AAS 1020, Introduction to Africana American and African Studies II

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Minor Hall 125

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 101. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

AAS 2224, Black Femininity and Masculinity in the US Media

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AAS 3456, The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement

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AAS 3500-001, Race, Culture & Inequality

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AAS 3500-002, African American Health Professionals

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AAS 3559-001, Black Fire

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AAS 4109, Civil Rights Movement & the Media

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AAS 4500, Critical Race Theory

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AAS 4501, Black Power

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AAS 4559-001, Heard it on the Radio

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AAS 4570-002, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

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AAS 4570-003, Black Conservatism & its Critics

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ANTH 4590, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

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ENAM 3140, African American Literature II

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ENAM 4840, Fictions of Black Identity

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ENLT 2547, Black Writers in America

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HIAF 2002, Modern African History

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HIAF 3559-001, African Decolonization

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HIME 2002, History of the Middle East and North Africa, ca. 1500-Present

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HIST 4501-005, Religion in Africa and the Mideast

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LNGS 2220, Black English

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MUSI 3090, Performance in Africa

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PLCP 3410, Politics of the Middle East and North Africa

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PLAP 4810, Class, Race and the Environment

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PLCP 4810, Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

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RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa

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RELI 3900 – Islam in Africa

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SOC 3410, Race and Ethnic Relations

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SOC 4550, Race & Ethics

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WGS 3130, Geographies of Desire: Race, Gender, Place, Identity

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

Instructor: Jim La Fleur

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

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

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

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 African Worlds through Life Stories (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!

AAS 3559 Gordon Parks-Documentary Tradition (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Gordon Parks and the American Documentary Tradition, is a special one-time-only course that explores work of one of the most important artists of the 20th century. For nearly half a century, Parks' photography, writing, and films made him one of the most important black voices in American culture. Although his 1971 hit movie "Shaft" made him a celebrity, his photojournalism, fiction, and an autobiography had already brought him considerable fame.

The course coincides with a major exhibition of Parks' photography that opens at the University's Fralin Museum of Art in September 2014. The course will take advantage of the exhibition itself and the various programs, films, and guest speakers that will accompany it.

AAS 3559 will look at all aspects of his career, with a special emphasis on his photojournalism. It will also view Parks in the context of the history of which he was such an important part -- the American tradition of documentary film, photography, and writing. We will examine the work of people as diverse as Dorothea Lange and Carrie Mae Weems, and Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X, Ken Burns and Spike Lee. Course materials include readings, photography, films, and several guest lectures by photographers and filmmakers. Students will write short papers on readings, films, and the exhibition. As members of small groups, they will participate in creating online and in-class presentations on aspects of Parks' career.

AAS 4570 Trauma and Narration in African Diaspora Literature (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues. 6:30- 9:00

In this course, we will explore literary representations of some of the traumas that have affected African Diaspora peoples in the past century: slavery, colonization, racism, sexual abuse, war, immigration and dictatorship. In particular, we will examine some ways that major African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean writers have attempted to narrate trauma. Reading writers such as Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Austin Clarke, Zoë Wicomb, Nuruddin Farah, and Chimamanda Adichie, our central questions will include: How can trauma be narrated? By what narrative devices and strategies? What does the choice of narrative devices and strategies teach us about the nature of trauma and its effects on the mind and body? Is trauma an inherent experience in the African Diaspora? Requirements include a theory application paper, a narrative experiment, and a seminar paper.

AAS 4570 Africa in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Africa” and “Blackness” in this country. We will focus primarily on the context of the present-day United States. However, we will also address pre-colonial and colonial periods and touch on the role of popular media in particular contemporary African contexts. This class will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, radio, television, and print news media create “Africa” in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. Working toward their own semester projects, students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information about such a mis- and under- represented area of the world have – and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility.

ANTH 2500 The Anthropolgy of the Caribbean (3)

Instructor: Kristin Lahatte

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50

It has been suggested that the Caribbean serves as a “master symbol” for understanding the processes of the modern world. This course will anthropologically examine this claim by exploring the history of the Caribbean from the time of European colonization to the present day with particular attention to subjects such as slavery and plantation economies, revolution and retribution, creolizaton, globalization, and migration and transnationalism.

AMST 2753 Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (3)

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that covers the American South to the Civil War. While the course centers on the visual arts—architecture, material culture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture—it is not designed as a regional history of art, but an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, foodways, music and literature in the formation of Southern identities. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures and a field trip.

DRAM 3070  African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

ENLT 2547 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENLT 2552 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Susan Fraiman

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45

An introduction to close reading and critical writing focused on recent works by women in a variety of genres and from a range of national contexts.  Possible works (final list still to be determined) include stories by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative of growing up by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel; a film set in India directed by Mira Nair; images of the U.S. by queer photographer Catherine Opie; Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s memoir of a “harem girlhood.”  Our discussion of these texts will address basic formal issues: modes of narration; the difference between “story” and “plot”; the use of framing and other structural devices; the constraints of genre; the handling of images, tone, and diction.  Likely thematic concerns include the effects of colonialism and migration on women; explorations by women of growing up, growing old, marriage, maternity, queer sexuality, work, and creativity; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of nation, generation, race, and class; the divergent meanings of feminism for women around the world.  We will work not only on becoming attentive readers but also on learning to conceive and organize effective critical essays.  This writing intensive course (three papers totaling 20 pages) satisfies the prerequisite for the English major as well as the second-writing requirement.   There is also a final exam.

ENAM 3500  Studies in American Literature: The Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15

ENAM 3500 Studies in American Literature: Harlem Renaissance, Arts & Politics

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs 1100-1215 

This course explores the 1920s Jazz Age from a multimedia perspective of the Harlem Renaissance in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, dance, music, photography, film, and politics. We’ll consider the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a “Mecca of the New Negro” but also of Chicago, D.C., Richmond, and Lynchburg (yes, Lynchburg) as instances of places contributing to the idea of the New Negro Renaissance. We’ll examine some of the hot debates and combustible movements of the time, including: the Great Black Migration, art as uplift and propaganda, elite versus vernacular approaches, the Negro newspaper, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting, urban sociology, the Garveyite movement, Negro bohemianism, the gendering of the Renaissance idea, queer subcultures, radical activism, and interraciality. We’ll sample a wide range of works: essays by Du Bois, Alain Locke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; novels by Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Angelina Weld Grimke and Zora Neale Hurston; art by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham, the Nicholas brothers, and Josephine Baker; musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, Harry Burleigh, and Roland Hayes; photographers Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee; and the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We’ll conclude with some contemporary revisualizations of the Harlem Renaissance in fiction and film. Assignments include several short papers, a reading journal, and a final “revisioning” project where you’ll be required to offer your own re-imagining of the New Negro era.

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African American Literature:  TIme and African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

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

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can run out of it.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.

ENCR 4500 Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race in American Places(3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Thurs. 6:30-9:00

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on built environments in America within the context of contemporary culture wars—especially as circumscribing issues of race.  We interrogate ideologies that distinguish people, placing them into social hierarchies, based on the places with which they are associated.  We consider, for example, how the seemingly innocent story of the Three Little Pigs shapes dominant assumptions about the moral attributes of people (masquerading as pigs) based on the materials and architectural styles of the houses in which they live.  In so doing we denaturalize popular assumptions that, say, straw huts or wood shacks represent the moral failing or lack of fitness of those we thus label as “primitive.”  Can such places as Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall (which we think of as belonging to “the public”) be planned and designed to welcome use by some members of the public and discourage use by others?  What does the concurrency of homelessness and homeowners’ associations in American society suggest about assumptions regarding a relationship between our right to privacy and our wealth?  We explore such issues through targeted discussion of readings; mandatory visits to places around Charlottesville; informal workshops (mainly to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places); and in-class presentations.  Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project.  The last requirement is presented in an informal symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

FREN 3585 North African Literature and Culture (3)

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FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioure Dramé

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

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor:  James La Fleur

Is an introductory course that explores why? where? when? how? people living on the African continent – from Cairo to Cape Town, and Dakar to Dar es Salaam – changed what they did from the so-called Stone Age to the years of intensive slaving and the export of humans as captives (ending roughly 200 years ago).

Over the course’s sixteen weeks, we will develop interpretive themes to help us make sense of experiences so diverse that they resist reduction into a single, unifying, continent-wide narrative. The course perspective emphasizes that Africans have always been engaged with their regional and continental neighbors in the making of world history, and that African history has significance and intellectual importance of its own, rather than deriving relevance only in its relationship to dynamism in Europe or the Americas. 

The course is structured with materials and lessons that guide the students through three successive learning stages, each with its own map quiz, exam, and discussion participation grade.  This architecture supports ambition and risk-taking in early stages of the course, positive response to constructive criticism, and intellectual independence and polished performance by the end of the term.

HIAF 2001 presumes no prior knowledge or personal experience with Africa and it requires no previous college-level studies in History. Course materials include a textbook, specialized scholarly readings, and other media rich with sights and sounds.

The course belongs to the African-American & African Studies curriculum, is required for the minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College of Arts & Sciences area requirements in “non-western perspectives” and “historical studies.”

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason

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 is especially concerned with the ways in which people expressed their political beliefs through popular culture.  It 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 film, 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.

HIME 2001 History of the MIddle East and North Africa, ca. 570- ca. 1500 (3)

Instructor: Joshua White

The success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the resurgence of piracy off the Horn of Africa have catapulted maritime raiding back into the public consciousness. Books, movies, and news articles have proliferated in recent years that cater to this new interest, and some commentators have sought context for the Somali phenomenon in the early modern Mediterranean. This course examines Mediterranean piracy in its own right, from the proxy battles for supremacy in North Africa in the sixteenth century to the U.S. naval interventions there in the nineteenth. We will pay special attention to the political, social, religious, legal, and economic ramifications of both Christian and Muslim sea raiding. Piracy in the early modern Mediterranean was a universal threat that affected East and West, North and South, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  It left its mark on the political geography of the coasts, impacted the development of international law and the conduct of diplomacy, and provided the pretext for both Ottoman and European imperial expansion. It mobilized the rhetoric of intractable religious conflict, popularized new genres of literary expression, created new networks of trade and destroyed others, and led thousands into lives of captivity. Its legacy is still with us today.

Beyond familiarizing you with the history of piracy in the Mediterranean, our goal in this course is to develop your ability to read critically, analyze sources, and deploy evidence to back up your arguments. Readings will be a mix of scholarly works and primary sources--including captivity narratives, diplomatic reports, court cases, fiction, and selections from the autobiography of an Ottoman corsair. There are no exams. Evaluation will be based on class participation and a series of short and medium-length papers that you will have the opportunity to revise. No previous knowledge of Mediterranean history or pirates is required.

HIST 3559 New Course in General History; Gordon Parks and the Modern Documentary Tradition (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Gordon Parks and the American Documentary Tradition, explores work of one of the most important artists of the 20th century.  For nearly half a century, Parks' photography, writing, and films made him one of the most important black voices in American culture.  Although his 1971 hit movie "Shaft" made him a celebrity, his photojournalism, fiction, and an autobiography had already brought him considerable fame.

The course looks at all aspects of his career, with a special emphasis on his photojournalism.  It coincides with an major exhibition of Parks' photography that opens at the Fralin University of Virginia Art Museum in September 2014.  The course will take advantage of the exhibition itself and the various programs and speakers that will accompany it.

HIST 3559 will also view Parks in the context of the history of which he was such an important part -- the American tradition of documentary film, photography, and writing.  We will examine the work of people as diverse as Dorothea Lange and Carrie Mae Weems, and Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X, Ken Burns and Spike Lee.

Students will write short papers on readings, films, and the exhibition.

 As members of small groups, they will participate in creating online and in-class presentations on aspects of Parks' career.

HIUS 3071 The Coming of the Civil War (3)

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Through a close examination of the interrelationships among economic change, cultural and political developments, and the escalating sectional conflict between 1815 and 1861 this lecture course seeks to explain what caused the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861. Students should note that this period also encompasses the Jacksonian era of American history, and most of the lectures in the first half of the course will be devoted to examining it, with a focus on party politics and debates over slavery. Grades will be based on class participation and on three written assignments: a midterm exam; an 8-10 page term paper; and a comprehensive, take-home final examination.

HIUS 3671 History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Lynn French

This course focuses on the long arc of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, arguably the greatest social movement of the 20th Century.  It will examine the social change accomplished from the 1870’s through the 1970’s – culminating in what might be considered a second reconstruction.  Most of the discussion will center on the work and lives of African Americans, but also will consider the impact of the Movement upon race, gender and ethnicity not only in America but around the globe as well.

In addition to assigned reading, student will be expected to submit four very brief essays on topics that highlight an issue, organization or leader.  Lively and intense class participation is encouraged. Diplomacy and respect for others’ views is required.

PLAP 3820 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

PLCP 2120 The Politics of Developing Areas (3) 

PLCP 3410 Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (3)

PLCP 4500 Special Topics in Comparative Politics (Imperialism and Globalization) (3)

PLPT 4500 Special Topics in Political Theory (Freedom, Empire and Slavery) (3)

RELA 2750  African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

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 3559 New Course in African Religions (Religion in African Literature and Film) (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An exploration of the ways in which religious concepts, practices and issues are addressed in African literature and film.  Literary genres include novels, short stories and poetry; Cinematographic genres include commercial "Nollywood" movies, as well as "Christian video films"   We will examine how various directors and authors interweave aspects of Muslim, Christian and/or traditional religious cultures into the stories they tell.

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

An analysis 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 Conquest and Religions in the Americas, 1400s-1830s (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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.

RELG 3559 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Charles Marsh Jr.

The seminar considers the American civil rights movement as theological drama.  The goal is to analyze and understand the movement, its participants and opponents, in religious and theological perspective.  While interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will probe the details of religious convictions in their dynamic particularity and ask how images of God shape conceptions of race, community and nation and modes of practical engagements.  Readings include four seminal studies of the period, writings by movement and anti-movement activists, and documents archived at http://archives.livedtheology.org/, in the digital history titled, "The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama".  Course requirements include active participation in class discussions, one 20-30 presentation, weekly reading summaries (250-300 words), one research paper (10-12 pages, or 3000-3400 words), and a take-home final.

SOC 2442 Systems if Inequality(3)

This course will examine various types of inequality (race, class, gender) in the US and abroad.  We will discuss sociological theories covering various dimensions of inequality, considering key research findings and their implications.  We will examine to what extent ascriptive characteristics impact a person's life chances, how social structures are produced and reproduced, and how individuals are able or unable to negotiate these structures.

Soc 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

AAS 2224 - Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 207

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Maury Hall 113
 

What is the state of literatures from the African continent today? In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new works of fiction, poetry, and drama, from the continent’s young and established authors. This semester our theme will be “Re-Dreaming the Modern African Nation State,” and authors will include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Teju Cole (Nigeria); Maaza Mengiste and Dinaw Mengistu (Ethiopia); Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone); Nuruddin Farah (Somalia); and J.M. Coetzee (South Africa). We will examine the literary innovations that writers use to narrate nations in continued turmoil, as we discuss issues such as dictatorship, the lingering effects of colonization, the postcolonial nation state, the traumas of war and geo-politics, religion, gender and sexuality, and migration, among others. Requirements include: short literary reviews, African news forum posts, a historical presentation (in pairs), and a final essay.

