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

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

AAS 3250 - Motherlands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty(3)

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

Mon/Wed. 11:00-11:50, Clark Hall 101

AAS 3500-1 Intermediate Seminar in African American & African Studies(3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 330

AAS 3559-1 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs 3:30-6:00, 521 New Cabell Hall

AAS 3359-2 Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45, 2006 Mcleod Hall

AAS 3359-3 M.L. King's Political Thought (3)

Instructor: Justin Rose

Tues/Thurs. 2:00-3:15, 215 Wilson Hall

AAS 3359-4 Insiders & Outsiders in Africa (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00, 345 New Cabell Hall

AAS 3359 - 5 Popular Cultures in Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Tyler Fleming

Mon. 3:30-6:00, 141B Wilson Hall

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

AAS 4501 -Black Power (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

Combined with HIUS 4501-8

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.

AAS 4570 -That's Ghetto! Blackness and the Modern American City (3)

Instructor: Kwame Holmes

Tues. 3:30PM - 6:00PM, 543 New Cabell Hall

AAS 4570 - Popular Cultures Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Tyler Fleming

Mon. 3:30-6:00, 141B Wilson Hall

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

AMST 2220 - Race Identity and American Visual (4)

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

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

ANTH 2156 - People and Cultures of Africa(3)

Instructor: Ivan Hultin

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:20, G0048 Ruffner Hall

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

This course presents a comprehensive study of 'Black Theatre' as the African-American contribution to the theatre. Explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political underpinnings of this theatre as an artistic form in American and world culture. Students gain a broader understanding of the relationship and contributions of this theatre to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

ENAM 3559 - Black Protest Narrative(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, 2006 Mcleod Hall

ENCR 4500- Race in American Places(3)

Instructor: Kenrick Grandison

Mon. 6:30-9:00AM, 242 Gibson Hall

ENLT 2547-001- Black Migrations (3)

Instructor: Sonya Donaldson

Mon/Wed. 5:00-6:00, 102 Dell1

ENLT 2547-002 - Black Women Writes (3)

Instructor: Jean Franziro

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 242 Nau Hall

HIAF 2002 - Modern Africa (4)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G010

HIAF 2002 explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

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

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

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

Tues. 3:30-5:30PM, New Cabell Hall 138

This course will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. The movement, largely composed of grass-roots unknowns, was based on a culture of resistance instilled by racially restrictive laws and customs institutionalized by the resistant white South following the demise of Reconstruction. By employing a variety of tactics, at the end of the ‘60s decade, it had won impressive victories against state-sanctioned discrimination. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required: Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press; Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

HIUS 4501 - Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

MUEN 3690 - African Music & Dance Ensemble Level 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs. 5:00-7:15, 107 Old Cabell Hall

MUEN 3690 - African Music & Dance Ensemble Level 3

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs 5:00-7:15, 107 Old Cabell Hall

Musi 2120 - History of Jazz Music

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 209 Maury Hall

Musi 3090 Performance in Africa

Instructor: Elizabeth Sapir

Tues/Thurs. 4:00-4:50, 107 Old Cabell Hall

PLAP 3700 - Racial Politics(3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Mon/Wed. 11:00-11:50, 101 Nau Hall

RELA 2850 - Afro-Creole Religions in Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 211 Gibson Hall

RELG 2260 - Religion, Race and Relationship in Film (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Mon/Wed, 141 Gilmer Hall

This course will explore themes of religion, race, and relationship to the religious or racial "other" in films from the silent era to the present. It will consider film as a medium and engage students in analysis and discussion of cinematic images, with the goal of developing hermeneutic lenses through which these images can be interpreted. The films selected all deal with issues of race, religion, gender, and relationship, and ask the ultimate question, "How should we treat one another?"

SOC 3410 - Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 122

Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation. Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.

SOC 4100 Sociology of African - American Community

Instructor: Hephzibah Strinic-Pawl

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, 242 Nau Hall

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 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 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 What's Love Got to do with it? (3)

Instructor: Kwame Holmes

Wed 3:30-6:00

This research seminar explores the way popular assumptions about "normal" gender roles and sexualities have both shaped African American history, determined the encounter of black and white in the United States and remain central to the construction of black identity. Central questions this course will explore include: How have race and sexuality been socially constructed alongside one another in the United States? How have desire and intimacy become commodified and politicized through the prism of race? Topical concerns that will be addressed include: Is marriage for white people and if so, does that matter? What is the relationship between "black" and "gay" identity and social movements in the United States? What are the politics of inter and intra-racial relationships? This course will begin with a month of theoretical readings on the construction of race and sexuality in the United States. From there, we will analyze a range of primary sources from the period of enslavement to the modern era. Students will be expected to write a 20 page research paper on a topic of their choosing related to the interaction of race, gender and sexuality in North America.

