Africana Studies

AFR 170/ ENG 235 Survey of African-American Literature 1746–1900 (4 Credits)

Offered as AFR 170 and ENG 235. An introduction to the themes, issues and questions that shaped the literature of African Americans during its period of origin. Texts include poetry, prose and works of fiction. Writers include Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AFR 175/ ENG 236 African American Literature 1900 to the Present (4 Credits)

Offered as AFR 175 and ENG 236. A survey of the evolution of African American literature during the 20th century. This class builds on the foundations established in AFR 113. Writers include Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AFR 245/ ENG 282 The Harlem Renaissance (4 Credits)

Offered as AFR 245 and ENG 282. A study of one of the first cohesive cultural movements in African American history. This class focuses on developments in politics, and civil rights (NAACP, Urban League, UNIA), creative arts (poetry, prose, painting, sculpture) and urban sociology (modernity, the rise of cities). Writers include Zora Neale Hurston, David Levering Lewis, Gloria Hull, Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen among others. Enrollment limited to 40. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AFR 360/ ENG 323 Seminar: Toni Morrison (4 Credits)

Offered as AFR 360 and ENG 323. This seminar focuses on Toni Morrison’s literary production. In reading her novels, essays, lectures and interviews, the class pays particular attention to three things: her interest in the epic anxieties of American identities; her interest in form, language and theory; and her study of love. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

AFS 222 Colloquium: Popular Culture, Gender and Sexuality in Africa (4 Credits)

This course uses popular culture as a tool to analyze gender and sexuality issues in Africa. It discusses relevant issues in gender and sexuality across the continent, using selected African songs and movies, which feature these issues as centralized themes. It also examines the lived experiences of African actors, musicians and artistes, both historical and modern, as a means of discussing social norms on gender and sexuality and their subversion. Enrollment limited to 18. (E) {S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ANT 229 Africa and the Environment (4 Credits)

In Western discourses, African environments are defined by violence, famine and degradation. These characteristics are depicted as symptoms of an African resistance to Western values such as private property, democracy and environmentalism. This course encourages students to think critically about such portrayals by learning about specific environments in Africa and how humans have interacted with them across time. The syllabus is anchored in cultural anthropology, but includes units on human evolution, the origins and spread of pastoralism, the history of colonial conservation science and more. Discussions covered include gender, race, land grabbing, indigenous knowledge, the commons, the cattle complex, desertification, oil, dams and nationalism. {H}{N}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ARH 290cv Colloquium: Topics in Art History-Colonialisms and Their UnMaking: Land, Water, Bodies, Belongings (4 Credits)

How does conquest by foreigners change the ways that images, objects, and environments (built and otherwise) are created and used? How do different forms of colonialism—settler, extractivist, etc.—remake values and thus objects, civic spaces, humans, and other living beings? What kinds of loss does colonization produce, what kinds of resilience? Focusing on recent scholarship, this class addresses these questions, highlighting the 16th–19th centuries. Discussion include: the production of colonial spaces and buildings; exchanges that brought people and objects into contact (and conflict); nationalist museum and archival projects; and current debates about decolonization, repatriation, and reparation. Counts for ARU. Restrictions: ARH 290 may be taken for credit a total of 4 times with different topics. Enrollment limited to 20. {A}{H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

DAN 142wa Topics in Dance Forms of the African Diaspora: West African Dance (2 Credits)

This course introduces West African dance, music and song as a traditional mode of expression in various West African countries. It emphasizes appreciation and respect for African culture and its profound influence on American culture and art. Restrictions: DAN 142 may be taken for credit a total of 3 times with a different topic. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}

Fall, Spring, Variable

DAN 146 Beginner Hip Hop Dance (2 Credits)

Hip hop is a popular form of Afro-diasporic cultural production and, for many, a lifestyle. In this studio course for beginner dancers, students learn movements from the poppin', lockin', house and breakin’ dance techniques. This study of movement vocabulary is contextualized in analyses of hip hop’s history, culture and current trends. May be taken three times for a total of six credits. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}

Fall, Spring

DAN 242 Dance Forms of the African Diaspora Intermediate (2 Credits)

This studio course offers intermediate level technique training in any of the dance forms from Africa and the African Diaspora. The physical study of the form is contextualized socially, culturally and historically, favoring an interdisciplinary perspective. Through the course, students approach the study of dance as a catalyst for cultural empowerment and social change. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}

