Spring 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Sylvia Chong

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Instructor: Christina Mobley

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.