AFR 378
Crazy Outside Dudes Fall 2015
Division II
Cross-listed ENGL 381
This is not the current course catalog

African American identity has always been inherently and irreducibly paradoxical. Our most compelling artists and intellectuals have often acknowledged this dilemma as the problematic foundation from which serious inquiries into American blackness must always proceed. Amiri Baraka celebrated what he called “crazy outside dudes”: iconic figures who expressed their black singularity with boldly subversive gestures of style. By contrast, Charles Mingus begins his autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, with this provocative assertion to his psychiatrist: “In other words, I am three.” Most famously, W. E. B. Du Bois begins The Souls of Black Folk with a description of double consciousness: “an America, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Optimistically, Du Bois presents an articulation of dialectics that imagines individual strength as prevailing against invidious historical forces. Nonetheless, insofar as blackness is an implementation of “race,” it exists to wound those designated as black, sometimes to destroy them but most often to maintain them as handicapped subordinates, usable as tools yet never recognizable as social equals. Black (or Negro or African or whatever its cognate in a given era) is a prescription of identity that designates the individual as first and foremost a manifestation of blackness, the problematic underside of the social hierarchy. Singularity denotes individuality, uniqueness, but also peculiarity, a difference that is vexing. Thus, this paradox of black identity also echoes what “singularity” designates in astrophysics: a place of tremendous destructive power that warps, consumes, and destroys everything within its grasp. Such power has been, in the idiom of recent theories surrounding “anti-blackness”, characterized as the proper critique of the modern world, insofar as it is blackness that stands, in its singularity, outside of modernity proper. Not surprisingly, African Americans have directed their strivings both to embrace and to spurn black singularity. This course will examine the efforts of various artists to use literature, theater, music, visual arts, cinema, dance, and style to explore and express our strivings with black singularity. We will give particular attention to artists such as Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Nina Simone, Little Richard, Romare Bearden, Kara Walker, Spike Lee, Savion Glover, Octavia Butler, Basquiat, Tupac Shakur, and Kendrick Lamar.