Spring

DAN 246 Intermediate Hip Hop (2 Credits)

This course journeys through time and allows students to experience in their own bodies the evolution of Hip hop from its social dance roots to the contemporary phenomenon of commercial choreography that Hip hop has become. Using film and text in addition to studio work, this class creates a framework from which to understand and participate in the global culture of Hip hop dance. May be taken twice for a total of four credits. Enrollment limited to 30. {A}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ECO 222 Economics of Race, Policy, and Mass Incarceration (4 Credits)

The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate at more than five times the global median. This country is regrettably distinguished by significant racial-ethnic and gender disparities in its carceral population. This course uses the tools of economic analysis to address three main questions: First, how did the United States become the world’s leader in incarceration? Second, what are the economic implications and collateral consequences of racialized mass incarceration? Finally, can economic tools be used to examine the efficacy of criminal justice reform? Prerequisite: ECO 150. {S}

Fall, Spring, Annually

EDC 243 Multicultural Education (4 Credits)

This course examines the multicultural approach in education, its roots in social protest movements and its role in educational reform. The course aims to develop an understanding of the key concepts, developments and controversies in the field of multicultural education; cultivate sensitivity to the experiences of diverse people in American society; explore alternative approaches for working with diverse students and their families; and develop a sound philosophical and pedagogical rationale for a multicultural education. Strand Designation: International/Global. Enrollment limited to 35. {S}

Fall

ENG 241 The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Literature (4 Credits)

Introduction to Anglophone fiction, poetry, drama and memoir from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia in the aftermath of the British empire. Concerns include the cultural and political work of literature in response to histories of colonial and racial dominance; writers' ambivalence towards English linguistic, literary and cultural legacies; ways literature can (re)construct national identities and histories and address dominant notions of race, class, gender and sexuality; women writers' distinctiveness and modes of contesting patriarchal and colonial ideologies; and global diasporas, migration, globalization and U.S. imperialism. Readings include Achebe, Adichie, Aidoo, Dangarembga, Walcott, Cliff, Rushdie, Ghosh, Lahiri, Hamid and others. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 246 Hoodoo Is What We Do: Black Poetry, Poetics and Spiritual Practice (4 Credits)

Visionary London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner “sees research as a spiritual and artistic endeavor,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Michelle Kuo. This course of interdisciplinary reading and writing explores “how Black people have thought through, imagined, and articulated freedom through artistic and cultural production,” an idea central to Wales Bonner’s Artist’s Choice exhibition, Dream in the Rhythm—Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection. How is spirituality defined and activated through contemporary art and poetry? How do Black artists innovate and improvise beyond the realm of organized religions? The class works toward a practice-based poetics, where creating is a way of working through these questions to arrive at new ideas. Enrollment limited to 30. {L}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

ENG 308im Seminar: Topics-One Big Book-Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man from Jim Crow to Black Lives Matter (4 Credits)

Ralph Ellison’s groundbreaking Invisible Man (1952) occupies a central position for thinking about America and the American novel. This seminar traces Ellison’s influence as a writer and public intellectual, from Jim Crow to Black Lives Matter. The class begins by identifying Invisible Man’s central themes, metaphors and narrative strategies in the context of the historical moment in which it appeared. The class then looks at moments in which Ellison’s novel—and his most important essays—have come to mediate major postwar debates about race, integration, democracy and art. The course concludes by reading Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), a contemporary re-writing of Invisible Man. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 309 Seminar: Black Prison Intellectuals (4 Credits)

This course traces the role of black prison writings in the development of American political and legal theory, interrogating theories of intellectualism, including Antonio Gramsci’s notion of traditional and organic intellectuals, and distinctions between categories of criminal and enemy. From 18th-century black captivity narratives and gallows literature through to the work of 20th- and 21st-century thinkers like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, this course asks how the incarcerated black intellectual has informed and challenged ideas about nationalism, community and self-formation from the early republic to the present. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

ENG 333ca Seminar: Topics: A Major Writer in English-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4 Credits)