AAS 3500- 2 Runaways and Rebels, Afro-Atlantic (3)

Instructor: James La Fleur

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, New Cabell Hall 132

AAS 3500- 3 Slavery and Literary Imagination (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs. 2:00 -3:15, Cocke Hall115

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Wed. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 115

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

AAS 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 1:00-3:30, Brooks Hall 103

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated or have been forced to move. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat or don't eat hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4501- Politics, Prisons and Punishment (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 066

Advanced Research Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS  4570 -1 The Black Studies Movement (3)

Instructor: Latasha Levy

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 168
 

AAS 4570-2 Race, Culture and Inequality (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Gibson Hall 341

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. The course will survey social science research about cultural forms such as everyday discourse, styles of dress, music, literature, visual arts, and media as they relate to race and inequality. As we examine these studies, we will learn about key thinkers in social science approaches to culture, and we will analyze core concepts such as cultural capital, frames,symbolic boundaries, scripts, racial grammar, and more

AAS 4993 Independent Study

ANTH 3590-1 Care in Africa (3)

Instructor: China Scherz

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 058

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning questions of care in contemporary Africa. Moving out from a set of conversations on slavery and patronage that emerged in the 1970s this course will examine the ways in which care and power cut across discussions three sets of themes: (1) corruption and witchcraft, (2) kinship, marriage, and sexuality, and (3) medicine and health.

HIAF 1501 Africa and Virginia (3)

Instructor: James La FLeur

Tues. 3:30-6:00, Nau Hall 341

This seminar explores relationships between Africa and Virginia in the very long run, from earliest arrivals of Angolans near Jamestown in 1619, through Jefferson’s view of the continent and its people, to mass emigration to Liberia after 1820, through dialogues and commerce during colonial overrule in Africa and after independence, and finally to the resurgence in trans-Atlantic families and experiences in the 21st century.

No prior experience studying Africa is expected nor is previous college-level study of History required.

As a first-year and new-student seminar, the course uses a broad topic to provide opportunities to learn and improve skills – in research, analysis, and written and oral communication – broadly applicable towards success at the University and beyond.  As a course in History, it introduces learners to how people (and not just scholars) interested in the past think, and how academic historians do their work with never-straightforward sources (or “evidence”).  To that end, seminar participants will learn through doing, and this will surely include some meetings at the University’s “Special Collections Library,” where we will handle and engage primary sources (e.g., old books and private letters).  Depending on student interest and practicalities, it may also include some site visits to places of significance on Grounds and nearby, as well as interaction (or “fieldwork”) with fellow UVa students whose life experiences transcend any notion of separation between “Africa” and “Virginia.”

Modern African History (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Claude Moore Nursing Education G120

Modern African History, explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present.  Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition.  We will look at the slave trade and its consequences, the growth of African states, the spread of Islam, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African responses to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; East Africa, especially Kenya and Ethiopia; and southern Africa, with an emphasis on South Africa.  We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and to the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.

HIAF 2002 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.  There will be two blue book exams -- a mid-term and a final -- and periodic quizzes on the readings.

HIAF 4501 Environment, Health, and Development in Africa (3)

Instructor: James La Fleur

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

This is a discussion- and writing-intensive seminar that explores the changing relationships between people in Africa, their environments (ecological, epidemiological, political, economic, cultural, and more), and their global neighbors from early times to present. Students will discuss issues such as the Columbian exchange, imperialism, wildlife conservation, HIV/AIDS, petroleum oil in Africa, KONY 2012, growing Chinese roles in the continent's future, and the rapidly maturing Ebola crisis.  Emphasis will also be placed on critical appraisal of the role of historic and emerging media in understanding (and sometimes misunderstanding) these problems and in engaging Africans’ own aspirations.  Experience studying Africa and/or any of the course themes is welcomed but not strictly required.  The seminar’s focus is on Africa, but the issues are global and comparative, and therefore course learning is applicable to other places.

Students should have the ability and the motivation to work independently.  They will find that the majority of their efforts are spent outside of the classroom as they prepare for meetings (to read, reflect, and formulate ideas to contribute) and as they make progress on research papers.  Students will indentify research interests and possible resources in the early weeks of the course, and then develop their writing through a series of successive stages, including: topic declaration, working bibliography, two-page précis, rough draft, and ultimately a final draft of approximately 25 pages.  This progressive architecture is supported through continual feedback from the instructor and from peers designated as “writing partners.”  Class meetings are then occasions to share, collaborate, negotiate, develop oral communication skills, and generally enjoy a collegial and intellectually stimulating atmosphere.

This course can be used to fulfill the College’s “second writing requirement,” as well as requirements in “historical perspectives” and “non-Western perspectives.”

Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, Gibson Hall 241

Studies the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Includes the colonial experience and the rise of African nationalism; the transition to independence; the rise and fall of African one-party states; the role of the military in African politics; the politics of ethnicity, nation- and state-building; patromonialism and patron-client relations; development problems faced by African regimes, including relations with external actors; and the political future of Southern Africa. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of Africa; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

RELA 2850 Afro Creole Relg in Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, New Cabell Hall 058

This survey lecture course investigates African-inspired religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in those religions--such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka "Santería"), and Brazilian Candomblé. By reading ethnographies, we will compare features common to many of these religions-such as polytheism, initiatory secrecy, divination, possession trance, animal sacrifice-as well as differences-such as contrasting evaluations of the devotional use of material objects, relations with the dead, and the commoditization of ritual expertise.  We will consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as "Africa," "tradition," "modernity," "creole," and "syncretism.

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Gibson Hall 341

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’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 332

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghreb in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.”   We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent.  We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.

SOC 4420 Sociology of Inequality (3)

Instructor:  Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 3:30-6:00 New Cabell Hall 115

SOC 4550 Race and Ethics(3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15 New Cabell Hall 364

This course will survey theories, concepts, and empirical evidence in sociology that contribute to public debates about race and ethics.  We will consider issues such as affirmative action, deathe penalty sentencing, abortion, race-based medicine, manadatory DNA testing, the legacies of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the story of of Henrietta Lacks, and more.

SOC 4640 Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Dell 2-102

The course explores changing urban live in different cultural, social and historical settings.  It examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory.  Among the topics to be discussed are theories of the everyday developed ins social segregation and urban inequality, cultural meanings of the city, problems of urban policy and planning.

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

Instructor: TBA

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 2559-001 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues 5:00-7:30

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations,  musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

AAS 2559-002 The Films of Spike Lee (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15

One of the most significant figures in modern American cinema, Spike Lee is one of today’s most prolific American filmmakers and arguably the most recognizable African American filmmaker alive.  With 35+ films to his credit, Lee’s filmography indexes the broad and tangled history of public debate over race, class, gender, ethnicity and commercial cinema since the 1980s. This course will consider the evolution of the themes, genres, techniques, and artistic philosophy reflected in Lee’s work as director, producer and cultural critic over his considerable career. We will also be concerned to highlight the tensions that arise from Lee’s seemingly contradictory reputation as an ‘independent’ filmmaker and his prominence as a commercially successful ‘mainstream’ producer and director.  We will view several major and lesser-known films, from blockbusters like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to the obscure Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop. We will also consider Lee’s documentary projects 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke among other important Lee works (including television ads). The goal of the course is to critically situate ‘the Spike Lee phenomenon’ in the history of black American cinema and in the wider context of global filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century.​

AAS 2559-003 Afro-Creole Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

This survey course investigates African-inspired religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka “Santería”), and Brazilian Candomblé. We will read ethnographic accounts and consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as “Africa,” “tradition,” “modernity,” “creole,” and “syncretism.” A discussion section is required.​

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 3500 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!​

AAS 3559 From Redlines to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the United States (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

This course examines the dynamic relationship between real estate, racial segregation, wealth, and poverty in American cities and suburbs, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will look at how the quest for homeownership in a capitalist society shaped ideas of race and belonging, influenced Americans’ political ideologies and material interests, and impacted movements for civil rights and economic justice.  We will study the history of Federal housing policies and programs, the evolution of real estate industry practices in the age of civil rights and “white flight,” the relationship between residential location and quality of public education, and contemporary trends in housing and real estate markets in metropolitan America.  In addition to secondary readings in history, sociology, economics, and urban studies, students will learn to interpret a variety of primary sources, including land deeds and covenants, tax records, maps, financial statements, contracts, and industry trade publications.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures, tutorials, and discussions of weekly reading assignments.  Students will complete 3 topical essays and a final research project.

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 - Present (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50

This course examines the black experience in America from emancipation to the present.  We will study African Americans’ long struggle for freedom and equality, and learn about their contributions to and influence on America’s social, political, and economic development.  We will also study the history of race and racism, explore how its meaning and practice has changed over time, and how it shaped—and continues to shape—the lives of all persons in America.  Central to this course is the idea that African American history is American history, and that the American experience cannot be understood apart from the struggles and triumphs of African Americans.  Course topics include: emancipation and Reconstruction; the age of Jim Crow; the Great Migration and the New Negro; the civil rights and Black Power movements; mass incarceration; and struggles for justice and equality in the present.  In addition to readings from assigned books, students will analyze and interpret a variety of primary sources, including film, music, and visual art.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures and discussions.  Assignments will include a midterm, a final exam, two topical essays, and short responses to weekly readings.

​AAS 4570-001 Time and African American Lit (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tue./Thur. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper.  Writers studied include Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Edward P Jones, and Toni Morrison.

AAS 4570-002 Africa in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 3:30-6:00

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Africa” and “Blackness” in this country. We will focus primarily on the context of the present-day United States. However, we will also address pre-colonial and colonial periods and touch on the role of popular media in particular contemporary African contexts. This class will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, radio, television, and print news media create “Africa” in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. Working toward their own semester projects, students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information about such a mis- and under- represented area of the world have – and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility.​

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tue./Thurs. 8:00-9:15

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles.  We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day.  Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years?  How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENAM 3500-005 Advanced Studies in American Literature: Black Protest Narrative(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

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.

ENAM 3500-006 Advanced Studies in American Literature: The Civil Rights Movement(3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
 

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 3510 Studies in African American Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed,/Fri. 12:00-12:50

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

ENAM 3880 Literature of the South (3)

Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

Mon./Wed 10:00-10:50

Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Americans negotiating the transformations of modernity and postmodernity have turned to literary representations of the South to get their bearings.  In imagining the South we seek a rooted, enduring culture in a sea of commercialism and mobility; we confront the persistence of racial and economic inequality at odds with the ideals of the United States; we insist upon the importance of locality in our increasingly global consciousnesses.  We also consume “the South” as a commodity, invoke it as an excuse or alibi for the nation’s ills, and enjoy its ostensible perversity as a guilty pleasure.  In this course we will read some of the most challenging, startling, and beautiful American prose fiction of the past 100 years, while attending as well to the broader cultural field of film, image, and music of which it is a part.  We will think in particular about questions of nationalism and literature (the role of “folk” culture; the location of poverty; place and race); questions of representation and representativeness (“identity” of writers; authenticity; production and presentation of Southern stuff); and questions of performance (of class, gender, race, and region).  Major authors will include Chesnutt, Faulkner, Caldwell, Porter, Wright, Welty, Hurston, Percy, and O'Connor.

ENAM 3510 Studies in African-American Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri.12:00-12:50

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

​ENCR 4500 Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race, Space, and Culture (3)

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross​

Tues. 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.

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African-American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper.  Writers studied include Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Edward P Jones, and Toni Morrison.

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 101. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

AAS 2224 - 1 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2:00-4:30, Physics Bldg 218

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 2224 -2  Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 6:00-8:30, New Cabell Hall 383

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 2559 Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter: The NAACP, 1909-1965(3)

Intructor: Latasha Levy

Tues./Thurs 9:30 - 10:45, New Cabell 168​

The contemporary Black Lives Matter movement represents yet another phase in the protracted struggle for Black freedom and human dignity in the African Diaspora. This course explores the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, as foundational to understanding the various campaigns to combat anti-Black violence and racial inequality over the course of the twentieth century. Students will examine the ways in which the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns, civil rights advocacy, and publications provided the foundations of the modern civil rights movement, which raised national consciousness around a fundamental notion that Black lives matter. The course also unpacks the ideological debates within Black political culture that shaped the NAACP's organizational and legislative strategies.

AAS 2559 Swahili Cultures (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon/Wed. 3:30-4:45 - Monroe Hall 118

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. This course offers an in depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures, and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and social and political issues. Students will actively engage in the analytical examination of required readings and express their responses through class discussions and group presentations.

Intermediate Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues/Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell 303
 

In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new novels by Africa’s young and established writers, from countries as varied as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that women writers such as Adichie, Bulawayo, Selasie, and Mengiste use to narrate issues affecting the continent. These topics include: dictatorship; the lingering effects of colonization; the postcolonial nation state; the traumas of war and geo-politics; gender and sexuality; and migration; among others. These central questions will guide our readings: What themes, concerns, and literary strategies animate, unite, or differentiate the literature by women writers from different African countries?  How applicable are Western feminist and womanist theories to African fiction? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Assignments include a weekly African News Forum, a historical group presentation, intermittent novel reviews, and a final essay.

AAS 3500- 2 Slavery to Freedom (3)

Instructor: Giuliana Perrone

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall 042

Exactly 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States. But it also signaled a new beginning for African Americans who would soon be considered citizens for the first time. How should we think about this event in American history? What were its consequences? How was black freedom conceived, and what did it look like once realized? What role did African Americans play in ending the peculiar institution? In what ways did emancipation succeed and in what ways did it fail? Using primary and secondary sources, we will explore these questions.

Beginning with the antebellum period and ending with the arrival of Jim Crow, this course will focus on emancipation as a moment of transition – as one step in the long and difficult process of transforming the nation from “half slave” to fully free. We will address several key themes from this period, including (1) the experience of African Americans as slaves and freedpeople; (2) the role of American law in defining slavery and shaping citizenship; and (3) the politics and economics of slavery, secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

AAS 3500- 3 Race, Medicine and Incarceration (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mon 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 238

The social history of medicine in the black experience has a long and seedy background. This course offers a three tiered approach to understanding the history of black incarceration (broadly defined) and the ways in which the captive black body has functioned as a site of medical exploitation and profit from the period of slavery to the present. Using medicine, race, and gender as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand how the male and female slave, prisoner, asylum “inmate,” and unclaimed “indigent” black body contributed to the development of modern medicine, as experimental subjects and autopsy specimens. Some of the subjects discussed include: the history of slavery and medicine in the American South, the post-Civil War medical crisis in the black community, the rise of convict leasing and the New South penal medical economy, Jim Crow and medical (in)justice in late 19th century America, the rise of the early 20th century eugenics movement and its impact on incarcerated subjects, prison photography and the black body as spectacle and specimen in the modern era, and a host of other related topics. This course is tailored to students interested in the sciences and humanities, and will prove useful for those pursuing careers in the medical profession.

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Wed. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

AAS 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, Shannon House 109

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated or have been forced to move. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat or don't eat hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4500-Africa & Mapping Global Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 395

AAS 4501-The Black Metropolis: African Americans and the City (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

In the first six decades of the twentieth century, over 6 million African Americans left the South in search of a better life in cities in the North.  This course will explore the urbanization of black America and its impact on American culture, politics, and society from the early twentieth century to the present.  We will learn how the urban experience shaped African Americans’ racial identities and struggles for equality.  We will look at how the massive demographic changes to American cities during this period also transformed the nation’s political and social geography, and how the black urban experience changed over time and in relation to larger changes in America’s political economy.  In examining the many facets of the black urban experience, we will pay close attention to: work, employment, and the struggle for economic opportunity; housing, real estate, and residential patterns; schools and education; music, the arts, and expressive culture; law enforcement and police-community relations; and movements for social, political, and economic justice.

AAS 4993 Independent Study

Swah 1020 - Introductory Swahili II (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50 New Cabell Hall 332

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50 New Cabell Hall 332

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

AMST 1559 – Slavery and its Legacies(3)

Instructor: Kelley Deetz

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15, Clark Hall  101

Slavery and Freedom at UVA and in Central Virginia:  History and Legacies

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region.  The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.  The course is thus an exploration of slave and free black communities, culture and resistance, and an examination of the development of the University of Virginia.  We will put the history of slavery in the region into political context, tracing the rise of sectional tensions and secession, the advent of emancipation, the progress of Reconstruction, and the imposition of Jim Crow.

The course is interdisciplinary in nature, as we will draw on a wide range of fields, such as art history, architecture, and archaeology.  A major focus will be on how we know what we know:  on what archives and other repositories of historical sources hold; on how they were constructed; on what they leave out or obscure; and how scholars overcome the gaps, distortions and silences in the historical record.

