Fall 2012

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African-American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor:

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 2700 Festivals of the Americas (3)

Combined with RELG 2700

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cindy Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3280 Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: Ian Kendrich Grandison

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs.

AAS 3500-001 Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

AAS 3500-002 Social Science Perspectives on African-American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3500-003 Framing the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Combined ENAM 3500

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans' endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.

AAS 4070 Directed Reading and Research (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Time: TBA

Students in the Distinguished Majors Program should enroll in this course for their first semester of thesis research.

AAS 4500 Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Combined with ENCR 4500

Mon 6:30-9:00

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.
AAS 4570 What's Love Got to do with it? (3)

Instructor: Kwame Holmes

Wed 3:30-6:00

This research seminar explores the way popular assumptions about "normal" gender roles and sexualities have both shaped African American history, determined the encounter of black and white in the United States and remain central to the construction of black identity. Central questions this course will explore include: How have race and sexuality been socially constructed alongside one another in the United States? How have desire and intimacy become commodified and politicized through the prism of race? Topical concerns that will be addressed include: Is marriage for white people and if so, does that matter? What is the relationship between "black" and "gay" identity and social movements in the United States? What are the politics of inter and intra-racial relationships? This course will begin with a month of theoretical readings on the construction of race and sexuality in the United States. From there, we will analyze a range of primary sources from the period of enslavement to the modern era. Students will be expected to write a 20 page research paper on a topic of their choosing related to the interaction of race, gender and sexuality in North America.

American Studies

AMST 2220 - Race, Identity and American Studies Visual Culture

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45, Bryan Hall 235

This course surveys the role that visual culture played in constructing racial and ethnic identities in the United States from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Debates about immigration, nationalism, labor and urbanism will be explored through an examination of critical texts and images (including advertisements, cartoons, films, paintings and photographs.) Importantly, the course will encourage students to engage with theoretical, ideological and aesthetic concerns regarding ethnicity, race, class and gender across media.

Art History

ARTH 2745 - African American Art

Intructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

This course surveys the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, prints, mixed media and textiles) produced by those of African descent in the United States from the Colonial period to the present. Presented both chronologically and thematically, the class interrogates issues of artistic identity, gender, patronage and the aesthetic influences of the African Diaspora and European and Euro-American aesthetics on African American artists.

Department of Drama

DRAM 307 - African-American Theatre

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

Presents a comprehensive study of ‘Black Theatre’ as the African-American contribution to the theatre. Explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political underpinnings of this theatre as an artistic form in American and world culture. Students gain a broader understanding of the relationship and contributions of this theatre to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering. Prerequisite: Instructor permission

Department of English

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America: Literature of Civil Rights

Instructor: Audrey Golden

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

Tues/Thurs 5:00-6:15

This course will examine the relationship between the literary and legal texts of the American Civil Rights movement. We will begin with W.E.B. DuBois’ and Booker T. Washington’s writings, appearing soon after the United States Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). We will ask how these early texts inform the thinking behind such seminal novels as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), both appearing in the Jim Crow era. We will then put these early novels in conversation with the 1950s and 1960s political writings of the Civil Rights movement. Looking at these literary materials in conjunction with excerpts from legal documents and related theoretical texts, this course will examine the ways in which literature has shaped Black personhood before the law, the literary mechanisms for imagining equal rights in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ways in which the aims of literature and law may (or may not) have coincided with the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The later part of this course then will consider both the literary and legal ramifications of “Civil Rights” in America and will question the role that post-1964 literature may play in imagining civil rights remedies for cases in which the law has proven limited. Likely literary and political texts will include those of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Anthony Grooms. Requirements will include three papers, several short response papers, and a final exam.

ENEC 3120 - Sensibility, Slavery, and Revolution

Instructor: Brad Pasanek

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

“INDEPENDENCE and SLAVERY are synonymous terms.”
“Reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions.”
“They say that I am a tyrant. Rather, I am a slave, a slave of Liberty.”

ENEC 3120 is a survey of the transatlantic literature of slavery and revolution published in the late eighteenth century. The three sentiments set out above — the first American, the second British, the third French — begin to illustrate paradoxical relations of mastery, servitude, tyranny, and rebellion in the period. The Enlightenment moment is characterized by reform, abolition, and revolt; and the literature of the period participates in this politics. Pleasures, profits, and violence mark vertices in the triangular exchanges between Europe, Africa, and America; discussion will consider how the literal trade in slaves and sugar figures in literary history. As we investigate a period of English literature traditionally labeled “The Age of Sensibility” or “The Age of Johnson,” we will read mainly prose (some fiction but also political pamphlets and biography) and poetry. Course requirements: weekly reading assignments, two papers, and a final.

ENMC 4500 African-American Drama

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. Playwrights include, among others, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

ENAM 3500 Black Protest Narrative

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Mon/Wed 2:00-3:15

Cross-listed with AAS 3500

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son,Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live,Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black independent films Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

ENAM 3500 Framing the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues/Thurs 12:00-1:15

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

ENAM 4814 African-American Women Authors

Instructor: Angela Davis

Tues/Thurs 930-1045

Restricted to English, African-American Studies, Women Studies, Poetry Program majors

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies.

