Queer Time, Black Shakespeare, and Afrofuturism: The Wokest College Courses In America

From “Queer Time, Queer Space” to “Black Shakespeare,” universities across the United States are offering left-wing courses that range from the radical to the downright strange.

It’s no surprise that elite colleges and universities have left-wing biases. But rather than offer courses on Marx or critical theory, many institutions are going even further in the spring semester. Academics are bringing increasingly fringe subjects to the classroom, “queering” the world of architecture and “racializing” science fiction.

Here are some of the most woke classes being offered on college campuses this semester.

Art Films: Queer Time, Queer Space (Brown University)

The Ivy League institution in Providence, Rhode Island is offering students Art Films: Queer Time, Queer Space, which will encourage “a sustained meditation on cinematic practices that trouble and disrupt normative, reproductive, developmental, and accumulative time.” The description goes into more depth, explaining its methods.

“By situating queer theories of temporality in proximity to time-based art-making, we will engage with and analyze art films, digital media, and performative works that push the boundaries of the aesthetically and politically possible,” it adds.

Spaces of Queer Theory (University of California Berkeley)

Not to be outdone, UC Berkeley is hosting “Spaces of Queer Theory,” a class that examines architectural practices and their interactions with queer politics. It will delve into “queer necropolitics and the carceral state” as well as “the architectural futurity of queer communities,” all while discussing “queering architecture,” “queer ecologies,” and “spaces of queer consumption.”

Black Shakespeare; Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice (Columbia University)

Called “Black Shakespeare,” the Columbia University course raises the question, “Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor?” It goes further. “Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works?” the course description inquires. It even probes, “What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia?”

Students at Columbia can also take “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice,” which seeks to untether science from its “colonial foundations” and encourages students to “decolonize their own research.”

“We begin by examining the colonial foundations of the sciences, with a special focus on the geo- and climate sciences,” the description explains. “The ideological underpinnings of these sciences assume the earth to be an inert object ripe for exploitation; this legacy of European modernity is often at odds with the worldviews of indigenous peoples and their relations with nature.”

AfroFuturism (Vassar College)

“Afrofuturists reconfigure notions of race and identity by appropriating science fiction tropes while speculating potential futures free from any Eurocentric gaze,” reads the description of the course at the Poughkeepsie, New York college.

“Beginning with Afrofuturist progenitor Sun Ra, we go “black to the future” and closely encounter other Afronauts such as Octavia Butler, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, OutKast, Parliament-Funkadelic, Ishmael Reed, and Fatimah Tuggar, among others.”

The Sexual Life of Colonialism; Race, Gender, and Medicine (Harvard University)

Students at Harvard University are invited to take a course called “Race, Gender, and Medicine” which employs “feminist theory, disability justice movements, critical race theory, queer theory, anti-colonial thought, and trans liberation movements.” One of the focuses of the course, the description explains, is “the development and racialization of transgender medicine.” It also poses the question, “What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face in seeking medical care as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies?”

Another course at the institution is titled “The Sexual Life of Colonialism” and seeks to “investigate the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in racial imaginations of gender and sexuality.”

Black Feminist and Queer Contemporary Culture (Swarthmore College)

Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College will offer a course on “Black Feminist and Queer Contemporary Culture,” with a focus on “the works of black queer and trans visual artists and writers.”

“Using the tools of black feminist and queer theory, the class will cover topics and concepts such as Afrofuturism, stereotypes, intersectionality, surveillance, film, performance, abstraction/figuration, photography, poetry, and ungendering,” the description states.

Queer and Trans of Color Critique; Queer and Trans Latino Studies (Northwestern University)

Evanston, Illinois’ Northwestern University joins the ranks of the other institutions with classes on race and queer politics. Students can take both “Queer and Trans of Color Critique” and “Queer and Trans Latino Studies,” the latter of which “will explore the construction of gender and sexuality as it intersects with race, class, immigration, and other relationships of power” and focus on “Black feminist, women of color feminist, and queer of color critique writing and activism.”

Queer, Quare, Ku’er: or Queer of Color Critique (University of Chicago)

The highly-ranked University of Chicago advertises a course titled “Queer, Quare, Ku’er: or queer of color critique,” which poses the question “what could queer theory look like if we begin from the premise that its model subject is not white?”

It also has a number of different courses on queer politics, including “Queer Theory and Queer Practice,” “The Aesthetics of Camp: Queer Style, Queer Sensibility,” and “Queer Theology and Queer of Color Critique.”