Will read black feminist theory as a window onto modernity understood as a politico-theological arrangement or as a mythic assemblage, drawing on H. Spillers’ deployment of myth in relation to R. Barthes and Ralph Ellison and her thinking about black culture as “counter-power” and “countermyth” in the “flesh.” In its own varied registers black studies is an intervention into sovereignty, a discursive formation and political praxis of racialization predicated on certain God-terms and structures of belief. The course consists of readings by four black feminist thinkers—H. Spillers, S. Wynter, and Denise F. da Silva, and pieces of M. NourbeSe Philips Zong. 3 units.