The last weeks of the course will focus on 20th century UVA and Charlottesville, and on the issues of segregation and integration, reconciliation and repair; we will connect current initiatives at UVA to represent the history of slavery with initiatives at other universities.

AMST 2559 – Racial Performances

Instructor: Sylvia Chong

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Bryan Hall 328

ANTH 2589 – Ancient African Cities (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 168

This course surveys current archaeological knowledge about ancient African cities and states, from the Nile Valley civilizations to the Swahili coast to Kongo Mbanza. In addition to presenting the results of archaeological research, we will deal critically with changing historiographic trends about African large-scale societies.

ANTH 3310 – Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa  (3)

Intructor: China Scherz

Tues./Thurs., Ruffner Hall 175

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa.

ANTH 5590 – Ethnography of Africa (3)

Instructor: James Igoe

Tues. 4:30-7:00, Nau Hall 341

This seminar will survey important ethnographic from the African Continent, including Madagascar. While we will explore a number of classic works, emphasis will be on works published since 1990. The seminar is aimed at gradua This seminar will survey important ethnographic from the African Continent, including Madagascar. While we will explore a number of classic works, emphasis will be on works published since 1990. The seminar is aimed at graduate students from anthropology and related disciplines. However, advanced undergraduates may also enroll with instructor permission. The students from anthropology and related disciplines. However, advanced undergraduates may also enroll with instructor permission.

ANTH 5885 – Archaeology of Colonial Expansion (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

Thurs 4:30-7:00, Wilson Hall 244

Exploration of the archaeology of frontiers, expansions and colonization, focusing on European expansion into Africa and the Americas while using other archaeologically-known examples (e.g., Roman, Bantu) as comparative studies. Prerequisite: For undergraduates, ANTH 4591 senior seminar or instructor permission.

DRAM 4592 – Hip Hop Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs. 2:00- 3:15, Drama Education Bldg 206

DRAM 4593 – Poetry in Motion (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs. 2:00- 3:15, Drama Education Bldg 217

ENAM 3140 – African-American Literature II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15, Nau Hall 142

This course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, and prose essays. This lecture and participation-based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler and Martha Southgate. Mandatory assignments include weekly responses, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 4840 – Fictions of Black Identity (3)
 

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Nau Hall 142

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure black identity? Can one be phenotypically white and still be black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include leading class discussion, midterm project and seminar paper. This class is designed for students majoring in English, African American studies, and/or American studies.

ENCR 4500 – Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Bryan Hall 310

How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from gender, sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism?  This course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints or controversies that have occurred over the last several decades: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/Black Arts movement, focused on the music of James Brown and the poetry of Amiri Baraka; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or women of color feminism), focused on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and the reception to its Steven Spielberg film adaptation; 3) the debate over the social construction of race, focused on the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Percival Everett’s postmodern novel Not Sidney Poitier; 4) the controversy over the so-called downlow and queer of color critique, focused on two films, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother, 5) the debate over “post-racialism” focused on Afro-optimism/pessimism and the Black Lives Matter movement. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Chicano/a, Asian American, and postcolonial studies. In addition to the materials listed above, the readings will include a variety of theoretical essays drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory; film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late-twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.  Graded assignments include two class presentations, two short position papers, and a 15-page term paper.

ENAM 4500 – Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Tues.5:00-7:00, Nau Hall 241

This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, "landscapes," are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public's interest).  We launchour exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars.  With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy.  You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens' modern progress, but also to block others from accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled.  We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region. In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar. Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion--politics of universal standards for public restroom pictograms.  Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester.  Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.

ENLT 2513: Crossings: Race and Trans-Atlantic American Literature (3)

Instructor: Sarah Ingle

Mon./Wed./Fr. 10:00-10:50, New Cabell Hall 309

This course will explore American literature from a trans-Atlantic perspective, focusing on "crossings" both literal and metaphorical. We will examine how works of American literature both reflect and respond to the construction and the permeability of racial and national boundaries. Assigned readings will include texts by authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Derek Walcott, Barbara Kingsolver, Caryl Phillips, and Edwidge Danticat. Students are encouraged to take advantage of the fact that Caryl Phillips will be at UVA in April as the Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence by attending his readings and lectures on campus. Our discussions will explore how the texts on our syllabus interrogate concepts such as race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and citizenship and how they represent the complex web of history, memory, and myth that ties them to the past. Class requirements include three essays, weekly email responses, an oral presentation, a final exam, and active participation in class discussions.

ENMC 3310 – Major African Americans Poets (3)
 

Instructor: Marvin Campbell

Mon./Wed./ Fri., 11:00-11:50, Gibson Hall 242

This course will explore the category, history, and development of African-American poetry over the course of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, spanning from the Harlem Renaissance to our contemporary moment, to examine how long poems of the tradition challenge distinctions between genres and interact with the musical forms of jazz, blues, and hip-hop, as well as reflect the aesthetic, cultural, and critical legacy of African-American poetics.  We will also consider the myriad ways in which these poets have responded to the pressures of history, situating their investigations of literary form and oral traditions in the context of the emergence of "the New Negro," the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of black feminism, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.  Authors will include: Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Melvin Tolson, and Claudia Rankine.

In addition to active class discussion, assignments will include two shorter papers, various unconventional class exercises, and a longer research paper.

ENMC 3500 – Currents in African Literature (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 303

In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new novels by Africa’s young and established writers, from countries as varied as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that women writers such as Adichie, Bulawayo, Selasie, and Mengiste use to narrate issues affecting the continent. These topics include: dictatorship; the lingering effects of colonization; the postcolonial nation state; the traumas of war and geo-politics; gender and sexuality; and migration; among others. These central questions will guide our readings: What themes, concerns, and literary strategies animate, unite, or differentiate the literature by women writers from different African countries?  How applicable are Western feminist and womanist theories to African fiction? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Assignments include a weekly African News Forum, a historical group presentation, intermittent novel reviews, and a final essay.

FREN 3570 – African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, New Cabell Hall 207

This course addresses various aspects of Francophone African Culture including , oral traditions, literature, theatre, cinema, and contemporary music and visual arts. Prerequisites: FREN 3031 & 3032

HIAF 3559 – Slavery in the Atlantic World (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50, New Cabell Hall 058

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of African History.

HIAF 4501 – African Atlantic World History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon. 1:00-3:00, Nau Hall 241

HIUS 3072 – The Civil War and Reconstruction (3)

Gary Gallagher

Examines the course of the Civil War and Reconstruction in detail and attempts to assess their impact on 19th century American society, both in the North and in the South.

HIUS 3231 - Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Mon./Wed. 10:00-10:50, Nau Hall 211

A history of the American South from the arrival of the first English settlers through the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Cross-listed with AAS 3231.

HIUS 4501 - Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 027

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

HIUS 4501 – African Americans and the City (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

In the first six decades of the twentieth century, over 6 million African Americans left the South in search of a better life in cities in the North.  This course will explore the urbanization of black America and its impact on American culture, politics, and society from the early twentieth century to the present.  We will learn how the urban experience shaped African Americans’ racial identities and struggles for equality.  We will look at how the massive demographic changes to American cities during this period also transformed the nation’s political and social geography, and how the black urban experience changed over time and in relation to larger changes in America’s political economy.  In examining the many facets of the black urban experience, we will pay close attention to: work, employment, and the struggle for economic opportunity; housing, real estate, and residential patterns; schools and education; music, the arts, and expressive culture; law enforcement and police-community relations; and movements for social, political, and economic justice.

MUSI 3090 - Performance in Africa (3)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues., Old Caebll Hall 107

This course explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples and hands-on practice. The course meets together with MUSI 3690 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble), but it is a full academic course. Students in 3090 are automatically part of the UVA African Music and Dance Ensemble. Your role in the Ensemble as learner and performer is crucial to your overall work in the course. We will explore African music/dance styles – focusing on Ewe music from Ghana and Togo and BaAka music from the Central African Republic, but branching to other forms and genres – their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the politics and processes involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another.

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Gibson Hall 341

PLAP 4810 Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs 3:30-6:00, Gibson Hall 341

Studies the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Includes the colonial experience and the rise of African nationalism; the transition to independence; the rise and fall of African one-party states; the role of the military in African politics; the politics of ethnicity, nation- and state-building; patromonialism and patron-client relations; development problems faced by African regimes, including relations with external actors; and the political future of Southern Africa. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of Africa; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

RELA 3559 – Magic and Witchcraft (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Gibson Hall 141

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of African Religions.

RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50, Gilmer Hall 141

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa.  After a brief overview of the central tenets and rituals of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century.  We will trace the transmission of Islam via traders and clerics to West Africa.  We will consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; and the impact of European colonization and de-colonization upon African Muslims. We will also consider distinctive aspects of Islam in East Africa, such as the flowering of Swahili devotional literature, and the tradition of saint veneration. 

Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics and themes encountered in our historical survey.  Through the use of ethnographic and literary materials, we will explore issues such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the role of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality. This course meets the Historical Studies requirement, as well as the Non-Western Perspectives requirement.  One prior course on Islam or African religions is recommended.

RELA 4085 – Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa (3)

Instructor:Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton 

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 309

An examination of Christian missions in Africa in the 21st Century. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses and approaches, we examine faith-based initiatives in Africa--those launched from abroad, as well as from within the continent. What does it mean to be a missionary in Africa today? How are evangelizing efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights?

RELG 3800 – African American Religious History (3)

Instructor: Heather Warren

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts, combining an examination of current scholarship, worship and praxis. It will examine the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US.

SOC 3410 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, Maury 115

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 4640 - Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Nau Hall 142

Examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory.  Topics include public space and urban culture, social segregation and inequality, the phenomenon of the global city, and the effects of economic change or urban social life. Six credits of Sociology or instructor permission.

SOC 4750 – Racism (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:00, New Cabell Hall 068

Racism, the disparagement and victimization of individuals and groups because of a belief that their ancestry renders them intrinsically different and inferior, is a problem in many societies. In this course we will examine the problem of racism by investigating the workings of these sociological processes theoretically, historically, and contemporaneously.

AAS 1010  Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Wilson Hall 301

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 in lecture and discussion section, and three written exams.

AAS 1559  Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45,  Gilmer Hall 141

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations, musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

AAS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2:00-4:30, New Cabell 191

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 2559 The Films of Spike Lee (3)

Intructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs.  2:00 -3:15, Physics Blg 204​

One of the most significant figures in modern American cinema, Spike Lee is one of today’s most prolific American filmmakers and arguably the most recognizable African American filmmaker alive.  With 35+ films to his credit, Lee’s filmography indexes the broad and tangled history of public debate over race, class, gender, ethnicity and commercial cinema since the 1980s. This course will consider the evolution of the themes, genres, techniques, and artistic philosophy reflected in Lee’s work as director, producer and cultural critic over his considerable career. We will also be concerned to highlight the tensions that arise from Lee’s seemingly contradictory reputation as an ‘independent’ filmmaker and his prominence as a commercially successful ‘mainstream’ producer and director.  We will view several major and lesser-known films, from blockbusters like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to the obscure Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop. We will also consider Lee’s documentary projects 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke among other important Lee works (including television ads). The goal of the course is to critically situate ‘the Spike Lee phenomenon’ in the history of black American cinema and in the wider context of global filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century.​

AAS 2559 Sensing Africa (3)

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

Tues. 6:00 - 8:00, New Cabell Hall 132

Following the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s cautionary tale about “the danger of the single story,” which sheds light on how Africa has been framed in both mainstream and radical discourses, this course explores how the senses can be mobilized to complicate the place of Africa in history, as well as the material struggles and traumatic displacements that have occurred there from colonial times to date. By bringing together a wide variety of materials ranging from ethnographies, novels, and documentaries to video clips and films, the course aims to help us question our misperceptions about Africa. First, we will engage with the question, “how to understand this extraordinary continent through our “perceptions?” More broadly perception is “the process of becoming sensitive to physical objects, phenomena.” In other words, our senses, which include sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste, play a key role in how we perceive and misperceive the world. So, to ask the question “how is Africa misperceived” requires that we ponder how our senses respond to Africa, not just visually, but say, through feeling, sound, and even taste when it is portrayed as backward, poor, undemocratic, and homophobic in mainstream representations. In the first half of the course, we will study how the way we perceive [sense] Africa is informed by particular histories, cultures, religions, political economies, and racial constructs. By underlining perception, we will engage in modes of enquiry that emphasize how Africa matters, questioning both historical and current stereotypes about the continent. The extent to which African intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, among others, reinvent themselves in moments that both appear promising and uncertain is at the heart of this course.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 11:00 - 12:15, Gibson Hall 241

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 3500 - 001 Musical Fictions (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues/Thurs. 11:00 - 12:15, New Cabell Hall 485

In this interdisciplinary course we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel as we read seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, and calypso and rock novels from writers such as James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Michael Thelwell, Oscar Hijuelos, Esi Edugyan, and Nick Hornby.  We will explore issues such as: How and why do contemporary writers record the sounds (instruments, rhythm, melody, tone), lyrics, structure, and personal and cultural valences of music, not on wax, but in novelistic prose, and what does it mean to simultaneously read and ‘listen to’ such novels? What kinds of cultural baggage and aesthetic conventions do particular music forms bring to the novel form? Why are writers and readers both so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope? Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations, musical and literary reviews, and a final paper.

AAS 3500 - 002 Race and Real Estate (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 323

This course examines the dynamic relationship between real estate, racial segregation, wealth, and poverty in American cities and suburbs, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will look at how the quest for homeownership in a capitalist society shaped ideas of race and belonging, influenced Americans’ political ideologies and material interests, and impacted movements for civil rights and economic justice.  We will study the history of Federal housing policies and programs, the evolution of real estate industry practices in the age of civil rights and “white flight,” the relationship between residential location and quality of public education, and contemporary trends in housing and real estate markets in metropolitan America.  In addition to secondary readings in history, sociology, economics, and urban studies, students will learn to interpret a variety of primary sources, including land deeds and covenants, tax records, maps, financial statements, contracts, and industry trade publications.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures, tutorials, and discussions of weekly reading assignments.  Students will complete 3 topical essays and a final research project.

AAS 3500 - 003 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri.  12:00-12:50, Dell 2 101

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

AAS 3500 - 004 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 3:30 - 4:45, New Cabell Hall 383

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 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 107

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated, settled, or have been forced to move. We will examine historical processes which have led to the development of certain foodways and explore the ways that these traditions play out on the ground today. We will begin by examining some examples of culinary tradition in different African spaces both in the past and present. We’ll be moving on to see how cooking traditions changed and morphed as people moved across oceans and land. We’ll investigate Caribbean, American (United States), and other Diasporic traditions, examining the ways people of African descent influenced cooking, eating and meaning in the new cultural worlds they entered and how the local traditions in these new spaces had an influence on these cooks’ culinary experiences. Concentrating on African spaces and cultural traditions as well as on traditions in other places in the world where people of African descent live, we will be exploring food and eating in this course in relationship to such topics as taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship, beauty, and temperance and excess. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat—or don’t eat—hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts.

AAS 4570  Black Women and Work (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mon. 3:30 - 6:00, New Cabell Hall 107

This course is an Advanced Research Seminar. Black women have always worked. This course offers an intersectional and historical examination of the lives and labors of African American women in the United States. Using gender, race, and class as essential categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand the myriad contributions working black women have made to American history—across time and space—as slaves, convict workers, domestic servants, laundresses, nurses, sex workers, beauty shop owners, educators, numbers runners, labor activists, and so on. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: the role enslaved women played in the plantation economy as producers and reproducers, black women and convict labor in the post-Civil War South, the lives and labors of wage-earning African American women, black women’s engagement in illicit and informal economies (e.g. sex workers, bootleggers, gamblers, etc.), black women’s informal and formal labor activism and protest, and the scientific labors of sick and deceased incarcerated black women. Historical social perceptions and constructions of non-laboring black women, who have been cast as “lazy,” “deviant,” and “criminal,” will also be discussed.  