Nigerian American fiction-writer, feminist and public intellectual Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is well-known for her TED talks, “The Danger of a Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists.” She is also internationally acclaimed for her short stories and novels, which have attracted “a new generation of young readers to African literature,” inspired countless young African writers and prompted much critical scholarship. This course focuses on this brilliant 21st century Anglophone writer’s fiction and non-fiction, and includes some recent social media debates. Supplementary readings include postcolonial and feminist theory, history and literary criticism. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

FRN 230ww Colloquium: Topics in French Studies-Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (4 Credits)

An introduction to works by contemporary women writers from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Topics studied include colonialism, exile, motherhood and intersections between class and gender. The study of these works and of the French language is informed by attention to the historical, political and cultural circumstances of writing as a woman in a former French colony. Texts include works by Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, Yamina Benguigui and Marie-Célie Agnant. Basis for the major. Prerequisite: FRN 220. Restrictions: FRN 230 may not be repeated. Enrollment limited to 18. Course taught in French. WI {F}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

FRN 380af Topics in French Cultural Studies-Les Annees Folles (4 Credits)

This class enters "les années folles" in Paris in this advanced culture class, taught in French. During the Roaring Twenties, jazz sizzled, Montmartre shimmied and Joséphine Baker’s Danse sauvage mesmerized crowds at the Music-Hall des Champs Elysées. Song, literature, dance, poetry, painting and the arts aligned to form an (in)coherent, (inter)national cultural proclamation. How might people interpret this riveting period today? The class discusses the roles of women, writers, soldiers, African Americans and others in “modern” French society at the end of the Great War. Restrictions: FRN 380 may be repeated once with a different topic. {F}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

FYS 182 Fighting the Power: Black Protest and Politics Since 1970 (4 Credits)

This course examines the various forms of black "politics," broadly conceived, that emerged and developed in the wake of the modern civil rights movement to the present time. Major topics of concern include: black nationalism and electoral politics, black feminism, resistance to mass incarceration, the war on drugs, black urban poverty, the rise of the black middle class, reparations, the Obama presidency, Black Lives Matter and other contemporary social movements. Restrictions: First years only; students are limited to one first-year seminar. Enrollment limited to 16. WI {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

GOV 227 Contemporary African Politics (4 Credits)

This survey course examines the ever-changing political and economic landscape of the African continent. The course aims to provide students with an understanding of the unique historical, economic and social variables that shape modern African politics, and introduces students to various theoretical and analytical approaches to the study of Africa’s political development. Central themes include the ongoing processes of nation-building and democratization, the constitutional question, the international relations of Africa, issues of peace and security, and Africa’s political economy. Designation: Comparative. Enrollment limited to 35. {S}

Spring

HST 157 Africa and the Making of the Modern World (4 Credits)

Often seen as peripheral to the modern world, Africa and African peoples are often ignored in both popular and scholarly world histories traversing the last several centuries. This course aims to turn these narratives on their head by not only injecting African histories into world historical narratives, but by using these histories to detail Africa’s centrality to understanding the world. In doing so, the course examines the development of and African experiences with the varying forms of capitalism and trade that developed out of both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade networks, the genealogical roots of European imperialism and the ways in which African peoples navigated, resisted and transformed these broader global phenomena in the construction of the world around them. This course is open to all students and assumes no prior knowledge. Enrollment limited to 40. (E) {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 235 Independent Africa: A Social and Cultural History (4 Credits)

This course provides a general, introductory survey of African social and cultural history from approximately the end of World War II to the present. In doing so, the course will look beyond the formal political maneuvering of elite figures, focusing instead on the many and competing ways in which a broad array of African actors engaged the changing political and social contexts in which they lived. As such, key themes of the course such as anticolonialism, decolonization, development, and HIV/AIDS will serve as lenses into a range of perspectives on life in an independent Africa. Enrollment limited to 40. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

HST 258 Modern Africa (4 Credits)

This course provides an introductory survey of African history under colonial rule and beyond. In doing so, the course offers students a framework for understanding the political, social and economic history of modern Africa by foregrounding the strategies African peoples employed as they made sense of and confronted their changing historical landscapes. Key subjects include the construction of the colonial state, African experiences with colonial rule, the dilemmas of decolonization and life in an independent Africa. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

HST 259dd Colloquium: Topics in African History-Discourses of Development (4 Credits)

