SWAH 1020

Leonora Anyango

Mo/We/Fri 10:00 am - 10:50 am

Professor Anne Rotich

Mo/We/Fri 11:00 am - 11:50 am

SWAH 2020

Professor Anne Rotich

Mo/We/Fri 12:00 pm - 12:50 pm

AAS 1020: Introduction to African-American and African Studies II

Professor Nemata Blyden

Tu/Th 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm

Wilson Hall 301

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 1010. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

AAS 2500-001: Black Life, Power & the Archive

Professor Shelby Sinclair

Tu/Th 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

New Cabell Hall 044

How are archives built and maintained? How can we use historical archives to tell stories about Black life? Students will investigate the politics of knowledge production, power in the archive, and the limitations of various source materials through critical reading, conversations with archivists and practitioners, and hands-on archive exploration. This course develops students’ research competencies and general understanding of sources, archives, and critical digital methods through a final assignment on a pre-1999 topic of their choice.

AAS 2500-002: Race, Class & Gender

Professor Liana Richardson

Mo/We 5:00 pm - 6:15 pm

New Cabell Hall 287

While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream”, and “the land of opportunity,” why do social inequalities by race, class, and gender continue to be such a persistent feature of our society? The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that create, reinforce, and sometimes exacerbate these inequalities, shaping differences in lived experiences and outcomes. First, we will discuss the social construction of race, class, and gender, and their intersections. Then, we will examine policies and practices within the labor market, housing, education, health care, and criminal justice systems that reflect and reinforce the social constructions and perpetuate race, class, and gender inequalities in health, economic, and social well-being. We will conclude by considering potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, as well as the social justice politics associated with them. Documentaries, as well as pop culture media (e.g., music lyrics and videos, social media posts, and movies), will be used throughout the course to illustrate key concepts and realities.

AAS 2500-003: African Liberation: Struggles for Freedom

Professor Naseemah Mohamed

Tu/Th 9:30 am - 10:45 am

New Cabell  Hall 31

AAS 2559:  African Americans in Popular Culture

Professor Robin Means Coleman

We 4:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Wilson Hall 238

How have Black Americans worked to assert their value in a media climate that relies, perhaps, on dichotomies of exceptionalism and deficiency? We will examine how African American culture, history, and experiences—“Blackness”—are presented in popular communication. Particular attention will be paid to representations of Blackness as offered up by Black people. Through a series of cases, we will examine how media has worked to inform “respectable” Black self-presentation.

AAS 3157: Caribbean Perspectives

Professor Fatima Siwaju

Tu 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will redefine the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples.

AAS 3500-001: Race, Gender & Environmental Justice in Latin America

Professor Kache Claytor

Mo/We 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

New Cabell Hall 064

This course offers an introduction to the concepts and perspectives in environmental justice movements by exploring the intersections of Black feminist activism in Latin America. This course explores the ways that Black women across borders, languages, as well as temporal and spatial markers have responded to injustices that have not only accelerated environmental degradation, but also disproportionately impacted their communities and shaped their experiences. Through a critical examination of case studies, we will analyze how Afro-descendant women have led movements to protect their communities, land, and natural resources. Using an interdisciplinary lens, students will engage with ideas of environmental justice, climate justice, Reproductive Justice, extractivism, colonialism, and sovereignty. This course is designed for students interested in activism, environmentalism, Blackness and Indigeneity, Black feminisms, Latin American politics, and Black consciousness throughout Latin America. Through a mix of readings, films, podcasts, discussions, and community engagement, students will gain a nuanced understanding of the role of Black women in shaping environmental and social justice across diverse contexts.

AAS 3500-002: Rethinking Race & Gender

Professor Nasrin Olla 

Tu/Th 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

Warner Hall 110

In our everyday life, we navigate gendered and racialized realities. In some significant sense, to qualify as a “human,” one must be assigned a gender and race. But what is race? What is gender? How do these concepts come into being across cultures and spaces? In this course, we will approach these big questions by exploring a range of novels, poetry, criticism, and films from the Caribbean, India, the United States, and Africa. Authors will include Gayatri Spivak, Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Bell Hooks, Saidiya Hartman, and others. This course aims to develop a theoretical language through which the way race and gender emerge in institutional and informal structures is explored. Through a close reading of a range of texts, we will attempt to think across feminist, queer, and world literatures to develop a set of intersectional terms and concepts.