SWAH 1010 - Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50 Monroe Hall 113

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50 Monroe Hall 113

Semester 1 - Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

SWAH 2010 - Intermediate Swahili I (3)

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50 Monroe Hall 113

Semester 3 - Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

AMST 3559- 2 -  Hip-Hop As Technology (3 credit in fall, 3 credits in spring)

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 2:00 -3:15, Gibson Hall 341

This course explores hip-hop music as both history and lived practice with a particular focus on the music's role as technology, in two senses of that word. The first is the technological underpinnings of the music itself, and its transformation of tools of musical reproduction into tools of musical production. The second is the music's potential as a technology of education, community-buildiing, and civic engagement. This class will be rooted in a lab-based learning experience that combines traditional academic study with introductory musical practice, offering a critical and historical examination of hip-hop music and the social contexts that birthed, shaped, and continue to sustain it. Students will be directly involved with the building, maintenance, and creative output of an in-class "audio lab," which will provide a hands-on introduction to historical inquiry and musical practice while particularly focusing on issues such as access and mobility. After the lab is up and running the outreach portion of this course will commence, which looks to extend new forms of musical education opportunities to local Charlottesville young people.

AMST 3559 - 3 - Cultures of Hip-Hop (3)

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Dell 1 105

This course explores the trajectories and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form over the last forty years, and maps the ways that a locally-born urban underclass subculture has become the dominant mode of 21st-century global popular culture. We will explore hip-hop’s historical roots in the post-Sixties urban crisis and postcolonial Caribbean diaspora; trace its emergence from subculture into mainstream culture during the 1980s and the music’s growing uses as a tool of politics and protest; probe its ascendance to the dominant form of American popular music in the 1990s and the widening regional, socioeconomic, and racial/ethnic diversity of its adherents; and finally explore hip-hop’s continuing dominance in contemporary global culture. While our syllabus is structured thematically as opposed to chronologically, the goal of this class is to provide students a clear sense of the history of hip-hop and the cultures that produced and have been produced by it, as well as broader issues that have driven both the music and conversations about it.

AMST 4500 - 3  Race, Space, and Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison/Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30 - 9:00, Bryan Hall 312

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.

AMST 4500 - 4 W. E. B. Du Bois (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 332

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual  W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about.

AMST 4500 - 5 Documentary and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 066

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. It foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. 

DRAM 4590 The Black Monologues (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Mon./Tues./Wed./Thurs./Fri. - 7:00 - 9:00

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

ENAM 3500 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Monroe Hall 118

ENAM 3510 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50, Dell 2 101

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

ENAM 4500-3 W. E. B. Du Bois (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 332

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual  W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Cocke Hall 101

This course for advanced undergraduates and master's-level graduate students surveys African American literature today. Assignments include works by Evreett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison

ENCR 4500 Race, Space, Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Tues. 6:30-9:00, Bryan Hall 312

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.

ENGL 1500 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

Gilmer Hall 141

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations,  musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

ENLT 2547 Black Woman Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15,  Nau Hall 142

Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year.  For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

FREN 4811 Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.

FRTR 3584 African Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

This course is a survey of African cinema since the 1950s.  First the course will examine the representation of Africa and the Africans in colonial films as well as policies and practices of colonial nations regarding cinema and filmmaking in Africa.  Second the course will study the birth and evolution of celluloid filmmaking in postcolonial Africa.  Third the emergence of Nollywood film industry.

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Tues./Thurs.11:00-12:15, Claude Moore Nursing Education Bldg G120

An introductory course to the history of Africa from roughly the dawn of history until the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Over sixteen weeks we will proceed chronologically by region, learning about the great diversity of peoples, cultures, and climates that inhabit the African continent. In this course we will learn that Africa was never the “dark continent” that it is often supposed to be. A major focus of the course will be Africa’s engagement with the outside world, including the trans-Saharan trade, Swahili city-states and the Indian Ocean, and Trans-Atlantic trade. We will see how Africans have always been important historical actors in world history, exploring how they interacted with their neighbors in ways that made sense to them and their communities.
Course material will be presented through interactive lectures and in-class discussion as well as in depth examination of primary and secondary historical courses, art and material culture. Evaluation will be based on class participation and a series of take-home writing assignments geared towards helping students develop their critical thinking, reading, and writing faculties. No prior knowledge of African history is required.

HIUS 3559 -1 Sounds of Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15, Nau Hall 211

HIUS 3651 Afro American History to 1865 (3)

Instructor: Justene Hill

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell 368

In this course, we will interrogate the history of people of African descent in the United States, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the outbreak of the Civil War.  We will discuss major events in early African-American history to consider how the twin engines of slavery and the quest for freedom shaped the lives of millions of African and African-American people in the United States.  Students will consider how social, economic, political, and legal frameworks established in the period between the colonial era and the Civil War influenced the lived experiences of African Americans, enslaved and free.  Topics will include: pre-colonial West and Central Africa, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the development of North American slavery, resistance and revolution in Atlantic slave communities, gradual emancipation laws, economics of slavery, the gendered experience in slavery and freedom, and black people’s participation in anti-slavery politics.  Students will learn about the multifaceted experiences of African Americans by analyzing primary and secondary sources, films, and historical fiction.

HIUS 3654 Black Fire (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

Does the idea of a "post-racial society" hold true when we examine the complex nature of social and cultural life at the University of Virginia?  How and to what degree have the individual and collective experiences of African American undergraduates transformed since the late 1960's?  Is there still a need for the Black Student Alliance, the Office of African American Affairs, and the Office of Diversity and Equity?  Is Black Studies still an intellectual necessity in the 21st century academy?  Have these entities been successful in bringing about meaningful change in the experiences of underrepresented minorities?  And if not, how can future efforts to make the University a more inclusive institution benefit from a critical engagement with past struggles for social justice and racial equality?  Moreover, how might we find a way to more effectively bring the many segments of UVa's black community(Athletes, black Greeks, second generation immigrants, Christians, Muslims, etc) together?

To facilitate critical thinking and exchange on these and other important questions, this hybrid course grounds contemporary debates on the state of race relations at UVA within the larger, historical context of the "black Wahoo" experience.  In addition to exploring contemporary issues affecting academic, cultural, and social life on grounds, our classroom and online activities draw attention to an important yet insufficiently explored chapter in the history of "Jefferson's University" by examining the varied ways in which various student-led movements have transformed the intellectual culture and social fabric of everyday life at the University.  How those transformations continue to shape our experiences on grounds will be a topic of frequent discussion.  Though the focus of this course is local, we will explore topics that have and continue to engage college students across the nation:  the Integration of African Americans into the post-civil rights, historically white university, the political potential of Greek organizations, the status of the black athlete, the viability of the African American Studies program and departments, and the impact of Affirmative Action on higher education.

HIUS 3853 From Redlines to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 323

This course examines the relationship between race, real estate, wealth, and poverty in the United States, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will learn about the instrumental role homeownership and residential location has played in shaping the educational options; job prospects, living expenses, health, quality of life, and wealth accumulation of Americans in the twentieth century, and how race became--and remains --a key determinant in the distribution of the homeownership's benefits in American society.  We will study the structure and mechanics of the American real estate industry, the historical and contemporary dynamics of housing markets in urban and suburban America, and the impact of governmental policies and programs on the American economy and built environment.  We will look at how the promise of perils of homeownership has shaped ideas of race and belonging, and informed the political ideologies and material interests, of both white and black Americans.  We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, and in the making of modern American capitalism.  And we will explore how legal challenges and political mobilizations against racial exclusion and economic exploitation in housing markets came to shape the modern black freedom movement as a whole.  As we do, we will acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of how real estate shapes our lives and lies at the heart of many of the most vexing problems and pressing challenges facing America today.  

HIUS 4501-1 Race and Inequality in America (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Tues. 1:00-3:30, Shannon House 108

This research seminar will examine the history of race as social category, racism as a set of interpersonal and institutional practices, and racial inequality in 20th century American life.  Students will study a range of scholarship and conduct research on a topic related to the course's theme, culminating in a final research paper.

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Tues./Thurs 11:00-12:15, Gibson 341

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

PLAP 4841 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Instructor: David O'Brien

Fri. 1:00-3:30, Gibson Hall 142

Explores the vexatious lines between the rights of individuals and those of the state in democratic society, focusing on such major issues as freedom of expression and worship; separation of church and state; criminal justice; the suffrage; privacy; and racial and gender discrimination. Focuses on the judicial process. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

PLCP 3012 The Politics of Developing Areas

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon./Wed. 9:00-9:50, Minor Hall 125

PLPT 4500 - 001 Freedom, Empire, and Slavery

Instructor: K. Lawrie Balfour

Wed. 2:00-4:30, Nau Hall 241

Investigates a special problem of political theory such as political corruption, religion and politics, science and politics, or the nature of justice.

Religion

RELA 2850 Afro- Creole Religions in the Americas

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30 - 10:45, Gibson Hall 211

This survey course investigates African-inspired religious practices in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S., particularly those religions--such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka “Santería”), Brazilian Candomblé, and black churches in North America--which are deemed emblematic of local African-descended populations and even entire New World societies. By reading ethnographies, we will compare features common to many of these religions—such as polytheism, initiatory secrecy, divination, possession trance, animal sacrifice—as well as differences—such as contrasting evaluations of the devotional use of material objects, relations with the dead, and the commodification of ritual expertise. We will consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as “Africa,” “tradition,” “syncretism,” “modernity,” and “creole.”

Sociology

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Kimberly Hoosier

Tues./Thurs. 9:00 - 9:50, Minor Hall 130

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.

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African American and African Studies II

Tues/Thurs, 12:30 – 1:45, Wilson Hall 301

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 101. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

AAS 2224 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wednesdays: 2:00 – 4:30, Maury 115 (section 1); 6:00 – 8:30, New Cabell 036 (section 2)

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 3500-001 – Currents in African Literature

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon/Wed 3:30 – 4:45, New Cabell 364

In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new novels by Africa’s young and established writers, from countries as varied as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that women writers such as Adichie, Bulawayo, Selasie, and Mengiste use to narrate issues affecting the continent. These topics include: dictatorship; the lingering effects of colonization; the postcolonial nation state; the traumas of war and geo-politics; gender and sexuality; and migration; among others. These central questions will guide our readings: What themes, concerns, and literary strategies animate, unite, or differentiate the literature by women writers from different African countries?  How applicable are Western feminist and womanist theories to African fiction? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Assignments include a weekly African News Forum, a historical group presentation, intermittent novel reviews, and a final essay.

AAS 3500-002: History of the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon/Wed 2:00 – 3:15, Nau 341

This course examines the history of the southern Civil Rights Movement.  Studies the civil rights movement's philosophies, tactics, events, personalities, and consequences, beginning in 1900, but concentrating heavily on the activist years between 1955 and 1968.

AAS 3500-003: Slavery Since Emancipation

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mondays 3:30-6:00, New Cabell 485

Slavery in the United States did not end after the Civil War. This course offers a historical and intersectional approach to understanding how slavery has evolved in the U.S. since 1865. Using gender, race, ethnicity, and class as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand modern slavery’s impact on diverse populations in the United States, including members of the African Diaspora. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: The 13th Amendment and the restoration of slavery through convict leasing, chain gangs, and mass incarceration; the proliferation of sex trafficking in the U.S. and the legal inequalities met by its victims; human trafficking and its global connections; U.S. involvement in the international slave trade and its often overlooked effects on black populations, and U.S. based activism and approaches to the abolishing the modern slave trade.  

AAS 3500-004: Being Human: Race, Technology, Performance

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon/Wed 2:00 – 3:15, New Cabell Hall 364

An introduction to the concepts in Afrofuturism, exploring race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through futuristic representations of blackness in TV ("Almost Human”); film (Last Angel of History); music (Janelle Monáe), and literature (Butler/Okorafor). Assignments include literary essays, short films, mashups, and web-content that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and technology in contemporary media.

AAS 3500-005: African American Literature

Instructor: Julius Fleming

Tues/Thurs 9:30 – 10:45, New Cabell 364

 this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day. 

AAS 3500-006: Black Fire

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:15, Wilson Hall 301

Does the idea of a "post-racial society" hold true when we examine the complex nature of social and cultural life at the University of Virginia?  How and to what degree have the individual and collective experiences of African American undergraduates transformed since the late 1960's?  Is there still a need for the Black Student Alliance, the Office of African American Affairs, and the Office of Diversity and Equity?  Is Black Studies still an intellectual necessity in the 21st century academy?  Have these entities been successful in bringing about meaningful change in the experiences of underrepresented minorities?  And if not, how can future efforts to make the University a more inclusive institution benefit from a critical engagement with past struggles for social justice and racial equality?  Moreover, how might we find a way to more effectively bring the many segments of UVa's black community(Athletes, black Greeks, second generation immigrants, Christians, Muslims, etc) together?

To facilitate critical thinking and exchange on these and other important questions, this hybrid course grounds contemporary debates on the state of race relations at UVA within the larger, historical context of the "black Wahoo" experience.  In addition to exploring contemporary issues affecting academic, cultural, and social life on grounds, our classroom and online activities draw attention to an important yet insufficiently explored chapter in the history of "Jefferson's University" by examining the varied ways in which various student-led movements have transformed the intellectual culture and social fabric of everyday life at the University.  How those transformations continue to shape our experiences on grounds will be a topic of frequent discussion.  Though the focus of this course is local, we will explore topics that have and continue to engage college students across the nation:  the Integration of African Americans into the post-civil rights, historically white university, the political potential of Greek organizations, the status of the black athlete, the viability of the African American Studies program and departments, and the impact of Affirmative Action on higher education.

AAS 3500-007: Race, Culture and Inequality

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. The course will survey social science research about cultural forms such as everyday discourse, styles of dress, music, literature, visual arts, and media as they relate to race and inequality. As we examine these studies, we will learn about key thinkers in social science approaches to culture, and we will analyze core concepts such as cultural capital, frames, symbolic boundaries, scripts, racial grammar, and more

AAS 3652: African American History since 1865

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon/Wed/Fri 11:00 – 11:50, New Cabell 315

This course examines the black experience in America from emancipation to the present.  We will study African Americans’ long struggle for freedom and equality, and learn about their contributions to and influence on America’s social, political, and economic development.  We will also study the history of race and racism, explore how its meaning and practice has changed over time, and how it shaped—and continues to shape—the lives of all persons in America.  Central to this course is the idea that African American history is American history, and that the American experience cannot be understood apart from the struggles and triumphs of African Americans.  Course topics include: emancipation and Reconstruction; the age of Jim Crow; the Great Migration and the New Negro; the civil rights and Black Power movements; mass incarceration; and struggles for justice and equality in the present.  In addition to readings from assigned books, students will analyze and interpret a variety of primary sources, including film, music, and visual art.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures and discussions.  Assignments will include a midterm, a final exam, two topical essays, and short responses to weekly readings.

AAS 3749: Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thursdays 2:00 – 4:30

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated, settled, or have been forced to move. We will examine historical processes which have led to the development of certain foodways and explore the ways that these traditions play out on the ground today. We will begin by examining some examples of culinary tradition in different African spaces both in the past and present. We’ll be moving on to see how cooking traditions changed and morphed as people moved across oceans and land. We’ll investigate Caribbean, American (United States), and other Diasporic traditions, examining the ways people of African descent influenced cooking, eating and meaning in the new cultural worlds they entered and how the local traditions in these new spaces had an influence on these cooks’ culinary experiences. Concentrating on African spaces and cultural traditions as well as on traditions in other places in the world where people of African descent live, we will be exploring food and eating in this course in relationship to such topics as taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship, beauty, and temperance and excess. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat—or don’t eat—hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts.

