Fall 2016

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.

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.

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.

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.​

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.

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.​

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

Instructor: Robert Fatton

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

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.

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.”

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.