Course Description:
Colloquium: Methods of Inquiry in Africana Studies is designed to introduce students to how we do the work of Africana Studies. Through study of a single topic, students will be introduced to and employ methods of inquiry that speak to the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of the field of Africana Studies.
Focused on Blackness and water (broadly conceived), this course will tend to Tiffany Lethabo King’s claim in The Black Shoals, Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies that “Water, most often the ocean, has been Black studies’ most faithful metaphor”:
Land is not the traditional element used to analogize Black flux or
think about dynamic, fluid, and ever moving Black diasporic subjectivity.
Rarely does land evoke the kind of flexibility, elusiveness, and trickster-like
qualities that Black diasporic life symbolizes in the Western Hemisphere.
Water, most often the ocean, has been Black studies’ most faithful metaphor.
Across eight framing units, students will read/view/listen to works by Black scholars, writers, and creatives that showcase the ways in which Africana Studies, in praxis, interfaces with water (broadly conceived). Once introduced to a variety of methods in Africana Studies, students will then apply those methods to a selection of corresponding texts/media on Blackness and water (broadly conceived). Framing units include but are not limited to Black Atlantic Oceanics as Archive, African Atlantic Water Cultures, The Liquid of Black Freedoms, and The Oceanic Age of Blackness.
- Instructor: Karla Zelaya