AAS 3500-003: Introduction to Black Queer Film

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 303

AAS 3500-004: Afro-Brazilian History: Thought, Memory, Body, and Space

Professor Guilherme Lemos

Tu/Th 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

New Cabell Hall 287

Brazil has the largest black population outside of the African continent. Forged in colonization, it was the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas (alongside Cuba). This course will survey key texts about Afro-Brazilian historiography and texts produced by Afro-Brazilian intellectuals and activists. Also, it relates these productions with others in the context of Afro-American, African and Afro-Caribbean Studies. It will emphasize Brazil as the largest slave trading political unit in the world and will address the consequences of this in the life of African and Afro-Brazilian people from 17th century to today. The course will then cover the historical strategies from the anti-slavery movements to post-abolition associations, identifying the confluences between Africans and Afro-Brazilians in the formulation of the thoughts, the memories, the body performances and the uses of land and space.

AAS 3500-005: Race, Class, Politics & the Environment

Professor Kimberly Fields

Tu 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Warner Hall 113

This course explores the relationships between ‘race’, socio-economic status, interest group politics and environmental policy. We will address and contend with debates surrounding the claims that racialized, marginalized and poor communities disproportionately shoulder society's negative environmental burdens. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples.

AAS 3500: Environmental Justice Across the Atlantic

Professor Kimberly Fields

We 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 411

This course uses an interdisciplinary social-science perspective to track the global trajectory of environmental justice movements and analyze them in relation to other global and regional processes. We will consider cases that do not explicitly invoke environmental justice as such, but where experiences of injustice are inseparable from environmental problems. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples. Additionally, the possible causes for patterns of injustice will be examined. Recent proposals to address the problem of environmental racism and injustice will be discussed and analyzed.

AAS 3500-007 – Africulture

Michael Carter, Jr.

Tu 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 303

Led by a practicing farmer-activist, Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, Virginia, we will examine how principles, practices, plants and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture, and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges in environmental and agricultural sciences faced by today’s Black farmers.

AAS 3500-008: Race & Medicine in Post-19th Century America

Professor Liana Richardson

We 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 207

When it comes to race, what do the NFL, Facebook, and the IRS have in common with our health care system? How are cops and doctors similar to each other and to college fraternities? And how did the Civil Rights movement influence health care as we know it today? In this course, we will examine the medical practices involved in the social construction of racial difference and in the persistence of racial inequalities in health during the last 60 years. Drawing from relevant scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and history, we will discuss the origins and consequences of medical racism in contemporary medical research and practice, including the continued role of medicine in racial meaning-making. Case studies about the contemporary (mis)use of race in clinical encounters and in diagnostic and treatment protocols will provide illustrative examples. We will also consider the racialization of various health issues, focusing especially on the sociopolitical contexts in which it occurs and how contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization drive the differential labeling and treatment of racial groups as either victims (sick) or villains (bad). In addition to exposing the contradictions between these phenomena and the ethical principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice in medicine, we will conclude by discussing their implications for health equity.

AAS 3559-001: African Americans in Sport

Professor Darren Kelly

Tu/Th 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm

New Cabell Hall 364

Race and sport in African American life provides a historical and analytical understanding of the issues involving race, racism, race relations in American sport. African Americans have had a unique relationship with sport within the interscholastic, intercollegiate, amateur and professional levels in the struggle to be recognized as valuable members of the sporting arena. This course provides an overview of the sporting events, icons, and time periods that have been shaped by America’s continued struggle to improve race relations. This semester’s course will also have a focus on athlete activism in the sporting world.

AAS 3559-002 – Africa’s Youth: Cultural & Political Perspectives

Professor Salma Mutwafy

Tu/Th 9:30 am - 10:45 am

New Cabell Hall 364

With a median age of 19 years, Africa’s population is – by far - much younger than all other regions, where the median age is more than 30 years. The youthfulness of Africa’s population has important implications for further population growth as well as social and political outcomes. In this course, we will carry out a critical and humanistic examination of Africa’s population dynamics and the questions they raise.

AAS 3559-003 Horror Noire: A History of Black Americans in Horror

To register for this course now, register as MDST 3113 or wait for permanent number AAS 3113 to be approved, in mid-November

Black horror is a primer on the quest for social justice. What can such a boundary-pushing genre teach us about paths to solidarity and democracy? What can we learn about disrupting racism, misogyny, and anti-Blackness? If horror is radical transgression, then we have much to learn from movies such as Candyman, The First Purge, Get Out, Eve¿s Bayou, Blacula, Attack the Block, Demon Knight, Tales from the Hood, Sugar Hill, and Ganja & Hess.

