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African-American and African Studies Program
AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies I (4)
Instructor:
Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45
This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.
AAS 2700 Festivals of the Americas (3)
Combined with RELG 2700
Instructor: Jalane Schmidt
Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45
By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.
AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)
Instructor: Cindy Hoehler-Fatton
Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45
This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.
AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)
Combined with RELG 3200
Instructor: Mark Hadley
Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45
An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.
AAS 3280 Reading the Black College Campus (3)
Instructor: Ian Kendrich Grandison
Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs.
AAS 3500-001 Black Protest Narrative (3)
Instructor: Marlon Ross
Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15
This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.
AAS 3500-002 Social Science Perspectives on African-American and African Studies (3)
Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass
Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15
This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.
AAS 3500-003 Framing the Civil Rights Movement (3)
Instructor: Deborah McDowell
Combined ENAM 3500
Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15
This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.
AAS 3500-004 African Worlds - Life Stories(3)
Instructor: Lisa Shutt
Mon. 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. 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 3500-005 History of the Civil Rights (3)
Instructor: Lynn French
Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
TBA
AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)
Instructor: Claudrena Harold
Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45
This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans' endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.
AAS 3749 Food Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)
Instructor: Lisa Shutt
Tues. 3:30-6:00
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 4070 Directed Reading and Research (3)
Instructor: Claudrena Harold
Time: TBA
Students in the Distinguished Majors Program should enroll in this course for their first semester of thesis research.
AAS 4500 Race, Space and Culture (3)
Instructor: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross
Combined with ENCR 4500
Mon 6:30-9:00
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.
AAS 4570 Black Womanhood and the Politics of the Body (3)
Instructor: Zakiyyah Jackson
Wed. 3:30-6:00
This course examines political and cultural constructions of black women's bodies in the United States. It aims to situate Black women’s literary representations of “the black female body" within the political and historical contexts in which these works are produced. The course will place emphasis on black feminist interventions into legal, scientific, medical, and philosophical constructions of black womanhood, particularly with respect to constructions of black women’s gender and sexuality.
PSYC 4870 The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry
Instructor: Lisa Shutt
Time & Day: TBA
Description coming.
Anthropology
ANTH 2500 Anthropology of the Caribbean (3)
Instructor: Kristin Lahatte
Intensive studies of particular world regions, societies, cultures, and civilizations.
ANTH 3559-001 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)
Instructor: Lisa Shutt
Tues.3:30-6:00
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.
ANTH 3559-002 (Imagining Africa)
Instructor: Lisa Shutt
Day & Time: TBA
Description coming.
ANTH 3603, Archaeological Approaches to Atlantic Slavery (3)
Instructor: Frasier Naiman
Wed. 4:30-7:00
This course explores how archaeological and architectural evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of the slave societies that evolved in the early-modern Atlantic world. The primary focus is the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, the later exemplified by Jamaica and Nevis. The course is structured around a series of data-analysis projects that draw on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org).
Architectural History
ARH 3500 Black Women in the Visual Arts(3)
Jacqueline Taylor
Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15
Topical offerings in architectural history
ARH 3603, Archaeological Approaches to Atlantic Slavery (3)
Frasier Naiman
Wed.4:30-7:00
This course explores how archaeological and architectural evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of the slave societies that evolved in the early-modern Atlantic world. The primary focus is the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, the later exemplified by Jamaica and Nevis. The course is structured around a series of data-analysis projects that draw on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.
Drama
DRAM 3070, African American Theatre (3)
Instructo: Theresa Davis
Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15
Presents a comprehensive study of 'Black Theatre' as the African-American contribution to the theatre. Explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political underpinnings of this theatre as an artistic form in American and world culture. Students gain a broader understanding of the relationship and contributions of this theatre to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering. Prerequisite: Instructor permission
English
ENAM 3500-001, Black Protest Narrative(3)
Instructor: Marlon Ross
Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15
This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black independent films Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.
