AFRS 326 - Challenging Ethnicity

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 326 and URBS 326) An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.

Topic for 2013/14a: Gay Harlem. This course explores Harlem’s role in the production of sexual modernity and in particular as a space of queer encounter. We will consider what conditions may have increased opportunities for interclass and interethnic contact in Harlem and examine how such encounters helped to generate the sexual subcultures more commonly associated with other parts of Manhattan, such as Greenwich Village, Chelsea or Times Square. Although cultural production from the Harlem Renaissance will feature centrally in our discussions, we will also consider the longer history of Harlem, from slavery to the Great Migration and through to the present day, taking into special account the relationship of space to erotics. While much of our investigation will be devoted to the intersection of race and sexuality in African American life, we also consider Harlem’s history as an Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican neighborhood as well as its discrete micro-cosmopolitanism within the larger global city. Mr. Perez.

One 2-hour period.