students will learn methods of communicating and pursuing anti-racism in culture, society, and in personal and professional interracial relationships. Coursework will immerse students in recognizing language, behaviours, institutions, and discourses that maintain white supremacies and further enable racist policies and practices in North America. Students will be challenged to apply course material to real issues of racisms in local contexts and communities.
In this course students will engage in Black speculative thought by engaging such questions as: what would the world have been like if Africa had colonized Europe? What if the "Other" was White? How and why do these questions make the public uncomfortable, and at the same time pique curiosities about the many "what ifs" that could have turned history? This course will challenge students to consider a world where the power dynamics are flipped. Special consideration will be given to histories of enslavement and colonialism, with a specific focus on the Black experience in Canada.
This course focuses on how Black public figures such as artists, intellectuals, and journalists in the 19th-21st centuries create and disseminate expressions of Black freedom in the public sphere and will explore how performances of Black speech in service of Black freedom is an act of borderless belonging.
BLKST 203Introduction to Anti-Racist Communication0.50 units
This course surveys the rhetorical strategies of both more recent and historical civil rights and anti-racist activists. Students will use Black rhetorical theory and will examine work by international historical figures such as Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, and Mohandas Gandhi, Frederick Douglas, WEB Dubois, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Fred Hampton, Robert Hill, and Walter Rodney and such recent figures as Kimberle Crenshaw, Robyn Maynard, Brittney Cooper, Desmond Cole, Feminista Jones, Rinaldo Walcott, and Idil Abdillahi. The objective for students is to understand the evolution of liberatory, anti-racist rhetoric and the rhetorical successes and failures of key anti-racist activists.
BLKST 210Language, Life, and Literature in the Caribbean0.50 units
This course introduces students to the ways in which language shapes and sustains various forms of cultural expressions in the Caribbean region. Students will use the creative output of storytellers, poets, DJs, and playwrights as a lens to investigate and trace the evolution of a distinctly Caribbean identity from the post-colonial period (1960s) up to the present. Students are also introduced to the social dynamics of Creole language use in the Caribbean and an exploration of the ways in which these languages are implicated in diverse cultural art forms.
This course explores the genealogies and historical development of Black performance created in regions such as North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Students will examine the influences of key artists and theorists. Students will be challenged to apply historical, political, and cultural contexts to the analysis of audio, text-based, and/or audio-visual materials. This course expands students' concepts of Black performance to include performative modes such as performance poetry, TV shows, music, and podcasts.
Through the sustained and in-depth study of foundational Black feminist organizers, activists, artists, theorists, and public figures, this course will analyze the interconnected themes of race and gender. Students will examine the meaningful ways that Black women have shaped feminist studies, gender studies, art, popular culture, civic, and social movements.
BLKST 240Black Diasporic Lives: 1740-19000.50 units
An introduction to cultural productions of the Black diaspora pre-1900, with an emphasis on political writing, memoir, fiction, and journalism. Students will engage works from a variety of regions, situated in their historical and cultural contexts, even as connections will be drawn to later social movements.
This course examines race in postcolonial Italy. Through literature, film, and postcolonial theory, students will assess the development of the Italian colonial mindset (1880s-1940s) in order to dismantle post-WWII narratives that attempted to subvert and deny Italian colonialism and its legacy. Students will critically evaluate the connections between Italy's colonial past, the Mediterranean migration crisis in the 1990s, and the contemporary Italian response to migrations. Students will listen to music, read novels, and engage with web content created by contemporary Afro-Italians whose artistic responses to racial discrimination invite a consideration of the crucial values that define Black Italy, and the underlying link between Italian colonialism and Mediterranean migrations.
BLKST 244Introduction to Black Canadian Writing0.50 units
An analysis of Black writing and cultural achievement in Canada. Students will develop an understanding of theoretical and literary texts in this field and will critically assess how contributions from this field have helped to shape Canada from the 18th century to the present.
BLKST 302Strategic Management of Black Enterprises0.50 units
Current real-world challenges in the strategic management of startups, technological innovation, and social enterprises are addressed through the lens of Black studies. Students will work collaboratively to address the topics to be pursued, including both cultural and business/economic aspects.
BLKST 303Black Anti-Racist Consulting Practices0.50 units
Using Canada and the United States as its context, this course will explore the historical outcomes and future opportunities for North America's growing diversity at work, in the classroom, and in society. Students will learn to conduct assessments of their own and others' attitudes about cultural competency and racial differences and to develop materials that can be used to promote cross-racial understandings. Special attention may be given to issues of miscommunication across racial, social, cultural, ethnic, economic, and historic barriers within workplaces and school environments. Students will also explore various approaches used to mitigate ethno-racial differences including intercultural fluency, diversity, anti-oppression, and anti-racism training.