AMST 2220 - Race, Identity and American Studies Visual Culture

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45, Bryan Hall 235

This course surveys the role that visual culture played in constructing racial and ethnic identities in the United States from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Debates about immigration, nationalism, labor and urbanism will be explored through an examination of critical texts and images (including advertisements, cartoons, films, paintings and photographs.) Importantly, the course will encourage students to engage with theoretical, ideological and aesthetic concerns regarding ethnicity, race, class and gender across media.

ARTH 2745 - African American Art

Intructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

This course surveys the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, prints, mixed media and textiles) produced by those of African descent in the United States from the Colonial period to the present. Presented both chronologically and thematically, the class interrogates issues of artistic identity, gender, patronage and the aesthetic influences of the African Diaspora and European and Euro-American aesthetics on African American artists.

DRAM 307 - African-American Theatre

Instructor: 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

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America: Literature of Civil Rights

Instructor: Audrey Golden

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

Tues/Thurs 5:00-6:15

This course will examine the relationship between the literary and legal texts of the American Civil Rights movement. We will begin with W.E.B. DuBois’ and Booker T. Washington’s writings, appearing soon after the United States Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). We will ask how these early texts inform the thinking behind such seminal novels as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), both appearing in the Jim Crow era. We will then put these early novels in conversation with the 1950s and 1960s political writings of the Civil Rights movement. Looking at these literary materials in conjunction with excerpts from legal documents and related theoretical texts, this course will examine the ways in which literature has shaped Black personhood before the law, the literary mechanisms for imagining equal rights in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ways in which the aims of literature and law may (or may not) have coincided with the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The later part of this course then will consider both the literary and legal ramifications of “Civil Rights” in America and will question the role that post-1964 literature may play in imagining civil rights remedies for cases in which the law has proven limited. Likely literary and political texts will include those of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Anthony Grooms. Requirements will include three papers, several short response papers, and a final exam.

ENEC 3120 - Sensibility, Slavery, and Revolution

Instructor: Brad Pasanek

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

“INDEPENDENCE and SLAVERY are synonymous terms.”
“Reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions.”
“They say that I am a tyrant. Rather, I am a slave, a slave of Liberty.”

ENEC 3120 is a survey of the transatlantic literature of slavery and revolution published in the late eighteenth century. The three sentiments set out above — the first American, the second British, the third French — begin to illustrate paradoxical relations of mastery, servitude, tyranny, and rebellion in the period. The Enlightenment moment is characterized by reform, abolition, and revolt; and the literature of the period participates in this politics. Pleasures, profits, and violence mark vertices in the triangular exchanges between Europe, Africa, and America; discussion will consider how the literal trade in slaves and sugar figures in literary history. As we investigate a period of English literature traditionally labeled “The Age of Sensibility” or “The Age of Johnson,” we will read mainly prose (some fiction but also political pamphlets and biography) and poetry. Course requirements: weekly reading assignments, two papers, and a final.

ENMC 4500 African-American Drama

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. Playwrights include, among others, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

ENAM 3500 Black Protest Narrative

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Mon/Wed 2:00-3:15

Cross-listed with AAS 3500

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 Framing the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues/Thurs 12:00-1:15

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.

ENAM 4814 African-American Women Authors

Instructor: Angela Davis

Tues/Thurs 930-1045

Restricted to English, African-American Studies, Women Studies, Poetry Program majors

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies.

ENCR 4500 Race, Space and Culture

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Mon 6:30-9:00

Cross-listed with AAS 4500

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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.

ENMC 3500-South African Literature of Apartheid and the Transition

Instructor: Dr. Barbara Boswell

Tu/Thu 12:30– 1:45pm

This survey course critically examines key South African novels in English, noting the ways in which selected writers engaged racial segregation and the growing disenfranchisement of citizens during apartheid. It also highlights the transitional period from apartheid to de-mocracy during the 1990s, investigating new literary forms and traditions generated by the transition to de-mocracy. Focusing on prominent 20th and 21st century South African texts, the course notes how writers have critiqued apartheid, as well as emerging nationalisms and the nation-building projects of post-apartheid South Africa. Novels may include: Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country (1948), J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1989), Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998), and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001).

FREN 3046 – African Literatures & Cultures

Instructor: Kandoura Dramé

Tues/Thurs 3:30 – 4:45

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms will be explored. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education, etc. The course will examine the images of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Selif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, two papers and a final exam.

FREN 4743 – Africa in Cinema

Instructor: Kandouira Dramé

Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:15

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the "other" and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa's filmmakers. These filmic inventions@are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F.Boughédir), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology.