ENAM 3500-002 Framing the Civil Rights Movement(3)
Instructor: Deborah McDowell
Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15
ENAM 5559 Contemporary African American Literature(3)
Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
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 4500-001 Race, Space and Culture (3)
Instructors: Kenrick Ian Grandison & Marlon Ross
Tues. 6:30-9:00
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 4500-002 Race in American Places
Instructor: Kenrick Ian Grandison
Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
ENLT 2547-001 Prophets of the Hood (3)
Instructor: Jason Saunders
Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15
Why do we so often associate black life with urban space? This class will explore how black writers have collaborated, contested, and wrestled with the urbanization of blackness over the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll not just read across genres and artistic forms (i.e. drama, autobiographies, novels, and poems) but through literary movements and historical periods as well. Likely authors include Charles Chestnutt, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Loraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, John Edgar Wideman, Sapphire, and Jay Z. The course requirements are two five page and one ten page paper, a final exam, and lots of conversation.
ENLT 2547-002 Black Women Writers (3)
Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
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 2547-003 Black Women Writers (3)
Instructor: Shermaine Jones
Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15
Challenging the national boundaries that commonly define literary studies, this course offers a survey of 20th century black women writers to locate a traditionally marginal group at the center of discussions of race, gender, and nation. Students will examine works of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American women writers through feminist and post-colonial frameworks. We will not only examine the similarities and thematic commonalities in these works but also the differences due to distinctive historical, spatial, and cultural imperatives. Central concerns of the course include: sexuality, motherhood, violence against women, resistance, identity, and family. While novels are the primary text in this course, we will also explore poetry, drama, and film.
French
FREN 3585-001 Francophone Caribbean (3)
Instructor: Stephanie Berard
Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15
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 3585-002, North African Literature and Culture (3)
Instructor: Majida Bargach
Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45
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.
History
HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)
Instructor: Joseph Miller
Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45
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 (3)
Instructor: John Mason
Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:20
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.
HIUS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)
Instructor: Claudrena Harold
Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45
Studies the history of black Americans from the Civil War to the present.
Politics
PLAP 3820, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties(3)
Instructor: David Klein
Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15
Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.
PLCP 2120, Politics of Developing Areas(3)
Instructor: Robert Fatton
Mon./Wed. 9:00-9:50
Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.
PLCP 4500-001 Imperialism and Globalization(3)
Instructor: Robert Fatton
Thurs. 3:30-6:00
Intensive analysis of selected issues and concepts in comparative government. Prerequisite: One course in PLCP or instructor permission.
Religious Studies
RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa(3)
Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45
This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.
RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)
Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50
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 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)
Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50
Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELA 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.
RELG 2700, Festivals of the Americas (3)
Instructor: Jalane Schmidt
Tues./Thur. 9:30-10:45
Readings will include contemporary ethnographies of religious festivals in the Caribbean ans South, Central, and North America, and increase their knowledge of the concepts of sacred time and space, ritual theory, and the relationships between religious celebration and changing accounts of ethnicity.
RELG 3200, Martin, Malcom and America(3)
Insrtructor: Mark Hadley
Tues./Thurs.9:30-10:45
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.
RELG 3800, African American Religious History(3)
Instructor: Valerie Cooper
Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15
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.
Sociology
SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality(3)
Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass
Tues./Thurs. 10:00-10:45
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)
Instructor: Milton Vickerman
Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15
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 4420, Sociology of Inequality (3)
Instructor: Paul Kingston
Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15
Surveys basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, and their causes and consequences for social conflict and social change. Prerequisite: Six credits of sociology or instructor permission.
Women and Gender Studies
WGS 3450, Presenting & Representing African American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts (3)
Instructor: Jacqueline Taylor
Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15
Through the twentieth century, African-American women challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. This course explores the role of the visual arts in reinforcing and countering images of African American women's identity. We will examine women in visual art, architecture, film and popular culture within the context of cultural, political and social change.
