AFAM 398: Cornel West and Black Study

Professor Seulghee Lee

Fall 2024: Tuesday & Thursday, 1:15–2:30

Course description:

Academic colossus, civil rights icon, and political firebrand, Cornel West has garnered praise, critique, and controversy throughout his storied career. As a thinker, his influence spans Black liberation theology, postmodernism, American pragmatism, Black cultural criticism, Marxist theory, and critical race theory. As an academician, West is a path-breaking figure in the establishment of Black Studies as an autonomous field committed to human liberation. As an essayist and public lecturer, he has spoken on economic, environmental, racial, and social justice, as well as on issues across contemporary politics and culture, including on the state of the public sphere itself. This course will introduce students to this historic figure, sampling from West’s wide-ranging work in order to assess his influence in both academic and public discourse and to consider, in his wake, the prospects of Black study in the present day. We will work through keywords in West’s idiom, including courage, death, despair, hope, improvisation, justice, love, nihilism, and truth, as well as through the Westian frameworks of the blues, the catastrophic, the prophetic (the jeremiadic), and the tragicomic. Along the way, we will engage the work of his collaborators and interlocutors, including Stanley Aronowitz, Christa Buschendorf, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Edward Said, and David Lionel Smith. We will also consider West’s most iconic critics, including Hazel Carby, J. Kameron Carter, Michael Eric Dyson, Eric Lott, and Adolph Reed.

This course is not affiliated with any federal campaign committee.