Course Info

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Course Info for AMST - 268 - 01, Fall 2026
Class number: 3372 Title: Black Inner Lives Department: American Studies
Career: Undergraduate Component: Seminar Session: Regular
Instructor's Permission Required: No Grading Basis: Regular Units: 1.00
Enrollment limited to 19 Current enrollment: 12 Available seats: 7
Start date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026 End date: Wednesday, December 23, 2026 Mode of Instruction: In Person
Schedule: TR: 1:30PM-2:45PM, AAC - 231 Instructor(s): Miller, Channon
Prerequisite(s): None
Distribution Requirement: Meets Humanities & Identity Power Equity Req
Course Description:
Prevailing understandings of Black life, read Black expression through a social, public lens. Their cultures, embodiments, and ideologies are often cast as responses to institutions and forms of protest. Often placed in conversation with worlds outside of themselves and their communities, they are cast as either disrupting a space, or transforming it. But what of Black life outside of public expression? This course complicates our conceptions of Black culture by tracing the inner lives of Black Americans. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and drawing from multidisciplinary works - we will trace their aspirations, longings, imaginations, as well as their fears, across race, gender, class, and time. With an emphasis on the intimate, we will redefine our sense of Black people's relationship to resistance.