InterracialSex/Mixed Feelings

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will examine how and why mixed feelings about constructs of race are resolved or unresolved when blackness and sexuality are present. The course will move throughout history: from Dido Belle and Samuel Coleridge Taylor to Georgetown's Patrick Healy to the notable radical interracial relationships and solidarities of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, Grace Chin Lee and James Boggs, Elizabeth Catlett and Francisco Mora, Leroi Jones and Hettie Cohen to contemporary individual multi-racial figures such as Zendaya, Naomi Osaka, Maya Rudolph, Patrick Mahomes, J. Cole, Logic, Kamala Harris, and Barrack Obama. Using novels, film, art, and music, it will highlight the history, culture, and affective movements of interracial sexual practices, bi-racial, and mixed race individuals and communities throughout the African Diaspora. With attention to Black-White, Black-Indigenous, Black-Latino, and Black-Asian relations, the course will investigate the following: legislation regulating racial contact, narratives of passing, trans-racial adoption, sexuality, desire, gender, queerness, slumming, class and labor, and solidarity movements.