This course interrogates and historicizes the problem of “development” in 20th-century Africa. In doing so, we query the assumptions made by colonial officials, postcolonial leaders, social scientific experts and local communities as they sought to understand and articulate African pathways into a largely ill-defined social and economic modernity. Key subjects of enquiry include an analysis of the relationship between western and non-western “modernities,” and explorations into the link between knowledge and power in our own interpretations of the past and of the so-called “underdeveloped world.” Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 259fm Colloquium: Topics in African History-Femininities, Masculinities and Sexualities in Africa (4 Credits)

This course examines the political, social and economic role of women, gender and sexuality in African history, while paying particular attention to the ways in which a wide variety of Africans engaged, understood and negotiated the multiple meanings of femininity, masculinity and sexuality in the changing political and social landscapes associated with life in Africa. Key issues addressed in the course include marriage and respectability, colonial domesticity regimes, sex and religion. Additionally, students interrogate the diversity of methodological techniques scholars have employed in their attempts to write African gender history. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 265 Race, Gender and US Citizenship, 1776-1865 (4 Credits)

Analysis of the historical realities, social movements, cultural expression and political debates that shaped U.S. citizenship from the Declaration of Independence to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. From the hope of liberty and equality to the exclusion of marginalized groups that made whiteness, maleness and native birth synonymous with Americanness. How African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and women harnessed the Declaration of Independence and its ideology to define themselves as citizens of the United States. Enrollment limited to 40. {H}

Fall, Spring, Annually

HST 266 Emancipation and the Afterlife of Slavery (4 Credits)

Examines the longevity of the U.S. Civil War in historical memory, as a pivotal period in the development of American racism and African American activism. Explores cutting-edge histories, primary source materials, documentaries, popular films, and visual and political culture. Explores the Civil War as a mass slave insurrection and studies the myriad meanings of Emancipation. Looks at the impact of slavery on race and racism on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Enrollment limited to 40. {H}

Fall, Spring, Annually

HST 270sr Colloquium: Topics in American History-Anatomy of a Slave Revolt (4 Credits)

During slavery, white Americans, especially U.S. slaveholders, feared the specter of insurrection. Uprisings at Stono or those led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved that slaves often fought back. Yet the central historiographical question remains: why didn’t U.S. slaves overthrow enslavement like Haitian slaves did on Santo Domingo? Enslaved people challenged slavery in a variety of ways including violence, revolts, maroon communities, truancy, passing, suicide and day-to-day resistance. This course examines the primary documents and contentious historical debates surrounding the import of slave resistance, primarily in the American South. Students examine slave societies, theories on race, gender, sexuality and resistance, as well as modern literature and film to investigate violent and nonviolent resistance and how they are memorialized both in history and in the popular imagination. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 276rj Colloquium: Topics-Historians Read the News-Race, Democracy and Reproductive Justice (4 Credits)

This course interrogates the intersection between current events and historical research. Exploring topics including race, debt, citizenship, democracy and reproductive justice, the course offers a comparative and transnational perspective of how historians and other historically focused scholars have approached topics that have dominated the recent news cycle, while thinking through the challenges and possibilities of doing historical research on subjects of contemporary importance. Enrollment limited to 18. {H}{S}

Fall, Spring, Variable

HST 371rs Seminar: Topics in 19th Century United States History-Remembering Slavery: A Gendered Reading of the WPA Interviews (4 Credits)

Despite the particular degradation, violence and despair of enslavement in the United States, African American men and women built families, traditions and a legacy of resistance. Using the WPA interviews—part of the New Deal Federal Writers Project of the 1930s—this course looks at the historical memory of former slaves by reading and listening to their own words. How did 70- through 90-year-old former slaves remember their childhoods and young adulthoods during slavery? And how do scholars make sense of these interviews given they were conducted when Jim Crow segregation was at its pinnacle? The course examines the WPA interviews as historical sources by studying scholarship that relies heavily on them. Most importantly, students explore debates that swirl around the interviews and challenge their validity on multiple fronts, even as they remain the richest sources of African American oral history regarding slavery. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. {H}

Fall, Spring, Variable

IDP 102 Thinking Through Race (1 Credit)

This course offers an interdisciplinary, historical and critical examination of race in the United States. Although race is no longer held by scientists to have any biological reality, it has played a central role in the formation of legal codes, definitions of citizenship, economics, culture and identities. Where did the concept of race come from? How has it changed over time? What pressures does it continue to exert on our lives? By bringing together faculty from a variety of programs and disciplines, and by looking at a range of cultural texts where racial distinctions and identities have been constructed and contested, this class presents students an understanding of how and why race matters. S/U only.