AAS 4109: The Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Instructor: Aniko Bodroghkozy

Tues/Thurs 3:30 – 4:45, New Cabell 027

Course examines the crucial relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and mass media from 1950s through early 1970s, looking at a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, and news as primary documents that can tell us something about American race relations during this period and how the nation responded to challenges posed by a powerful social change movement. Prerequisite: Students should have completed either MDST 2000 Introduction to Media Studies or AMST 2001 Formations of American Cultural Studies.

AAS 4570-001: Queer Africas

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

Mondays, 6:00 – 8:30, New Cabell 036

Retracing the execution of the royal pages in nineteenth century Uganda, now famously known as the Martyrs of Uganda, to the murder of the LGBT human rights activist, David Kato, for example, we will explore the extent and circulation of afroqueer subjectivities in the the circum-Atlantic world. By providing an introduction to various artists, activists, and intellectuals, both in Africa and its myriad diasporas, this interdisciplinary seminar examines what it means to be both black and queer historically, spatially, and contemporarily. Together, we will explore how “afro-queer” as a concept is not only embraced or contested, but is also an aesthetic that drives imaginations and projects that constantly disrupt racialized gendered normativities dictated by white supremacist regimes. How do queer political projects perpetuate antiblackness in both liberal and neoliberal scenes of empire? And how are black queer subjects’ refusal of mainstream queer political projects constitutive of a longer history of black refusal and complicity? We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific aesthetics as well as racial and sexual identity categories more broadly. Our aim here is to employ the prism of artistry and of the day to day experiences of afroqueer subjects to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies.

AAS 4570-002: Black Radicalism and the Artistic Imagination

Instructor: Petal Samuel

Tuesdays, 2:00 – 4:30, New Cabell 056

In her 2016 Superbowl performance, Beyoncé donned the iconic garb of the Black Panthers, eliciting a wide range of both supportive and critical responses. This performance, however, is only one recent example of a far longer tradition of black artists controversially using their work to indict and challenge structures of oppression, demand radical social and political change, and imagine a future devoid of the pervasive and persistent anti-blackness of modern life. Black Radicalism and the Artistic Imagination explores the role of art--fiction, poetry, film, music, and visual art--in shaping and sustaining the diverse body of revolutionary, activist philosophies known as the black radical tradition. We will examine a variety of artists and texts, including the writings of Octavia Butler and James Baldwin; musicians Nina Simone, Solange, and D'Angelo; filmmaker Ava Duvernay; Haitian-American visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the artistic strategies of organizations like The Movement for Black Lives and BYP100. The course asks: What is black radicalism, and how might we define its core concerns and strategies? How are these core principles articulated through art? What continuities and deviations, points of consensus and conflict, can we observe through time when juxtaposing the creative strategies of artists through time? What is the relationship between art and activist organizations? In what way does black radical art enact, advance, or define the work of revolution?

AMST 2155-001 Whiteness and Religion: Religious Foundations of a Racial Category

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./ Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

This class examines the role religion plays in defining a racial category known as whiteness. By reading cultural histories and ethnographies of the religious practices of various communities, we will examine how groups now classified as white (Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc.) and religious images (depictions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary) "became white" and the role that religious practice played in this shift in racial classification.

AMST 2753: Arts and Cultures of the Slave South         

Instructor: Louis Nelson
                                                                                 
Tues./Thurs.9:30AM-10:45AM, Nau Hall 101

This interdisciplinary course covers the American South to the Civil War. While the course centers on the visual arts- architecture, material culture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture- it is not designed as a regional history of art, but an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, foodways, music and literature in the formation of Southern identities

AMST 3559- 2 -  Hip-Hop As Technology

Instructor: John Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 2:00PM-3:15PM, Wilson Hall

This course explores hip-hop music as both history and lived practice with a particular focus on the music's role as technology, in two senses of that word. The first is the technological underpinnings of the music itself, and its transformation of tools of musical reproduction into tools of musical production. The second is the music's potential as a technology of education, community-building, and civic engagement. This class will be rooted in a lab-based learning experience that combines traditional academic study with introductory musical practice, offering a critical and historical examination of hip-hop music and the social contexts that birthed, shaped, and continue to sustain it. Students will be directly involved with the building, maintenance, and creative output of an in-class "audio lab," which will provide a hands-on introduction to historical inquiry and musical practice while particularly focusing on issues such as access and mobility. After the lab is up and running the outreach portion of this course will commence, which looks to extend new forms of musical education opportunities to local Charlottesville young people.

AMST 3559 - 3 - Cultures of Hip-Hop (3)

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Dell 1 105

This course explores the trajectories and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form over the last forty years, and maps the ways that a locally-born urban underclass subculture has become the dominant mode of 21st-century global popular culture. We will explore hip-hop’s historical roots in the post-Sixties urban crisis and postcolonial Caribbean diaspora; trace its emergence from subculture into mainstream culture during the 1980s and the music’s growing uses as a tool of politics and protest; probe its ascendance to the dominant form of American popular music in the 1990s and the widening regional, socioeconomic, and racial/ethnic diversity of its adherents; and finally explore hip-hop’s continuing dominance in contemporary global culture. While our syllabus is structured thematically as opposed to chronologically, the goal of this class is to provide students a clear sense of the history of hip-hop and the cultures that produced and have been produced by it, as well as broader issues that have driven both the music and conversations about it.

AMST 3559-003 Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

TR 200-315 (Dell 2 103)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

This course explores the 1920s Jazz Age from a multimedia perspective of the Harlem Renaissance in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, dance, music, photography, film, and politics. We’ll consider the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a “Mecca of the New Negro” but also of Chicago, D.C., Richmond, and Lynchburg as instances of places contributing to the idea of the New Negro Renaissance.  We’ll examine some of the hot debates and combustible movements of the time, including:  the Great Black Migration, art as uplift and propaganda, elite versus vernacular approaches, the Negro newspaper, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting, urban sociology, the Garveyite movement, Negro bohemianism, the gendering of the Renaissance idea, queer subcultures, radical activism, and interraciality. We’ll sample a wide range of works: essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Willis Richardson and Zora Neale Hurston; art by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham, the Nicholas brothers, and Josephine Baker; musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Harry Burleigh, and Roland Hayes; photographers Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee; and the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We’ll conclude with some contemporary revisualizations of the Harlem Renaissance in fiction and film.  Assignments include several short papers, a midterm, and final exam.

AMST 4500-1 Race and Sound

Instructor: John Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30PM-4:45PM, Nau Hall 241

This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics vary.

AMST 4559-1 Race in American Places

Instructor: Kendrick Grandison

Tues. 5:30PM-8:00 PM, Bryan Hall 235

This interdisciplinary seminar analyzes and unearths how everyday places and spaces are involved in the negotiation of power in American society. We analyze not only written texts, but also non-written materials and field trip experiences.

AMST 4500 - 3  Race, Space, and Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison/Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30 - 9:00, Bryan Hall 312

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.

ANTH 2625-001 Imagining Africa

Instructor: James Igoe

Tues. 3:30PM-6:00PM, The Rotunda Room 150  

Africa is commonly imagined in the West as an unproblematically bounded and undifferentiated entity. This course engages and moves beyond western traditions of story telling about Africa to explore  diverse systems of imagining Africa's multi-diasporic realities. Imagining Africa is never a matter of pure abstraction, but entangled in material struggles and collective memory, and taking place at diverse and interconnected scales and locales.

Prerequisite: ANTH 1010

ANTH 3455-001, ANTH 7455 African Languages

Instructor: Ellen Contini-Morava

Tues./Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15 PM, The Rotunda Room 150

An introduction to the linguistic diversity of the African continent, with focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Topics include  linguistic structures (sound systems, word-formation, and syntax); the classification of African languages; the use of linguistic data to reconstruct prehistory; language and social identity; verbal art; language policy debates; the rise of "mixed" languages among urban youth.

SWAH 1020- Introductory Swahili II

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri.10:00AM-10:50AM, New Cabell Hall 368

Mon./Wed./ Fri. 11:00AM-11:50AM, New Cabell Hall 368

WAH 2020-001 Intermediate Swahili II

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00PM-12:50PM, New Cabell Hall 368

Further develops skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, and awareness of the cultural diversity of the Swahili-speaking areas of East Africa. Readings drawn from a range of literary and journalistic materials.

DRAM 3070-001 African-American Theatre

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./ Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

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

ENAM 3140-001 African-American Literature II

Instructor: Julius Fleming

Tues./ Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, New Cabell Hall 364

Continuation of ENAM 3130, this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day. 

ENAM 3500-002

Black Power and the Bildungsroman: From Richard Wright’s Black Boy to Marvel’s Luke Cage

Instructor: Marvin Campbell

MON./WED 3:30PM-4:45PM (New Cabell 132)

Soon after its appearance in eighteenth-century Germany, the Bildungsroman—or “novel of education”—developed into a major literary form, migrating to England a century later, when Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Bronte, among others, focused on the individual’s psychological and moral development from youth to adulthood. In this course, we will explore how black authors in the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean have taken this European literary tradition and adapted it to define their own growth into selfhood and maturity, examining how colonialism, race, class, and gender, has shaped black protagonists from the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment.

From frauds to murderers; from renegades to artists; from prisoners, literal and figurative, to superheroes; from figures ostracized by their own communities, to those seeking the ties that bind in the wider world; growth for black individuals means contending with, summoning, and negotiating the rigors of power, for a voice that can surmount—if not totally free itself from—oppression. To paraphrase what Rowan Pope says to his daughter Olivia in the hit television program Scandal: no one is ever in charge, power is in charge.

Texts will include: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Black Boy, Richard Wright; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid; Sula, Toni Morrison; Luke Cage, Marvel

FREN 3570-001 Topics in Francophone African Studies

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Mon./Wed. 5:00PM-6:15PM, New Cabell Hall 044

This course addresses various aspects of Francophone African Culture including , oral traditions, literature, theatre, cinema, and contemporary music and visual arts. 
Prerequisites: FREN 3031 & 3032

FREN 4743-001 AFRICA IN CINEMA

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Mon./Wed. 2:00PM-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 594

Study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. Ideological Constructions of the African as 'other'. Exoticism in cinema. History of African cinema. Economic issues in African cinema: production, distribution, and the role of African film festivals. The socio-political context. Women in African cinema. Aesthetic problems: themes and narrative styles.  Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and FREN 3584 or another 3000-level literature course in French.

HIAF 2002 Modern African History

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./ Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, Nau Hall 211

Studies the history of Africa and its interaction with the western world from the mid-19th century to the present. Emphasizes continuities in African civilization from imperialism to independence that transcend the colonial interlude of the 20th century.

HIAF 4511-001/ HIAF 5559-001 Colloquium in African History

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon. 1:00PM-3:30PM, New Cabell Hall 042

The major colloquium is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the colloquium. Colloquia are most frequently offered in areas of history where access to source materials or linguistic demands make seminars especially difficult. Students in colloquia prepare about 25 pages of written work distributed among various assignments. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment.

HIUS 3231 Rise and Fall of the Slave South

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Mon./Wed. 10:00AM-10:50AM, McLeod Hall 2007

A history of the American South from the arrival of the first English settlers through the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Cross-listed with AAS 3231.

HIUS 3652-001 Afro-American History Since 1865

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00AM-11:50AM, New Cabell Hall 315

Studies the history of black Americans from the Civil War to the present.

HIUS 3671-001 History of the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed 2:00PM-3:15PM, Nau Hall 341

Examines the history of the southern Civil Rights movement. Studies the civil rights movement's philosophies, tactics, events, personalities, and consequences, beginning in 1900, but concentrating heavily on the activist years between 1955 and 1968.

HIUS 4501-005 Seminar in United States History: Capitalism and Slavery

Instructor: Justene Hill

Wed. 3:30PM-6:00PM, Nau Hall 242

The major seminar is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the seminar. The work of the seminar results primarily in the preparation of a substantial (ca. 25 pp. in standard format) research paper. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

PLCP 4500-002 Inequalities

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon. 4:00PM-6:30PM, Gibson Hall 241

Intensive analysis of selected issues and concepts in comparative government.  Prerequisite: One course in PLCP or instructor permission.

PLCP 4652-001 Markets, Inequality and the Politics of Development

Instructor: John Echeverrri-Gent

Tues. 3:30PM- 6:00PM

Examination of how politics affects the historical development of markets and the impact of inequality on the development of markets and economic development more generally.

PLCP 4810 Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30PM-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 187

Studies the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Includes the colonial experience and the rise of African nationalism; the transition to independence; the rise and fall of African one-party states; the role of the military in African politics; the politics of ethnicity, nation- and state-building; patromonialism and patron-client relations; development problems faced by African regimes, including relations with external actors; and the political future of Southern Africa.  Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of Africa.

RELA 2750 African Religions

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./ Thurs. 12:30PM-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 142

Introduces the mythology, ritual, philosophy, and religious art of the traditional religions of sub-Saharan Africa, also African versions of Christianity and African-American religions in the New World.

RELA 3351-001 African Diaspora Religions

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, Gibson Hall 241

This seminar examines changes in ethnographic accounts of African diaspora religions, with particular attention to the conceptions of religion, race, nation, and modernity found in different research paradigms. Prerequisite: previous course in one of the following: religious studies, anthropology, AAS, or Latin American studies

RELA 3730-001 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon 3:30PM-6:00PM, Lower West Oval Room 102

An exploration of religious concepts, practices and issues as addressed in African literature and film.  We will examine how various African authors and filmmakers weave aspects of Muslim, Christian and/or traditional religious cultures into the stories they tell. Course materials will be drawn from novels, memoirs, short stories, creation myths, poetry, feature-length movies, documentaries and short films.

SOC 2442-100 Systems of Inequality

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs 9:30AM-10:20AM, Maury Hall 104

This course will examine various types of inequality (race, class, gender) in the US and abroad. We will discuss sociological theories covering various dimensions of inequality, considering key research findings and their implications. We will examine to what extent ascriptive characteristics impact a person's life chances, how social structures are produced and reproduced, and how individuals are able or unable to negotiate these structures.

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Rose Buckelew

Mon./Wed. 10:00AM-10:50AM

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 4640 Urban Sociology

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15PM, Wilson Hall 214

Examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory.  Topics include public space and urban culture, social segregation and inequality, the phenomenon of the global city, and the effects of economic change or urban social life.  Six credits of Sociology or instructor permission.

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: Kwame E. Otu

Tues./Tues. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

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 in lecture and discussion section, and three written exams.

AAS 2224-001 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 2:00-4:30, Mcleod Hall 2005

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 medium 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.

AAS 3500-003  Race, Medicine and Incarceration (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

The social history of medicine in the black experience has a long and seedy background. This course offers a three tiered approach to understanding the history of black incarceration (broadly defined) and the ways in which the captive black body has functioned as a site of medical exploitation and profit from the period of slavery to the present. Using medicine, race, and gender as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand how the male and female slave, prisoner, asylum “inmate,” and unclaimed “indigent” black body contributed to the development of modern medicine, as experimental subjects and autopsy specimens. Some of the subjects discussed include: the history of slavery and medicine in the American South, the post-Civil War medical crisis in the black community, the rise of convict leasing and the New South penal medical economy, Jim Crow and medical (in)justice in late 19th century America, the rise of the early 20th century eugenics movement and its impact on incarcerated subjects, prison photography and the black body as spectacle and specimen in the modern era, and a host of other related topics. This course is tailored to students interested in the sciences and humanities, and will prove useful for those pursuing careers in the medical profession.