ENCR 4500 Race, Space and Culture

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Mon 6:30-9:00

Cross-listed with AAS 4500

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

ENMC 3500-South African Literature of Apartheid and the Transition

Instructor: Dr. Barbara Boswell

Tu/Thu 12:30– 1:45pm

This survey course critically examines key South African novels in English, noting the ways in which selected writers engaged racial segregation and the growing disenfranchisement of citizens during apartheid. It also highlights the transitional period from apartheid to de-mocracy during the 1990s, investigating new literary forms and traditions generated by the transition to de-mocracy. Focusing on prominent 20th and 21st century South African texts, the course notes how writers have critiqued apartheid, as well as emerging nationalisms and the nation-building projects of post-apartheid South Africa. Novels may include: Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country (1948), J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1989), Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998), and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001).

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 3046 – African Literatures & Cultures

Instructor: Kandoura Dramé

Tues/Thurs 3:30 – 4:45

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms will be explored. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education, etc. The course will examine the images of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Selif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, two papers and a final exam.

FREN 4743 – Africa in Cinema

Instructor: Kandouira Dramé

Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:15

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the "other" and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa's filmmakers. These filmic inventions@are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F.Boughédir), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology.

Department of History

HIAF 2001: Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in greater detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 2001 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives with strategies of community that contrast with the materiality and individualism that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 2002, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.) http://www.virginia.edu/history/node/2410

HIAF 3021: History of Southern Africa

Instructor: John Edwin Mason

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

HIAF 3021 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the country of South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs. Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

HIUS 3471: American Labor History

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

This course examines the political engagements, labor struggles, and cultural endeavors of the U.S. working class from the end of the Civil War to the present. It chronicles how the lives of the U.S. laboring majority was shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy in the United States. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of U.S. working class history will be in the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines.

HIST 4501: Major Seminar, "Sex, Stereotypes, and the Seduction of Africa"

Instructor: Cody Perkins

Tues 3:30-6:00

This course will highlight the diverse historical interpretations of sexualities in African history since 18th-century interactions between Africans and Europeans through the modern AIDS crisis in central and southern Africa. In addition to prominent themes in scholarly literatures, the course aims to enable students to recognize popular stereotypes and myths pertaining to Africans and the African continent as an imagined space. Stereotypes about Africans, the African environment, and sexualities in general will figure prominently in our discussions as we consider how stereotypes are created and what their modern implications might be. We will also consider the diverse meanings Africans placed in sex as a performance of love, companionship, political protest, and community identities. Readings in the first six weeks of the course are intended to expose students to historical interpretations and debates about African sexualities as they consider possible research paper topics.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2750 African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon/Wed 12:00-12:50

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

RELA 5559 New Course in African Relgions: Evangelism in Contemporary Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Thurs 3:30-6:00

This seminar examines Christian missions in Africa over the past two decades. We consider foreign, faith-based initiatives in Africa, as well as African missionaries in Europe and the U.S. How are missionary efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights? What is the relationship between evangelism and development, proselytism and humanitarian aid, mission and education today?

RELG 2700 Festivals of the Americas(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America(3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

RELG 3360 Religions in the New World(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon/Wed 3:30-4:45

Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation. Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.

SOC 4100 African-American Communities (3)

[accordion]

Instructor: TBA

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

Prerequisites: Six credits of sociology or permission of instructor

Study of a comprehensive contemporary understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the African-American community.

Studies in Women and Gender

WGS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon 6:30-9:00

Combined with MDST
This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of "Blackness" in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each media encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have – and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

WGS 3250: MotherLands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty (3)

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

Tues/Thurs12:30-1:45

This course explores the legacy of the "hidden wounds" left upon the landscape by plantation slavery along with the visionary work of ecofeminist scholars and activists daring to imagine an alternative future. Readings, guest lectures, and field trips illumine the ways in which gender, race, and power are encoded in historical, cultural, and physical landscapes associated with planting/extraction regimes such as tobacco, mining, sugar, and corn. Course satisfies the Global Perspectives requirement.

WGS 3559 – African-American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts(3)

Instructor: Jacqueline Taylor

Mon/Wed/Fri10:00-10:50

Through the 20th century, African‐American women, like their white counterparts, challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. Unlike their white counterparts, however, black women battled a long history of entrenched racist ideology. From the first moments of encounter, European imperialists appropriated the black body in service of a propaganda of consumption and exploitation. Subjected to the male gaze, women of African descent were imagined as exotic and highly sexualized, or barbaric and hideous, providing evidence in support of white superiority. In the 20th century however, African Americans sought to overturn negative stereotypes of the black female body, replacing them with both real and differently imagined black female identities. This course will explore the ways in which African American women presented themselves and were represented in visual culture from the New Negro to the Black Power Movement and beyond.

Semester: 
Year Offered: 
2012
Graduate/Undergraduate: 
Undergraduate Courses