AAS 3559-004 – Haiti and the US

Professor Shelby Sinclair

Tu/Th 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

New Cabell Hall 315

What are the origins of anti-Haitian antagonism in the U.S. and why has it persisted? This course presents the history of Haiti and its relationship to Western powers, most especially the United States and France. We examine the political and cultural foundations of Haiti's globally impactful revolution to overthrow slavery and French colonialism as well as the early twentieth century U.S. occupation and its consequences. How has the United States' persistent involvement in Haitian politics and demonization of Haitian culture transformed the country's geopolitical realities? From zombies to AIDS to the sensational headlines animating current presidential debates, we uncover why Haiti has played a central role in U.S. political discourse, immigration policy, and popular culture for centuries.

AAS 3559-005: Reparations, Abolition & the Black Radical Tradition

Professor Guy Mount

Mo 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 068

Arguments in favor of reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics. Focusing on reparations claims can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. Contextualized by recent demands for redress for racial injustice, this course will examine various definitions of "reparations" and arguments for and against various forms of the idea that reparations can actually work toward repair.

AAS 3830: Being Human: Race, Technology & the Arts

Professor Njelle Hamilton

Mo/We 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

Dell 2, 102

What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV, film, music, art, and literature. In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement, and invisibility. We will think about the various ways that black artists/writers/creators displace or “dimension-shift” the African Diaspora experience to grapple with contemporary and historical issues, and employ science/technology/sci-fi to invent places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, mashups, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. (No artistic talent or experience required)

AAS 4080: Distinguished Major Thesis II

Required course for students enrolled in the Distinguished Majors Program. Students should sign up for the section led by their thesis advisor / first reader.

AAS 4501 – Engaging Local Histories: River View Farm 

Professor Lisa Shutt

Th 2:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Pavilion V 110

This course aims to encourage students to situate and shed light on various aspects of Black history and culture in Albemarle County and the surrounding regions through the lens and example of River View Farm and those who established it, lived there, farmed there, and led local and regional communities in a number of capacities.
Who were these local leaders? They included a formerly enslaved man, Mr. Hugh Carr (approximately 1843-1914) who was a farm manager on the nearby Woodlands plantation and was able to earn and accumulate enough money to purchase the 58-acre tract that formed the beginnings of River View Farm in 1870. He continued to add to his holding and became an elder in the primarily Black Hydraulic Mills / Union Ridge communities. One of his daughters with his second wife, Ms. Texie Mae Hawkins, was Ms. Mary Louise Carr Greer (1884-1973). She was an incredibly influential educator – a principal of the Albemarle Training School, and a local behind-the-scenes Civil Rights leader. Ms. Greer’s husband, Mr. Conly Greer (1883-1956), was Albemarle County’s first African American Extension Agent. He build a “sanitary demonstration barn” as a teaching tool and rode from one corner of the county to the next on horseback for days at a time to teach Black farmers the newest farming methods supported by the (segregated) Extension Service. Inspired by Mr. Greer, these farmers then taught these cutting edge agricultural skills to their neighbors.

Students will learn how to conduct historical and/or ethnographic research including research of archival materials, material culture, and the landscape/built environment. Each student will embark on a semester-long examination of a topic related to River View Farm, the individuals who lived there, and the larger communities of which they were a part. Instruction will include the examination of primary materials in Special Collections at the University of Virginia in addition to secondary readings that provide context about post-emancipation lives of formerly enslaved men and women, the Black Extension Service and Land Grant University system, Black 4-H youth programs, women’s “Demonstration Clubs,” the history of African American education in the region between 1840-1973, Black agricultural history, African American communities such as Hydraulic Mills and Union Ridge, African American foodways, the importance and format of kitchen gardens, garden clubs, museum studies, the historicization and preservation of local Black histories in the 21st century, and many more potential topics.

An important part of the mission of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies is public outreach. We would like to see our students actively support and engage with communities outside the space and influence of the university.

Some classes will be held on the site of River View Farm (now known as Ivy Creek Natural Area) and there will be some trips during class time. Transportation will be arranged or provided.

AAS 4570: Know Thyself: Research Ancestry, Heritage, Culture

Professor Naseemah Mohamed

Tu 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

New Cabell Hall 056

This course is a rigorous research-based exploration of ancestry, heritage, and identity. Students will take a DNA ancestry test, conduct interviews with family members, trace their genealogy through archival research, and investigate a significant cultural or religious aspect of their lineage. The course culminates in a 20-page research paper and three-part video series documenting students’ research process, findings, and reflections on how their discoveries shape their understanding of identity and heritage.

AAS 7000: Introduction to Africana Studies

Professor Kevin Gaines

Th 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

New Cabell Hall 056