AAS 3500-004 Social Science Perspectives on African American Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 407

Are black students who do well in school accused of “acting white”? Do middle-class blacks feel a shared fate with low-income blacks? How do the political views of black youth differ from those of older blacks? We will address these and other questions in AAS 3500. In this course, you will learn about major debates across the social sciences that contribute to African American and African Studies. We will draw on readings from sociology, political science,psychology, public health, anthropology, law, economics, and media studies. We will consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches our efforts to analyze issues such as health disparities, education, or incarceration as they relate to the African diaspora

AAS 3500-005 White Liberalism and the Black Writer (3)

Instructor: Petal Samuel

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall 364

Reviews of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out in The Guardian, The Root, The New York Times, and Vice praise the film as a sharp and timely critique of white liberalism—what the reviews describe variously as “nice racism” or “self-congratulating” allyship—re-emerging in the wake of the Obama presidency. However, black writers and activists across the globe have long grappled with the limits of white allyship long prior to the Obama era. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” warned of the dangers of the “white moderate” who prefers the “absence of tension” to the “presence of justice”. Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1977 Our Sister Killjoy follows a young Ghanaian girl’s reflections on racism and colonialism as she experiences subtle, yet pernicious, forms of racism while on an ostensibly benevolent state-sponsored trip to Germany.

In this class, we will examine the figure of the white liberal in literature, the arts, and media, focusing on the ways they are described and represented by black writers and artists. We will ask: What is white liberalism? How and why does it come to be understood as an ideological position that is dangerous or hostile to movements for social, political, and economic equality? We will examine a wide range of texts—novels, poetry, music, visual art, and film—be writers and artists such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Solange, and Jordan Peele.

AAS 3559-001 Revolutionary Struggles in the African Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Kwame E. Otu

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 415

In this course, we will grapple with the concept of struggle, as it pertains to Africans’ desire to wrestle themselves from the interlocking white supremacist systems of colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, and racialized capitalism. How, we will consider, has the desire to be “free” from these systems of oppression defined black identities both in Africa and its myriad diasporas? Our goal is to work together to comprehend blackness as struggle, and to amplify how black bodies continue to contend with anti-black regimes spawned by enslavement, colonial oppression, and apartheid. Focusing on places like South Africa to Brazil to the USA to England, and from Haiti to Guinea, we shall emphasize how in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, white supremacist structures and infrastructures continue to legitimize black death. In the face of death, nevertheless, the struggle to live a dignified life, and to be free from white supremacy continue to define black experiences in neocolonial and neoliberal scenes of empire. Understanding that this struggle is revolutionary, we shall tackle how the fight for freedom from white supremacy is constitutively part of the desire to be free from heteropatriarchal nationalism and sexism, homonegativity, and racialized capitalism. Thus, we will ask: How do African and African descended peoples’ quests for freedom in the circum-Atlantic world compel us to revision freedom as something other than a state of being, but as a condition continuously in the process of becoming?  

AAS 3559-002 America in the Age of Revolution (3)

Instructor: Marlene Daut

M/W 2:00 - 3:15, New Cabell Hall 338

This course is a literary-historical examination of comparative American writing in a revolutionary era that began with the U.S. American Revolution in 1776, continued with the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789, and culminated with a series of slave revolts and military strikes that erupted in Saint Domingue in 1791 and led to Haitian independence in 1804.  Students will examine the origins, meanings, and legacies of these political struggles for freedom and equality in writings by a diverse array of authors.

AAS 3559-003 Sound and Religion of James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Ashon Crawley

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell 056

This course uses the texts of James Baldwin – fictional, theatrical, essay forms – to have students think more broadly about how Black literature is a sound and religious literature, how it is always concerned with both sound and religion as augmentations of sense experience, sound and religion as a disruptive force against western thought. We will explore how sense experience itself is produced through non-division when we listen closely to the texts. And what is heard in Baldwin's texts often most forcefully show up in scenes of religiosity. In this course, we will give special attention to how Baldwin utilizes sound and religion in his texts to produce arguments.

AAS 3559-004 ​American Colonialism and Post-Colonial Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlene Daut

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15, New Cabell Hall 332

In this course, students explore the content and historical contexts of postcolonial theory beginning with colonial America. Through the examination of different foundational texts and the authors who have defined colonial and postcolonial theory, students will engage with the major issues that preoccupy postcolonial thinkers such as identity and alterity, nationalism and cultural imperialism, hybridity and origins, as well as diaspora. The relationship between postcolonial theory, capitalism, Marxism and postmodernism is something that will also be examined, as we explore the complexity and contradictions within the field of postcolonial theory itself.

AAS 3559-005 African Worlds through Life Stories (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15. Shannon House 107

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!

AAS 4501-001 African American Women's History (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 027

In her 1989 essay, “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History,” historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham proclaimed that “The sound of silence, which resonates throughout much of the scholarship on Afro-Americans and women, reflects the failure to recognize black women’s history as not only an identifiable field of inquiry in its own right, but as an integral part of Afro-American, American, and women’s history.” Since the publication of Higginbotham’s seminal critique of the marginalization and obscuration of black women in the historical literature, these silences have been broken and the black female has moved from the periphery to the center of historical and historiographical discourse. In this course, students will be introduced to the significant themes and events that have shaped black women’s historical experiences from slavery to the present. Some of the topics covered in this course include: gender and the middle passage; women and slavery; the medical lives of enslaved women; the plight of working-class and incarcerated black women in the post-Civil War South; gendered violence, terror, and resistance in the aftermath of emancipation; black women’s informal and formal activism and protest during the Civil Rights movement, and black women’s ongoing crusade for justice through the #SayHerName and #BlackGirlsMatter movement. 

AAS 4501-002 Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues. 3:30- 6:00, Nau Hall 242

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

SWAH 1010: Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50, New Cabell Hall 038

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

SWAH 1010: Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50, New Cabell Hall 038

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

SWAH 2010: Intermediate Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50, New Cabell Hall 038

This second year Swahili course is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It’s an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize multi-media resources, the internet, literary texts, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African-American and African Studies

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 101. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

AAS 2224-001 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Professor Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2-4:30pm

Description: This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 2224-002 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Professor Lisa Shutt

Tu 2-4:30pm

Description: This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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 medium 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.

AAS 3200 – Martin, Malcolm, and America

Professor Mark Hadley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: 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.

AAS 3500-001 – Readings in Black Feminism

Professor Telisha Bailey

Tu 6-8:30pm

Description: Reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

AAS 3500-002 – Art of Black Social Movements

Professor Julius Fleming

Tu 6-8:30pm

Description: Reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

AAS 3500-003 – Slavery since Emancipation

Professor Talitha LeFlouria

Mon 3:30-6pm

Description: Slavery did not end after the Civil War. Using race, gender, ethnicity, and class as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand modern slavery’s impact on diverse populations in the United States, including members of the African Diaspora. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: The 13th Amendment and the restoration of slavery through convict leasing, chain gangs, and mass incarceration; the proliferation of sex trafficking in the U.S. and the legal inequalities met by its victims; human trafficking and its global connections; U.S. involvement in the international slave trade and its often overlooked effects on black populations, and U.S. based activism and approaches to abolishing slavery.

AAS 3500-004 – Early Caribbean Writing

Professor Marlene Daut

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course will exam nineteenth-century writing (in translation, where applicable) by people of color from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone islands, which make up the Caribbean. Haitian independence in 1804 ushered in a vibrant and diverse print culture that included poetry, plays, newspapers, and historical writing. From the pages of La Gazette Royale d’Hayti (1811-1820), to the poems of Jean-Baptiste Romane (1807-1858), to the historical writings of Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806), to the operas of Juste Chanlatte (1766-1828), there arose a distinct nineteenth-century literary culture in Haiti. Beginning with national literary developments in Haiti, this course expands to consider nineteenth writing from Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, and Bermuda.  These writings, both fictional and non-fictional, will help us to think about whether and/or how a coherent Caribbean literary tradition was developed in the nineteenth century across geographical, linguistic, national, and indeed, imperial lines.

AAS 3500-005 – Black Fire

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Description: Does the idea of a "post-racial society" hold true when we examine the complex nature of social and cultural life at the University of Virginia?  How and to what degree have the individual and collective experiences of African American undergraduates transformed since the late 1960's?  Is there still a need for the Black Student Alliance, the Office of African American Affairs, and the Office of Diversity and Equity?  Is Black Studies still an intellectual necessity in the 21st century academy?  Have these entities been successful in bringing about meaningful change in the experiences of underrepresented minorities?  And if not, how can future efforts to make the University a more inclusive institution benefit from a critical engagement with past struggles for social justice and racial equality?  Moreover, how might we find a way to more effectively bring the many segments of UVa's black community (Athletes, black Greeks, second generation immigrants, Christians, Muslims, etc) together?

To facilitate critical thinking and exchange on these and other important questions, this hybrid course grounds contemporary debates on the state of race relations at UVA within the larger, historical context of the "black Wahoo" experience.  In addition to exploring contemporary issues affecting academic, cultural, and social life on grounds, our classroom and online activities draw attention to an important yet insufficiently explored chapter in the history of "Jefferson's University" by examining the varied ways in which various student-led movements have transformed the intellectual culture and social fabric of everyday life at the University.  How those transformations continue to shape our experiences on grounds will be a topic of frequent discussion.  Though the focus of this course is local, we will explore topics that have and continue to engage college students across the nation:  the Integration of African Americans into the post-civil rights, historically white university, the political potential of Greek organizations, the status of the black athlete, the viability of the African American Studies program and departments, and the impact of Affirmative Action on higher education.

AAS 3500-006 – Soul and Spice: African American Foodways

Professor Lisa Shutt

Th 3:30-6pm

Description: How did African American food traditions grow to be so rich and varied and what are the roots of these foodways, going back to the slave coasts of West Africa and beyond? How did food traditions grow, morph and change throughout the Civil War, Emancipation, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Era, and the Reagan presidency through the Obama years? We will be examining regional differences, clashing ideologies, the relationships between food and health, connections between religious practices/beliefs and culinary traditions, the secrecy and power of the proprietary recipe, family and personal identities, taboos, gender, sexuality, bodies, ritual and kinship. We will read, hear, gather and tell stories. We will inquire after the stories of rural farmers who are the descendants of sharecroppers, urban “food desert” dwellers, urban activist farmers educating a new generation of city kids, matriarchs with secret, sacred peach pie recipes and old men and young uncles whose technique for smoking ribs or flair for frying fish can evoke powerful nostalgia and delight.

We will seek out stories with the intention of building a public internet resource that will preserve and pay tribute to African American food culture in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. Students will work with our community partners to determine the categories of content to include in the online resource, most likely we will be conducting interviews, writing food narratives, collecting recipes and documenting cooking techniques.

AAS 3500-007 – Race, Culture, and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: In this course, we will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. The course will survey social science research about cultural forms such as everyday discourse, styles of dress, music, literature, visual arts, and media as they relate to race and inequality. As we examine these studies, we will learn about key thinkers in social science approaches to culture, and we will analyze core concepts such as cultural capital, framing processes, symbolic boundaries, scripts, and racial grammar. 

AAS 3500-008 – Black Women and Mass Incarceration

Professor Talitha LeFlouria

Th 3:30-6pm

Description: One out of every 100 black women are under the supervision of the U.S. criminal justice system. This course explores the history of mass incarceration and its impact on African American women. It traces its origins to the post-emancipation South, where the roots of racial bias, criminalization, and mass incarceration were first laid. It ends in the modern-day cell block where structural racism, systemic discrimination, and infinite exclusion coalesce into keeping black women contained. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: black women and convict leasing after the Civil War; abuses of the prison health care system; how the "War on Drugs" became a war on black women; black girls and the juvenile justice system;  the punishment of pregnancy; and carceral violence against black women. 

AAS 3559 -- _Mpathic Design

Professor Elgin Cleckley

Wed 9-11:30am

This seminar, part of the _mpathic design initiative, will create a design proposal for the Birth site of Carter G. Woodson in Buckingham County, Virginia. Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary UVa team led by Architecture and the Carter G. Woodson Institute, developing and presenting concepts to the Buckingham African American Life and History Society. This seminar, part of the _mpathic design initiative, will create a design proposal for the Birth site of Carter G. Woodson in Buckingham County, Virginia. Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary UVa team led by Architecture and the Carter G. Woodson Institute, developing and presenting concepts to the Buckingham African American Life and History Society. 

AAS 3652 – African American History since 1865

Professor Andrew Kahrl

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: This course studies the history of African Americans in the United States from emancipation to the present. Central to this course is the idea that African American history is American history, and that the American experience cannot be understood apart from the struggles and triumphs of African Americans. Course topics include: emancipation and Reconstruction; the age of Jim Crow; the Great Migration and urbanization; movements for equality and justice under law, at the ballot box, in schools, in the workplace, and in public life; and the changing face of race and inequality from the civil rights era to the present.

AAS 4109 – Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Professor Aniko Bokroghkozy

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Before the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, there was the Civil Rights Movement. And just as the current movement has benefited from and, to a significant extent, required attention from national media in order to achieve its political and social objectives, so too did the movement of fifty years ago. In both cases, activists in these movements harnessed the power of their era’s new media. This course, while focused on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has clear resonance and relevance for the current situation of heightened activism around racial justice. In this course we examine how the media responded to, engaged with, and represented this most powerful of social change movements. We will study a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, popular music, and news magazines in order to explore the relationship between the movement and the media. We will examine media artifacts as primary documents for what they can tell us about American race relations during this period. Through intensive classroom discussion, students will hone their abilities to interpret and analyze media artifacts as historical documents, as aesthetic forms, and as ideological texts.

AAS 4570 – Queer Africas

Professor Kwame Otu

Mon 3:30-6pm

Description: How does “Africa” shape the contours of queerness? Might “Africa” as geography and the “African” as body be inherently queer? Illuminating how contemporary accounts on the murder of David Kato, the Ugandan LGBT human rights activist in 2011, for instance, obscure the circumstances that preceded the execution of the royal pages in nineteenth century Uganda, now famously known as the Martyrs of Uganda, we will explore the complex iterations of afro-queer subjectivities in the the circum-Atlantic world. Importantly, we will examine the extent to which the afterlife of slavery in the Americas intersect with the state of postcoloniality in Africa, and how blackness and queerness get conditioned at these intersections. By providing an introduction to various artists, activists, and intellectuals in both Africa and its myriad diasporas, this interdisciplinary seminar will thus examine what it means to be both black and queer historically, spatially, and contemporarily. The “afro-queer” is a useful optic that will help to complicate how black queer embodiments are radical aesthetics that simultaneously drive imaginations and projects that disrupt racialized gendered normativities dictated by white supremacist regimes. Therefore, we will take seriously such questions as: how do queer political projects perpetuate antiblackness in both liberal and neoliberal scenes of empire? And how are black queer subjects’ refusal of mainstream queer political projects in the era of a Black Lives Matter part of a genealogy of black rejection and complicity? We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural articulations of race, sex, and gender, to highlight the dynamic relationship and tensions between the study of Africa and its myriad diasporas and Queer Studies.   

AAS 4570 – Race, Class, and Gender in a Time of Crisis

Professor Ashon Crawley

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: The guiding question for this course is this: what can we make during crisis, against crisis? The history of western civilization – at least since 1492, but before that date as well – can be considered to be an ongoing crisis of theological, philosophical, material proportion. The genocide of indigenous peoples, the displacement – through theft and selling, through indentured servitude and enslavement – of African peoples are two nodal points in this crisis. The creation of race, the making gender cohere through property ownership. We exist in an ongoing crisis, a set of crises that have been unending. And it is felt, likewise, today. These crises effect how we think about race, class and gender, how they each are their own modality of existence and how they intersect. So we will read from various thinkers, view various films, listen to various musics, that will inform us about the ongoing crisis in our moment in time. But more than reading, viewing, listening, we will propose a way forward, a path clear, to responding to the crisis of our time. What will we do, who can we be, in order to produce justice?

AMST 4321 -- Caribbean Latinx: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the DR

Professor Carmen Lamas

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: In this course we will read texts by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how their works speak to issues of race, colonialism and imperialism based on their individual and shared histories. We will discuss their different political histories and migration experiences and how these in turn impact their literary and artistic productions in the US.

