Teaching Responsibility
LJMU Schools involved in Delivery:
Humanities and Social Science
Learning Methods
Lecture
Seminar
Tutorial
Workshop
Module Offerings
6111ENGL-JAN-MTP
Aims
1. to engage students with important critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history through the study of a range generically diverse texts from the post-war period to the colourblind present.
2. to develop cultural and historical understanding of the dynamics of race in post-war America.
3. to engage with critical race theory and other racial theories to produce an informed critical reading of race in key cultural texts from post-war America.
Learning Outcomes
1.
Transfer and apply critical and intellectual skills to produce close readings of cultural texts using a critical vocabulary of race.
2.
Critically evaluate and integrate new concepts in order to reflect on how race operates culturally in post-war America.
3.
Critically review, and extend knowledge of the signification of race in recent American culture.
Module Content
Outline Syllabus:Introductory weeks on understanding key terms in the colourblind present:
1. racial assumptions 1 – defining race and racism; racial dualism; racial naming; Todd Williams’ The N Word documentary (2004)
2. racial assumptions 2 – white privilege and colour-blindness; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014)
Before the ‘Great Transformation’ and racial apartheid:
3. Chester Himes’ If He Hollers (1945)
4. Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1960)
During the ‘Great Transformation’, Civil Rights and Black Power:
5. Speeches by Martin Luther King and Malcom X and Autobiography of Malcom X (1965)
6. Autobiography of Malcom X
7. Black Arts Movement writing (manifestoes and poetry)
After the ‘Great Transformation’, challenges to racial dualism, for example, intersectionality (age, class, gender) and differential racialisations (mixed race) and development of whiteness studies:
8. From hip hop to gangsta rap
9. Danzy Senna’s From Caucasia, with love (2000)
10. Danzy Senna’s From Caucasia, with love (2000)
11. Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014)
Module Overview:
You will learn important critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history to develop cultural and historical understanding of the dynamics of race in post-war America.
You will learn important critical and theoretical views relating to racial formations, racial identities, and racism in American history to develop cultural and historical understanding of the dynamics of race in post-war America.
Additional Information:This module examines racial formations and representations in modern American culture, before and after the ‘great transformation’ of civil rights in the mid-1960s. There is a focus on the polarities of blackness/whiteness in American culture, or racial dualism. In addition to exploring practices of racism, this module analyses rhetorics of race and racism, the assumption of white privilege and the complexities of new racial identities and cultural politics. The module is text-based and includes the examination of speeches, autobiographical writing, fiction, film, poetry, music and recent race theory, for example, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (1994; 2014), Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012) and Critical Race Theory (CRT).