Fall, Spring, Variable

PSY 263 Colloquium: Psychology of the Black Experience (4 Credits)

The purpose of this course is to educate, sensitize and stimulate thinking about varied psychological issues affecting African Americans. Foundational frameworks, models and concepts for understanding African American psychology in a context that includes an historical analysis of African American adaptation to American society is emphasized. Prerequisites: PSY 100 or PSY 201, or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 25. {N}

Fall, Spring, Alternate Years

SOC 243 Race, Gender and Mass Incarceration (4 Credits)

This course introduces students to the historical roots of mass incarceration and how it shapes multiple aspects of life and society. Students focus on the particular experiences of currently and formerly incarcerated women, with an emphasis on the overrepresentation of Black women; the major social, political and economic factors that have contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States; the primary ways mass incarceration alters the lives of people and communities; and why eliminating racial oppression cannot be disentangled from eliminating mass incarceration. Prerequisite: SOC 101. Enrollment limited to 35. {S}

Fall, Spring, Annually

SOC 350 Seminar: Caribbean Feminisms (4 Credits)

This course introduces students to the history and sociology of feminisms in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean. Course materials include primary documents, secondary sources and historical fiction in English. However, students who are able to read Spanish have the option of engaging with texts in that language. Prerequisite: SOC 101, LAS 150 or SWG 150. Restrictions: Juniors and seniors only. Enrollment limited to 14. Instructor permission required. (E) {H}{S}

Variable

SPN 252 Spanish Colonialism in Africa (4 Credits)

This course examines Spanish colonialism and its aftermath in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. Topics include the development of Spanish imperialism, the Rif War of resistance (1919-26), the Civil War (1936-39), African immigration, the rise of Spanish right-wing populism, and the so-called “War on Terror” in Spain and in the rest of Europe. Enrollment limited to 20. {F}{H}{L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

SWG 235 Colloquium: Black Feminism (4 Credits)

An in-depth discussion of the history, debates, theory, activism and poetics of Black Feminism. Students study the conversations, ruptures and connections produced in dominant feminist scholarship by black feminist theory. The class reads foundational and emergent work in the field. Students learn the history of those scholarly interventions and examine the pervasive ways of knowing that are being disrupted through black feminist scholarship. Students develop an understanding of the relationship between black feminism, feminism, women of color feminism and queer theory. Topics covered using theoretical texts, works of cinema and popular culture. Students examine cultural texts alongside theory to practice close reading as a methodological tool. Students finish with the analytical and methodological skills to identify and critique structures of power that govern everyday experiences of gender, the body, space, violence and modes of resistance. Prerequisite: SWG 150. Enrollment limited to 25.

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 205 Contemporary African Literature and Film (4 Credits)

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa, with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. The course pays particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term "African literature" a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance? Writers include Achebe, Ngugi, Dangarembga, Bâ, Ndebele and Aidoo. Films: Tsotsi , Softie and Blood Diamond. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 240 Imagining Black Freedom: African, Caribbean and African American Literature (4 Credits)

An examination of race, identity, and resistance in African, Caribbean, and African American literatures through the lens of coming-of-age novels. This course will enable students to critically engage the political and aesthetic imperatives of black writing by interrogating the thematics and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. How do writers of Africa and the African diaspora appropriate the Bildungsroman as a literary form in their constructions of identity, freedom, and citizenship? What makes this genre particularly useful for the liberatory project of black imagination? Writers include Ngugi, Dangarembga, Wicomb, Cliff, Kincaid, Morrison and Wright. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable

WLT 266md Colloquium: Topics in South African Literature and Film-Modern (4 Credits)

A study of South African literature and cinema from apartheid era to the present. The course focuses on the ways in which the political, economic and cultural forces of colonialism and apartheid have shaped culture and politics in contemporary South Africa. The course also pays attention to the ways in which literature and film helps us visualize the relationship between power and violence in apartheid and post-struggle South Africa. Enrollment limited to 18. {L}

Fall, Spring, Variable