ANTH 2270 -- Race, Gender, and Medical Science

Professor Gertrude Fraser

TuTh 12-12:50pm

Description: Explores the social and cultural dimensions of biomedical practice and experience in the United States. Focuses on practitioner and patient, asking about the ways in which race, gender, and socio-economic status contour professional identity and socialization, how such factors influence the experience, and course of, illness, and how they have shaped the structures and institutions of biomedicine over time.

ANTH 2626 -- Imagining Africa

Professor James Igoe

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: Africa is commonly imagined in the West as an unproblematically bounded and undifferentiated entity. This course engages and moves beyond western traditions of story telling about Africa to explore diverse systems of imagining Africa's multi-diasporic realities. Imagining Africa is never a matter of pure abstraction, but entangled in material struggles and collective memory, and taking place at diverse and interconnected scales and locales. Prerequisite: ANTH 1010

DRAM 3070 -- African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: 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

ECON 3640 -- The Economics of Africa

Professor Mark Plant

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: Examine the economic problems confronting sub-Saharan Africa countries, focusing on what is needed to accelerate sustainable growth and reduce poverty. Use standard economic tools to gain an understanding of the economic management challenges faced by African policy makers and the similarities and differences between African countries. Explore Africa's relationship with the rest of the world, focusing on trade, aid and economic cooperation.

ENAM 3140 -- African-American Literature II

Professor Timothy Griffiths

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: African American literature was, according to Kenneth Warren, a literary genre born during the early Jim Crow era in order to address the specific problems of racial segregation, lynching, and disenfranchisement against black people. It ended not because racial discrimination ended, but because the territory, frameworks, and promises upon which this literature was founded have radically shifted. No longer only about black people’s lack of rights as American citizens, nor a response only to forms of social oppression, writing by black U.S. authors — or, more precisely, literature about the experiences of black people living in the U.S. — has become something that goes beyond what was originally intended for the genre. This raises a number of questions. Given that African American literature is still a widely-used scholarly term as well as a way to organize artistic activism — despite its “end” — what is the future of this body of work? Is the term merely historically useful, or is it being fruitfully revised or recuperated to account for and address antiblack racism in the twenty-first century? If African American literature has ended, then is there a new and necessary organizing term for work by black authors, from Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead? What anxieties, progressions, or changes in the analysis of social identity — particularly through intersectionality — have emerged that have changed the way literature by black authors is studied and written? And finally, what could older artistic ethics of African American writing teach us about the problems and challenges facing the artistic response to antiblack racism in the present? Our questions, while beginning with a brief prelude on the invention of African American literature as a literary movement between 1890–1930, will primarily track the development of African American literature from the early rumblings of the Civil Rights movement in the 1940s to the recent wave of literature and art oriented toward ending police violence. Along the way, we will pay service to and properly historicize movements in African American cultural production, while figuring the way black feminism, queer activism, postmodernism, transnational thought, postcolonialism, class-based analysis, and neoliberalism have altered the prerogatives and practices of African American literature over time. Our class likely will address a variety of short works by a wide range of writers, which may include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Samuel R. Delany, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class will hybridize lecture and student-facilitated discussion. Assignments will include one or two discussion papers, a hybrid take-home/in-class midterm, and a final paper. 

ENAM 9500 -- African American Literary and Cultural Theory

Professor Maurice Wallace

Tu 2-4:30pm

Description: Topics range from the colonial period to the cultural influence of pragmatism. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses

ENCR 4500-001 -- Race in American Places

Professor Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30-8pm

Description: This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest). We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars. With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy. You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled. We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region. In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar. Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of universal standards for public restroom pictograms. Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester. Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.


ENCR 4500-002 -- Critical Race Theory

Professor Marlon Ross

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: What does race mean in the late 20th and early 21st century? Given the various ways in which race as a biological “fact” has been discredited, why and how does race continue to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, mass media, and everyday social realities? How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? This course surveys major trends in race theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to women of color feminism), focused on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and the Steven Spielberg film adaptation; 3) the debate over the social construction of race (poststructuralist theory); 4) the debate over queer racial identities, focused on two films, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Asian-American, and Chicanx studies.

ENLT 2547-001 -- Black Writers in America

Professor Jeffery Allen

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

ENLT 2547-002 -- Black Writers in America: Race, Crime, and Justice

Professor Sarah Ingle

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description:  Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

ENMC 3559 -- Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Literature

Professor Carmen Lamas

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Modern and Contemporary Literature. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

ENMC 4500-002 -- Multiethnic American Fiction

Professor Caroline Rody

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Description: American authors from a wide range of backgrounds have infused contemporary American fiction with new stories. This course will observe transformations of literary form, discourse, plot, and character in an era of cultural and linguistic multiplicity; global migration; contested notions of racial, gendered, religious, sexual, and national identity; and rising interest in both ethnic histories and possibilities for cross-ethnic encounter. Secondary material will include critical and theoretical essays. Primary texts will be drawn from the novels and stories of some of the following writers: Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, John Okada, Grace Paley, Alfred Kazin, Lore Segal, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bapsi Sidhwa, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Nathan Englander, Mat Johnson, Edwidge Danticat, Galina Vromen, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nam Le, Rabih Alameddine, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid. 
Requirements: active reading and participation, short response papers, 2 major essays (total pages=20), class leading (in groups). 

FREN 3585-001 -- Reading Haiti

Professor Kaiama Glover

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Interdisciplinary seminar in French and Francophone culture and society. Topics vary annually and may include literature and history, cinema and society, and cultural anthropology. Prerequisite: FREN 3032.

FREN 4743 -- Africa in Cinema

Professor Kandioura Dramé

MonWed 2-3:15pm

Description: Study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. Ideological Constructions of the African as 'other'. Exoticism in cinema. History of African cinema. Economic issues in African cinema: production, distribution, and the role of African film festivals. The socio-political context. Women in African cinema. Aesthetic problems: themes and narrative styles. Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and FREN 3584 or another 3000-level literature course in French.

FRTR 2580-001 -- Blackness in French

Professor Kaiama Glover

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Description: Introduces the interdisciplinary study of culture in France or other French-speaking countries. Topics vary from year to year, and may include cuisine and national identity; literature and history; and contemporary society and cultural change. Taught by one or several professors in the French department. https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3ekmmjhifuso66/BIF-UVA.pdf?dl=0

HIAF 2002 -- Modern African History

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: Studies the history of Africa and its interaction with the western world from the mid-19th century to the present. Emphasizes continuities in African civilization from imperialism to independence that transcend the colonial interlude of the 20th century.

HIAF 3112 -- African Environmental History

Professor James La Fleur

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: This course explores how Africans changed their interactions with the physical environments they inhabited and how the landscapes they helped create in turn shaped human history. Topics covered include the ancient agricultural revolution, health and disease in the era of slave trading, colonial-era mining and commodity farming, 20th-century wildlife conservation, and the emergent challenges of land ownership, disease, and climate change.

HIAF 4511-001 -- Atlantic Migration

Professor Christina Mobley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: The major colloquium is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the colloquium. Colloquia are most frequently offered in areas of history where access to source materials or linguistic demands make seminars especially difficult. Students in colloquia prepare about 25 pages of written work distributed among various assignments. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

HIUS 1501-001 -- American Slavery and the Law

Professor Justene Hill

Mon 1-3:30pm

Description: Introduces the study of history intended for first- or second-year students. Seminars involve reading, discussing, and writing about different historical topics and periods, and emphasize the enhancement of critical and communication skills. Several seminars are offered each term. Not more than two Introductory Seminars may be counted toward the major in history.

HIUS 2053 -- American Slavery

Professor Justene Hill

MoWe 11-11:50am

Description: This course will introduce students to the history of slavery in the United Sates.

MDST 3559-004 -- Screening White Supremacy

Professor William Little

MoWe 4-5:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Media Studies.

MDST 3760 -- #BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Professor Meredith Clark

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Using a mix of scholarly and popular-press readings and an examination of digital artifacts, we will analyze the creations and contributions of Black digital culture from the mid-90s to the present. Covering topics including the early Black blogosphere; the creation of niche content sites like BlackPlanet.com; the emergence of Black Twitter; the circulation of memes, and the use second-screening.

MDST 4109 -- Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Before the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, there was the Civil Rights And just as the current movement has benefited from and, to a significant extent, required attention from national media in order to achieve its political and social objectives, so too did the movement of fifty years ago. In both cases, activists in these movements harnessed the power of their era’s new media. This course, while focused on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has clear resonance and relevance for the current situation of heightened activism around racial justice. In this course we examine how the media responded to, engaged with, and represented this most powerful of social change movements. We will study a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, popular music, and news magazines in order to explore the relationship between the movement and the media. We will examine media artifacts as primary documents for what they can tell us about American race relations during this period. Through intensive classroom discussion, students will hone their abilities to interpret and analyze media artifacts as historical documents, as aesthetic forms, and as ideological texts.

MDST 4320 -- Celebrities of Color

Professor Keara Goin

TuTh 5:30-6:45pm

Description: Paying particular attention to how race and ethnicity intersect with the phenomenon of celebrity in the media, this highly student-driven class will investigate celebrities of color through both historical and analytical lenses. In examining the increasingly self-aware culture associated with celebrity, we will discuss the ways in which celebrity is conceived, constructed, performed, and discussed, as well as how it shapes notions of identity.

MDST 4559-006 -- Black Girl Magic in Media

Professor Meredith Clark

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description:  This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Media Studies.

MUEN 2690 -- African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1

Professor Michelle Kisliuk

TuTh 5:45-7:30pm

Description: A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka), with the intention of performing during and at the end of the semester. Traditions include drumming, dancing, and singing. Prerequisites: By audition. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required. May be repeated for credit.

MUSI 2120 -- History of Jazz Music

Professor Scott Deveaux

MoWe 1-1:50pm

Description: Survey of jazz music from before 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century; important instrumental performers, composers, arrangers, and vocalists. No previous knowledge of music required.

MUSI 3120 -- Jazz Studies

Professor Scott Deveaux

MoWeFr 11-11:50am

Description: Introduction to jazz as an advanced field of study, with equal attention given to historical and theoretical approaches. Prerequisite: MUSI 3310 or comparable fluency in music notation, and instructor permission.

PLAP 3500-001 -- Race and the Obama Presidency

Professor Larycia Hawkins

MoWe 2-3:15pm

Description:

PLAP 4841 -- Seminar in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Professor David O'Brien

Th 1-3:30pm

Description: Explores the vexatious lines between the rights of individuals and those of the state in democratic society, focusing on such major issues as freedom of expression and worship; separation of church and state; criminal justice; the suffrage; privacy; and racial and gender discrimination. Focuses on the judicial process. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

RELG 3559-002 -- Race, Religion, Belonging US

Professor Katherine Mohrman

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Religious Studies.

RELG 3559-001 -- Blackness and Mysticism

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo 2-4:30pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject of general religion.

SOC 3410 -- Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

Description: 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 -- Sociology of the African-American Community

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

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

SOC 4559-002 -- Race, Crime, and Punishment

Professor Rose Buckelew

MoWe 2-3:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of sociology.

WGS 4559 -- Gender, Race and Sport: A History of African-American Sportswomen

Professor Bonnie Hagerman

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course seeks to explore the intersection of gender and race in sport, specifically examining the African-American female experience in sport. This course will ask students to consider whether sport was (and continues to be) the great equalizer for both African-American sportsmen and sportswomen, and to evaluate their portrayals (or lack thereof) in both the white and black media. We’ll consider athletic greats Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson, as well as lesser known athletes Jack Johnson and Ora Mae Washington—why are some athletes destined to be celebrated while others are forgotten? We will also explore the activism of Muhammad Ali and Venus Williams, and the gendered differences of their campaigns, as well as the importance of sport as a platform for voicing inequality as we look not only at breaking color barriers during Jim Crow America, but “The Black Power Salute” of the 1960s, and taking a knee—and a stand—in 2016. Through primary source readings, documentaries and discussion we’ll seek to put the African-American sporting experience in context to see just how far athletes of color have actually come in the American sporting arena.

WGS 4750 -- Global History of Black Girlhood

Professor Corinne Field

We 6-8:30pm

Description: Until recently, many historians believed that black girls were inaccessible in archives, silenced by gender, race, and age. New research proves that the voices of black girls can be recovered through creative archival strategies.  In this class, you will contribute to the emergent field of black girls’ history by collaborating with students at the University of Michigan to design an online exhibition from primary source materials.  You will also participate in the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference to be held at the University of Virginia March 17-18, 2017.  Finally, you will write a research paper exploring your exhibit topic in more depth. Assignments for this class will introduce you to a range of sources from histories to novels, poetry, films, photographs, and paintings. Themes we will consider include: creativity, pleasure, and play; political activism and social change; slavery, servitude and freedom; kinship and family; identities and borders of belonging.  Throughout, we will ask how our understandings of history, contemporary issues, and our own identities change when we move black girls' experiences from the margins to the center.

AAS 1010--Introduction to African American and African Studies I

Kwame Otu

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

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 1880s. 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; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

AAS 2224--Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Lisa Shutt

Th 2:00-4:30pm

Mo 2:00-4:30pm

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, 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.

AAS 2559--History of Abolition in the Americas

Marlene Daut

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

The course will introduce students to the long history of attempts to abolish chattel slavery in the Americas. By reading primary documents that include speeches, newspaper articles, novels, poetry, and religious tracts, we will examine the rise of abolitionist movements in Great Britain, France, the Caribbean, and the United States. In many respects, transatlantic abolitionists invented the modern concept of human rights, an ideological tool indispensable to all of our social justice movements in the present, but laden with its own ethical and social complications. By looking at abolition as a global phenomena that extended well beyond the geographical borders of the United States, we will discover a whole range of new events and actors in one of human history’s most compelling and disturbing dramas. By covering issues ranging from gradual emancipation in New England in the late eighteenth century, to the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1794, to its reinstatement in 1802, to the end of the US Civil War in 1865, to the legal abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s, we will examine the origins and ideological underpinnings of antislavery andabolitionist movements across the Atlantic World. In so doing, we will pay special attention to the different methods by which abolitionists in the Atlantic World defined the goals of anti-slavery activism, as well as the various meanings of liberty and independence produced within their discourses. 

AAS 2559-- Swahili Cultures

Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 1:00PM - 1:50PM

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

AAS 2657--Routes, Writing, Reggae

Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

In this course, we will trace the history of reggae music and explore its influence on the development of Jamaican literature. With readings on Jamaican history, we will consider why so many reggae songs speak about Jah and quote from the Bible. Then, we will explore how Marcus Garvey's teachings led to the rise of Rastafarianism, which in turn seeded ideas of black pride and black humanity into what would become reggae music.

AAS 3300--Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies

Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as health disparities, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora.

AAS 3500-001 Digital Caribbean Studies

Marlene Daut

Tu 2:00-4:30pm

Increasingly, we access, share, and create information in digital forms, and this has been referred to as a digital revolution. But how does — or how should — this revolution in the way we teach, learn, and conduct research also change the way we do scholarly work in the classroom? The digital humanities investigates how new media and digital tools are changing the way we produce knowledge in the humanities, by enabling us to share not only information, but sound, visualizations, and even performances using new platforms. This class will provide an introduction to some of these formats and tools, along with immediate critical reflection and discussion about their value to the academy. Since information technology has become one of the key ways in which the peoples of the Caribbean and its diasporas both communicate with one another and gain access to global conversations, alongside this exploration of digital tools, in general, this class will likewise study how the internet can help people in marginalized spaces to engage with crucial social problems and to express their political ideals and aspirations. As the creators of the Digital Caribbean website have attested, “the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others in relentless relation.” This class will therefore both introduce students to the digital humanities and to the Caribbean as an apt space for exploring the potential of the internet to confront and disrupt many of the more traditional structures of dominance that have traditionally silenced marginalized voices

AAS 3500-002 Revolutionary Struggles in African Atlantic

Kwame Otu

Tu 3:30-6:00pm

In this course, we will grapple with the concept of struggle, as it pertains to Africans’ desire to wrestle themselves from the interlocking white supremacist systems of colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, and racialized capitalism. How, we will consider, has the desire to be “free” from these systems of oppression defined black identities both in Africa and its myriad diasporas? Our goal is to work together to comprehend blackness as struggle, and to amplify how black bodies continue to contend with anti-black regimes spawned by enslavement, colonial oppression, and apartheid. Focusing on places like South Africa to Brazil to the USA to England, and from Haiti to Guinea, we shall emphasize how in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, white supremacist structures and infrastructures continue to legitimize black death. In the face of death, nevertheless, the struggle to live a dignified life, and to be free from white supremacy continue to define black experiences in neocolonial and neoliberal scenes of empire. Understanding that this struggle is revolutionary, we shall tackle how the fight for freedom from white supremacy is constitutively part of the desire to be free from heteropatriarchal nationalism and sexism, homonegativity, and racialized capitalism. Thus, we will ask: How do African and African descended peoples’ quests for freedom in the circum-Atlantic world compel us to revision freedom as something other than a state of being, but as a condition continuously in the process of becoming?  