HIAF 2001: Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in greater detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 2001 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives with strategies of community that contrast with the materiality and individualism that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 2002, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.) http://www.virginia.edu/history/node/2410

HIAF 3021: History of Southern Africa

Instructor: John Edwin Mason

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

HIAF 3021 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the country of South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs. Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

HIUS 3471: American Labor History

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

This course examines the political engagements, labor struggles, and cultural endeavors of the U.S. working class from the end of the Civil War to the present. It chronicles how the lives of the U.S. laboring majority was shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy in the United States. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of U.S. working class history will be in the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines.

HIST 4501: Major Seminar, "Sex, Stereotypes, and the Seduction of Africa"

Instructor: Cody Perkins

Tues 3:30-6:00

This course will highlight the diverse historical interpretations of sexualities in African history since 18th-century interactions between Africans and Europeans through the modern AIDS crisis in central and southern Africa. In addition to prominent themes in scholarly literatures, the course aims to enable students to recognize popular stereotypes and myths pertaining to Africans and the African continent as an imagined space. Stereotypes about Africans, the African environment, and sexualities in general will figure prominently in our discussions as we consider how stereotypes are created and what their modern implications might be. We will also consider the diverse meanings Africans placed in sex as a performance of love, companionship, political protest, and community identities. Readings in the first six weeks of the course are intended to expose students to historical interpretations and debates about African sexualities as they consider possible research paper topics.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

RELA 2750 African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon/Wed 12:00-12:50

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

RELA 5559 New Course in African Relgions: Evangelism in Contemporary Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Thurs 3:30-6:00

This seminar examines Christian missions in Africa over the past two decades. We consider foreign, faith-based initiatives in Africa, as well as African missionaries in Europe and the U.S. How are missionary efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights? What is the relationship between evangelism and development, proselytism and humanitarian aid, mission and education today?

RELG 2700 Festivals of the Americas(3)

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.

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America(3)

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.

RELG 3360 Religions in the New World(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

Instructor: TBA

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

Prerequisites: Six credits of sociology or permission of instructor

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

WGS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon 6:30-9:00

Combined with MDST
This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of "Blackness" in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each media 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.

WGS 3250: MotherLands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty (3)

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

Tues/Thurs12:30-1:45

This course explores the legacy of the "hidden wounds" left upon the landscape by plantation slavery along with the visionary work of ecofeminist scholars and activists daring to imagine an alternative future. Readings, guest lectures, and field trips illumine the ways in which gender, race, and power are encoded in historical, cultural, and physical landscapes associated with planting/extraction regimes such as tobacco, mining, sugar, and corn. Course satisfies the Global Perspectives requirement.

WGS 3559 – African-American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts(3)

Instructor: Jacqueline Taylor

Mon/Wed/Fri10:00-10:50

Through the 20th century, African‐American women, like their white counterparts, challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. Unlike their white counterparts, however, black women battled a long history of entrenched racist ideology. From the first moments of encounter, European imperialists appropriated the black body in service of a propaganda of consumption and exploitation. Subjected to the male gaze, women of African descent were imagined as exotic and highly sexualized, or barbaric and hideous, providing evidence in support of white superiority. In the 20th century however, African Americans sought to overturn negative stereotypes of the black female body, replacing them with both real and differently imagined black female identities. This course will explore the ways in which African American women presented themselves and were represented in visual culture from the New Negro to the Black Power Movement and beyond.

AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Kenrick Grandison

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

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 3456 The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Joseph Hylton

Tues. 6:30-9:30

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3500-001 Insiders & Outsiders in Africa (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

AAS 3500-002 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00, Maury Hall 113

AAS 3500-003 Race, Culture and Inequality (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 430

AAS 3500-004 Women Writing Africa  (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Wilson Hall 235

AAS 3500-005 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Tues. 3:30-6:00, Pavilion VII 103

AAS 3500-006 Afrofuturist Fiction (3)

Instructor: Zakiyyah Jacskon

Time: Wed 6:30-9:30, Bryan Hall 334

AAS 3559 Sounds of Blackness (3)

Instructor:Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45, Glimer Hall 190

AAS 4500 Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15, Bryan 330

AAS 4570-001 The Black Body in Translation (3)

Tues 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 215

AAS 4570-002 Afrofuturist Fiction (3)

Wed 6:30-9:00, Bryan Hall 334

ENAM 3140 Africna American Literature II(3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15, Gibson Hall 341

ENAM 4500-001 Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15,  Bryan Hall 330

ENMC 3500-002 Women Writing Africa (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Wilson Hall 235

FREN 3559-001 Caribbean/ African Theatre(3)

Instructor: Stephanie Berard

Wed. 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 140

FREN 3570 Africna Oral Traditions(3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15,  Wilson Hall 235

MDST 4559-004 Civil Rights Movement & Media (3)

Mon 3:30-6:00, Bryan Hall  235

PLAP 3820 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties(3)

David Klein

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

Studies judical 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)

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)

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.

