Course Catalogue

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We live in a world defined by the ongoing and increasingly acute crises of racialized violence and anthropogenic climate change. These two crises are inextricable from one another. As the climate crisis worsens, its effects are distributed asymmetrically, impacting Black and Brown people across the globe who have been disproportionality disenfranchised, dislocated, and dispersed globally due to the ongoing disinheritance of colonialism and capitalism. In this course, we explore the relationship between these two crises by turning (or, rather tuning) to Black music and art. Using the interdisciplinary techniques of Black studies including sound studies, literary analysis, and performance studies, we look at how Black art, particularly music, archives and builds a narrative of resistance.

2 x 1hr lecture seminar over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus

This is one of the taught Postgraduate options in English Literature and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

Standard entry to Masters at College level

ENGLIT9006 Race, Ecology, Sound: Black Studies and the Environment from the Plantation to the Metaverse (DL)

N/A

The assessment for this course will take two forms, one group project and one individual. The goal of these assessment is critically and creatively about the interrelationship between all three terms in this course's title: "Race, Ecology, Sound" through non-traditional formats.

Project Output: Critical Mixtape (60%)

For this assessment, students are asked to take any one of the genres we have covered over the course of the term (or, alternatively, one that we have not covered) and produce a critical mixtape. The mixtape here can be taken as literally or as creatively as you like, but students will be asked to "blend" together critical theory, primary texts, and a narrative response to the material we've covered. This can be done in written form, recorded orally, as a video, or in any other medium. Alongside the mixtape, students will be asked to submit a 750-word response critically reflecting on the process.

Project Output: Online Archives (40%)

The second assessment will be a group project. For this group project, students will work with a team of colleagues to identify an online platform to host the respective mixtapes. In doing this, students will need to think collaboratively about how what sort of platform they want to use, how to create navigation across the mixes, and how to archive the material more generally. Students will receive individual grades based on their submission of a written reflection about the process of putting together online archive, how they approached the organization of the project, and their own role in the group project.

This course aims to:

■ Introduce students to a broad cross-section of Black studies including, music, theory, and literature foundational to critical studies of race

■ Explore the relationship between race and environmentalism

■ Situate contemporary problems of anthropogenic climate change and anti-Black violence within a longer history of race

■ Develop interdisciplinary methods for interrogating cultural and political forms

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Discuss critically a wide variety of Black art from the 19th century to the present

■ Conceptualize the relationship between race and environmentalism within Black diasporic art

■ Explain and engage with a variety of methodologies and tools such as digital humanities, Black ecology, critical race theory, Black feminist theory, sound studies, and genre theory.

■ Make effective use of digital platforms to host work  

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.