AAS 3500-003 Toni Morrison

MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

Maurice Wallace

Reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

AAS 3500-004 Working Barefoot in the Snow and Other Dimensions of the Environmental History of Slavery

Tony Perry

Mo: 3:30 - 6:00 pm

This course bridges studies of the historical environment and American slavery in order to examine enslaved people’s complex relationship to the places they inhabited. We will devote particular attention to enslaved women and men’s encounters with a range of environmental phenomena, including the land and landscape, waterways, plants and animals, and the weather. Thinking deeply about the impact of slavery on the environment and vice versa, we will also consider how Virginia-based locales such as the UVA Grounds, Monticello, and the Great Dismal Swamp are entwined in the larger environmental history of slavery in this country.

AAS 3500-005 What is Performance? The Practice of Black & Latin/x Performance

Ethan Madarieta
M/W, 2:00 – 3:15

From 2001 to 2009 Black artist William Pope.L crawled 22 miles up Broadway in Manhattan dressed in a Super Man costume with a skateboard strapped to his back in his performance The Great White Way. In 1972 Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta performed Untitled (Death of a Chicken) in which she, naked and standing before a white wall, held a recently decapitated live chicken by its legs in the throes of death. In his 2017 performance Manual to Be (to Kill) or to Forgive my Own Father, indigenous Mexican artist Emilio Rojas cut text from several (mis)translated copies of his father’s children’s book Little Friend and assembled his own texts from these on over a hundred self-healing cutting mats for 8 hours/day, five days/week (ongoing). Connecting all of these performances are their physical and emotional intensity, duration, endurance, and their specific reference to present and historical racial subjectivities. But why did these artists perform and document such acts? What and how do these performances mean? What can they tell us about ourselves, race, culture, social relations, and even existence? And what effects do these, and other performances have in the world? This course prepares us to answer these questions by first understanding what performance is, and second, how to study it through research, writing, and practice. Throughout the course we will explore the foundations of Performance Studies and Performance Theory and put pressure on what has largely been a white and western discipline by engaging works by Black and Latina/o/x scholars and performers, and by perceiving theory as performance and performance as the practice of theory. We will apply the knowledge gained through this practice in in-class analyses of live and documented performances, and in our own daily practice. You will also write three short essays that formally analyze a performance related to the theme of the week in which the essay is due. And finally, we will all be practicing various modes of performance in class, with an option of creating a well-conceived and thoughtful 10 – 12-minute performance in lieu of a final research paper.

AAS 3500-006 Free Your (Funky) Mind: Mod/ernist Africana Poetry

Brenda Marie Osbey
Wednesdays, 3:30 – 6:00

This course locates the origins of Modernism in the texts of Africana authors of the New World and covers poetry, poetics and poetry movements of Brazil, Latin America, the Caribbean and United States. MAPA begins with audio/video presentations of composer-musician-performance artist George Clinton and his early Parliament-Funkadelic bands as a way of introducing such major Black Arts Movement poets of the period as Amiri Baraka, Mari Evans, spoken word artist Sekou Sundiata and others. Works by the above-mentioned poets epitomize innovations associated with late 20th-early 21st literary expression: experimentation with and revision of traditional forms; irregular line/stanza; disrupted syntax; transgressive language; experimentation with sound and rhythm; blurring of boundaries between poetry and music (blues, jazz, hip-hop, chant); heightened emphasis on oral delivery and performance; increased use of multi-media, improvisation and audience participation; dramatic monologue and confessional style and tone; interiority and questions of identity and displacement; a trend toward more social and political themes; thematic treatment of previously taboo or unorthodox topics; increased emphasis on human and technological threats to the natural environment, to name a few. These and other trends, however, date to far earlier periods and works. The seminar, therefore, resets to introduce work by earlier Africana poets who radicalized poetic expression, language, diction, content, and form across the Americas. Modernism begins with the “adoption” and transformation of European languages by African captives throughout the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. MAPA treats poets of African descent writing in the four primary languages of the New World – Portuguese, Spanish, French, English. Included are samples of works by such early Modernist poets as Domingos Caldas Barbosa of 18th century Brazil, Candelario Obeso, Armand Lanusse and the Couvent School/les Cenelles poets of 19th century Colombia and New Orleans, respectively. The course then advances to works by the first self-declared Modernist poet, Rubén Darío of Nicaragua; continues with major poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910’s and 20’s; Mario de Andrade’s conception and execution of the 1922 Week of Modern Art in Brazil; Caribbean writers of the Negrismo and Négritude movements of the 1930’s and 40’s; and concludes with the work of such US and Anglophone Caribbean poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Martin Carter. 

AAS 3645--Musical Fictions

Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Over the course of the semester, we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel in order to better understand why writers and readers are so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope. Pairing close listening and music theory with close readings of seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, calypso and rock novels set in the US, UK, Jamaica, Trinidad, France and Germany.

AAS 3749--Food and Meaning in African and the Diaspora

Lisa Shutt

We 2:00-4:30pm

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated or have been forced to move. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat' or don't eat' hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts.Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship & beauty, among others.

AAS 3853--From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

Andrew Kahrl

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in modern America. We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.

AAS 4570--MLK Jr.: Power, Love, Justice

Maurice Wallace

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Reading, class discussion, and research on a special topic in African-American and African Studies culminating in the composition of a research paper. Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

AMST 4500--Race and Sound

John Hamilton

We 6:00-8:30pm

This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics vary.

ANTH 2250--Nationalism, Racism, Multiculturalism

Richard Handler

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH 3310--Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa

China Scherz

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Sahararn Africa.

ARTH 2753--Arts and Cultures of the Slave South

Louis Nelson

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This interdisciplinary course covers the American South to the Civil War. While the course centers on the visual arts 'architecture, material culture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture' it is not designed as a regional history of art, but an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, foodways, music and literature in the formation of Southern identities.

ARTH 4591--Histories Photography Africa

Staff

Th 3:30-6:00pm

Subject varies with the instructor, who may decide to focus attention either on a particular period, artist, or theme, or on the broader question of the aims and methods of art history. Subject is announced prior to each registration period. Representative subjects include the life and art of Pompeii, Roman painting and mosaics, history and connoisseurship of baroque prints, art and politics in revolutionary Europe, Picasso and painting, and problems in American art and culture. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

DRAM 3070--African-American Theatre

Theresa Davis

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

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

ENAM 3559--Jim Crow America

K. Ian Grandison and Marlon B. Ross

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Richmond.

ENAM 4500--W. E. B. Du Bois

Marlon Ross

Th 5:30-8:00pm

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about. Because Du Bois’s intellectual and activist contributions range across the fields of history, sociology, education, fiction, philosophy, political theory, literary theory, biography, and autobiography, we’ll sample works by him in each of these fields. In addition to examining his major texts — including The Souls of Black Folk (philosophy), Philadelphia Negro (sociology), Black Reconstruction in America (history), John Brown (biography), Dark Princess (novel), Dusk of Dawn (autobiography), The World and Africa (African studies) — we’ll sample his influential essays from the journal he edited, The Crisis. Du Bois’s phenomenal impact will be further understood by examining the work of his interlocutors, those with whom he had an intense public dialogue on major issues of the day, including Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Oswald Garrison Villard. We’ll contextualize influential theories like the color-line, double consciousness, the Talented Tenth, art as propaganda, liberal education as uplift, Pan-Africanism, etc. in light of the movements he championed, including the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, the Pan-African Congresses, the anti- lynching campaign, the Harlem Renaissance, anti-World War II activism, the United Nations movement, anti-colonialism, and democratic socialism. How did a man whose fierce idealism over decades end in a decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and retreat to Ghana in the final years of his life?

ENAM 4500--Black Queer Culture

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Timothy Griffiths

Mary Kuhn

In the now-essential critical anthology Black Queer Studies (2005), scholars like E. Patrick Johnson, Mae G. Henderson, and Dwight A. McBride announced three primary reasons for the formalization of black queer cultural studies: the need for a usable past in African American culture for black queer people, the traditionally patriarchal and heterosexist tendencies of African American cultural studies, and a perceived inhospitality in women’s and gender studies toward research on race as it intersected with gender and sexuality. When Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, it was a sign to some that at least some minor progress had been made in the cultural representation of queer people of color. “Intersectionality,” though not always adequately defined, is now an acknowledged conceptual keyword of liberal and leftist culture. And in women’s and gender studies and African American studies, it is now becoming a given that critiques of race, gender, and sexuality are not hermetically sealed discourses, that the elevations and devaluations of certain identitarian markers are constellated in both deliberate and latent fashions. Given the progress being made in all three of the needs Black Queer Studies addressed, what are the primary critical problems faced by black queer cultural studies now and in the future? How can we continue to expand the usable past of black queer culture, opening up African American cultural production across its history to a black queer critical audience? Where have increases in black queer cultural representation succeeded and what are the discontents of cultural representation as a primary ethic of black queer liberation? How can or should we understand the relationship between the discursive histories of black feminism and black queer culture, and what conflicts have arisen in their mutual (but not always well-mapped) related growth? And finally, how do the anthologizing practices and theorizations of black queer culture elevate or exclude various iterations of black queer cultural expression, identity, or history? To answer these questions, we will engage a very broadly defined canon of black queer literature from Harriet Jacobs to Uzodinma Iweala, constellating black queer identity with other forms of black transgressive sexuality. Other cultural figures may include Alice Dunbar Nelson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheryl Dunye, Samuel R. Delany, Janelle Monae, and Berry Jenkins.

ENCR 4500--Race in American Places

K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30-8:00pm

This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society. Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest). We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars. With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy. You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled. We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region. In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar. Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of universal standards for public restroom pictograms. Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester. Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.

ENLT 2547--Black Writers in America

Alyssa Collins

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

FREN 3570--Topics in Francophone African Studies

Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

This course addresses various aspects of Francophone African Culture including , oral traditions, literature, theatre, cinema, and contemporary music and visual arts. Prerequisites: FREN 3031 & 3032

FREN 4743--Africa in Cinema

Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. Ideological Constructions of the African as 'other'. Exoticism in cinema. History of African cinema. Economic issues in African cinema: production, distribution, and the role of African film festivals. The socio-political context. Women in African cinema. Aesthetic problems: themes and narrative styles. Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and FREN 3584 or another 3000-level literature course in French.

HIAF 1501--Africa and Virginia

James LeFleur

We 3:30-6:00pm

Introduces the study of history intended for first- or second-year students. Seminars involve reading, discussing, and writing about different historical topics and periods, and emphasize the enhancement of critical and communication skills. Several seminars are offered each term. Not more than two Introductory Seminars may be counted toward the major in history.

HIAF 2001--Early African History

Christina Mobley

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

HIAF 3021--History of Southern Africa

John Mason

TuTh 9:30-10:45

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

HIAF 4511--Soccer in the Global South

Christina Mobley

Mo 3:30-6:00pm

The major colloquium is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the colloquium. Colloquia are most frequently offered in areas of history where access to source materials or linguistic demands make seminars especially difficult. Students in colloquia prepare about 25 pages of written work distributed among various assignments. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

HILA 1501--Race, Sex, Cold War Latin America

Eleana McGrath

Tu 6:00-8:30pm

Intended for first- or second-year students, this course introduces the study of history. Seminars involve reading, discussing, and writing about different historical topics and periods, and emphasize the enhancement of critical and communication skills. Several seminars are offered each term. Not more than two Introductory Seminars may be counted toward the major history.

HIUS 1559--Slavery and Its Legacies

Kirt Von Daacke

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of United States history.

HIUS 2559--African American History to 1865

Justene Hill

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of United States history.

HIUS 3490--From Motown to Hip-Hop

Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction

HIUS 4501--Capitalism and Slavery

Justene Hill

TuTh 13:30-1:145pm

The major seminar is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the seminar. The work of the seminar results primarily in the preparation of a substantial (ca. 25 pp. in standard format) research paper. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

HIUS 4501--Eugenics

Sarah Milov

Mo 3:30-5:00pm

The major seminar is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the seminar. The work of the seminar results primarily in the preparation of a substantial (ca. 25 pp. in standard format) research paper. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

MDST 3760--#BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Meredith Clark

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

Using a mix of scholarly and popular-press readings and an examination of digital artifacts, we will analyze the creations and contributions of Black digital culture from the mid-90s to the present. Covering topics including the early Black blogosphere; the creation of niche content sites like BlackPlanet.com; the emergence of Black Twitter; the circulation of memes, and the use second-screening.

PLCP 3410--Politics of Middle East and North Africa

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

Introduces contemporary political systems of the region stretching from Morocco to Iran. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of the Middle East.

PLCP 4810--Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Robert Fatton

Studies the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Includes the colonial experience and the rise of African nationalism; the transition to independence; the rise and fall of African one-party states; the role of the military in African politics; the politics of ethnicity, nation- and state-building; patromonialism and patron-client relations; development problems faced by African regimes, including relations with external actors; and the political future of Southern Africa. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of Africa.

RELA 2850--Afro-Creole Religions in the Americas

Jalane Schmidt

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

A survey course which familiarizes students with African-derived religions of the Caribbean and Latin America

RELA 3890--Christianity in Africa

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

MoWe 1:00-1:50pm

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELC 3222--From Jefferson to King

Mark Hadley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

A seminar focused upon some of the most significant philosophical and religious thinkers that have shaped and continued to shape American religious thought and culture from the founding of the Republic to the Civil Rights Movement, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will explore how their thought influenced the social and cultural currents of their time.

RELG 3325--The Civil Rights Movement in Religious and Theoretical Perspective

Charles Marsh

Tu 3:30-6:00pm

The seminar considers the American Civil Rights Movement, its supporters and opponents, in religious and theological perspective. While interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will explore the religious motivations and theological sources in their dynamic particularity; and ask how images of God shaped conceptions of personal identity, social existence, race and nation in the campaigns and crusades for equal rights under the law.

RELG 4559--MLK Jr.: Power, Love, Justice

Maurice Wallace

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Religious Studies.

SOC 2442--Systems of Inequality

Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11:00-11:50am

This course will examine various types of inequality (race, class, gender) in the US and abroad. We will discuss sociological theories covering various dimensions of inequality, considering key research findings and their implications. We will examine to what extent ascriptive characteristics impact a person's life chances, how social structures are produced and reproduced, and how individuals are able or unable to negotiate these structures.

SOC 3410--Race and Ethnic Relations

Milton Vickerman

MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

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 4559--Race, Crime, and Punishment

Rose Buckelew

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of sociology.

WGS 2896--Front Lines of Social Change: Through the Lens of Gender, Race, and Class

Jaronda Miller-Bryant

TuTh 13:30-1:45pm

This course is for students who have committed to an internship with the Women's Center. While analyzing the intersectionality of race, class and gender and the deep connection to advocating for social change, interns will be exposed to experiential learning on Grounds in the community and abroad. We see our interns as ambassadors for the university. This course was designed to help students develop into the most well-informed interns possible.

WGS 4620--Black Feminist Theory

Lanice Avery

Th 2:00-4:30pm

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.