CORE C132   Black Youth

Explores histories, cultural politics, creative practices, protests, and social lives of Black youth alongside systems, contexts, and structures that co-produce this diasporic community. Through a critical and intersectional perspective, it asks: how do social categories of difference like gender, class, gender, sexuality, and nation coalesce to inform experiences of Black youth? Students examine knowledge and creativity produced by as well as how multiple academic fields and disciplines define and understand these youth. Challenging monolithic narratives, it draws on art, music, written works, and both scholarly and popular media to examine the ways Black youth experience exclusion and how they utilize artistic and cultural expressions as modes of self-definition, resistance, and belonging. While the geographic focus of the course is the United States, it places the experience of Black youth in North America within a broader diasporic, global context. Students question narratives of belonging and the whole idea of "community” by studying the lived experiences and structures that determine life chances, embodiment, treatment, and self-expression of Black youth.