This course examines Africa's role in international order and offers an in-depth study of the evolution of Africa's global political relations. Engaging with concepts related to political and economic underdevelopment, post coloniality, and early Pan-African political thought and practice, students will be challenged to develop and apply an historical understanding of Africa's past political relations to analyses of contemporary African multilateralism, global Pan-Africanism, and increased political and economic engagement with world nations. Students will engage with current concepts of Pan-African politics and envision prospects of future Black global leadership.
In this course students will be introduced to counterstory as research method, genre, and organizing rhetoric within anti-racist movements. Students will examine counterstory in the context of Critical Race Theory and read classic counterstories by figures such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Bryan Brayboy, Tomson Highway, and Lee Maracle. Course activities will challenge students to assess and assert the value and truth of the Black lived experience, Black epistemologies, and Black knowledge production, including that of Black Canadians and their Indigenous and Allies of Colour. Students will write, workshop, revise, and publish their own actionable anti-racist commitments.
This course examines intersectionality as a theoretical framework, a methodological approach, and a tool for activists. Students will learn to interrogate the complex and varied ways that intersectionality has been used by scholars and activists to understand the relationships among intersecting forms of marginalization and privilege, as well as its limitations. Students will explore how gender, disability, racialization, language, sexuality, sex, class, and nation articulate and co-constitute one another. Students will be challenged to apply course concepts to thinking about the complexities of identity formation beyond the language of intersectionality, and to discover what individuals, communities, and societies lose and gain in the pursuit.
BLKST 310Topics in Black Language and Linguistics0.50 units
This course focuses on the formal linguistic, sociolinguistic, and communicative aspects of either a single Black language or a combination of Black languages or language varieties spoken within the contemporary African diaspora, e.g., in Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, or the United States. Attention will be given to the ways in which Black language has developed, how it is deployed by speakers and writers, and attitudes and debates about Black language use in culture, education, and society.
The African diaspora is central to understanding the historical development and contemporary expressions of Latin American identity. Through the study of historical events, cultural production, and current affairs, this course examines African cultural legacies in Latin America, and explains the economic, societal, and political challenges faced by Afro-Latin Americans today.
This course examines a range of historical and contemporary issues, texts, movements, and figures of Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, gender non-conforming, non-binary, intersexed, and two-spirited people. Students will be immersed in the groundbreaking work of the late 20th and 21st centuries to develop the field of Black queer studies. Students will be introduced to such topics as Black queer life, Black queer literature and the pedagogical implications of Black queer studies.
BLKST 340Contemporary African Literature and Film0.50 units
Drawing on a wide range of genres that includes prose fiction, plays, popular fiction, and films/videos, this course will examine the development and growth of modern African literature and film (in English or in translation to English) from the late 1950s to the present and from different regions of the continent. Students will develop introductory knowledge of the varied historical and cultural contexts that shaped the rise and global circulation of contemporary African literature and film since the mid-20th century. Students will build their knowledge of the unique stylistic techniques that major writers and film-makers from Africa have used since the 1950s, and will increase their capacity for critical assessment of themes relating to colonization in Africa, cultural nationalism, politics and mis-governance, gender and identity politics, and globalization.
A workshop that explores the history, dramatic literature, and performance of Black theatre artists. Students will explore the relationship of Black theatre to artistic and public life. Special attention may be given to specific issues, periods, locations, and genealogies of Black theatre. Students will create performance pieces.
This course examines the artistic, cultural, political, and disciplinary histories of African American rhetoric, discourse, and persuasion. Students will study various genealogies of African American rhetoric through primary texts such as dialogues, essays, folklore, music, song lyrics, dance, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches by African Americans. Special attention will be given to the economic, gendered, and social conditions of African Americans from the enslavement period in North America to the present, as well as to the Black diaspora.
Using a number of Black studies' approaches, including Black Feminist Theory and Critical Race Theory, students will explore the diverging and converging histories of Black people(s) in the "Atlantic" and examine the diachronic realities of the Black Self in the 21st century.
BLKST 499Black Entrepreneurial Enterprises0.50 units
This workshop addresses the formulation of firm-wide strategic plans (e.g., business cases, marketing plans) for startups, technological innovations, and social enterprises. Special emphasis will be given to the local ecosystem of Black entrepreneurship. This course involves significant group work as well as a completed special capstone project.