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa

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)

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

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

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)

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)

Jalane Schmidt

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)

Mark Hadley

An analysis of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

RELG 3800, African American Religious History

Valerie Cooper

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

SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality

Sabrina Pendergrass

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

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Milton Vickerman

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

Paul Kingston

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.

WGS 3450, Presenting & Representing African American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts

Jacqueline Taylor

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AAS 1020, Introduction to Africana American and African Studies II

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

AAS 2224, Black Femininity and Masculinity in the US Media

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AAS 3456, The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement

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AAS 3500-001, Race, Culture & Inequality

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AAS 3500-002, African American Health Professionals

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AAS 3559-001, Black Fire

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AAS 4109, Civil Rights Movement & the Media

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AAS 4500, Critical Race Theory

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AAS 4501, Black Power

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AAS 4559-001, Heard it on the Radio

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AAS 4570-002, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

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AAS 4570-003, Black Conservatism & its Critics

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ANTH 4590, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

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ENAM 3140, African American Literature II

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ENAM 4840, Fictions of Black Identity

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ENLT 2547, Black Writers in America

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HIAF 2002, Modern African History

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HIAF 3559-001, African Decolonization

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

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HIST 4501-005, Religion in Africa and the Mideast

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LNGS 2220, Black English

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MUSI 3090, Performance in Africa

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PLCP 3410, Politics of the Middle East and North Africa

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PLAP 4810, Class, Race and the Environment

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PLCP 4810, Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

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RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa

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RELI 3900 – Islam in Africa

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SOC 3410, Race and Ethnic Relations

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SOC 4550, Race & Ethics

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

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

Instructor: Jim La Fleur

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

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

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

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

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

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

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3500 African Worlds through Life Stories (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00

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

AAS 3559 Gordon Parks-Documentary Tradition (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs. 3:30-4:45

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

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

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

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

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues. 6:30- 9:00

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

AAS 4570 Africa in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

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

ANTH 2500 The Anthropolgy of the Caribbean (3)

Instructor: Kristin Lahatte

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

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

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

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis

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

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

DRAM 3070  African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Presents a comprehensive study of 'Black Theatre' as the African-American contribution to the theatre. Explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political underpinnings of this theatre as an artistic form in American and world culture. Students gain a broader understanding of the relationship and contributions of this theatre to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering.  Prerequisite: Instructor permission

ENLT 2547 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

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

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

ENLT 2552 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Susan Fraiman

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

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

ENAM 3500  Studies in American Literature: The Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15

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

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs 1100-1215 

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

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

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

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

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Thurs. 6:30-9:00

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

FREN 3585 North African Literature and Culture (3)

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FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioure Dramé

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

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor:  James La Fleur

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

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

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

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

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

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the country of South Africa.

The course is especially concerned with the ways in which people expressed their political beliefs through popular culture.  It begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires.  Conquest had not come easily.  Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated.  Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements.  Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and film, as well as academic studies.  Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

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

Instructor: Joshua White

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

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

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

Instructor: John Mason

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

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

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

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

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

HIUS 3071 The Coming of the Civil War (3)

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

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

HIUS 3671 History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Lynn French

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

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

PLAP 3820 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

PLCP 2120 The Politics of Developing Areas (3) 

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

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

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

RELA 2750  African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

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

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

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

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

An analysis of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.  We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to and social struggles against this legacy.  We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

RELG 3360 Conquest and Religions in the Americas, 1400s-1830s (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

RELG 3559 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Charles Marsh Jr.

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

SOC 2442 Systems if Inequality(3)

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

Soc 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

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

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have –and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

AAS 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Maury Hall 113
 

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

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

Instructor: James La Fleur

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

AAS 3500- 3 Slavery and Literary Imagination (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

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

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4501- Politics, Prisons and Punishment (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

Advanced Research Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS  4570 -1 The Black Studies Movement (3)

Instructor: Latasha Levy

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 168
 

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

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

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

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

AAS 4993 Independent Study

ANTH 3590-1 Care in Africa (3)

Instructor: China Scherz

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

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

HIAF 1501 Africa and Virginia (3)

Instructor: James La FLeur

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

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

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

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

Modern African History (3)

Instructor: John Mason

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

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

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

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

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

Instructor: James La Fleur

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

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

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

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

Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Instructor: Robert Fatton

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

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

RELA 2850 Afro Creole Relg in Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

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

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

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

This course examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts.  Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa.  Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

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

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

SOC 4420 Sociology of Inequality (3)

Instructor:  Milton Vickerman

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

SOC 4550 Race and Ethics(3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

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

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

SOC 4640 Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

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

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

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

Instructor: TBA

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.​

​AAS 2559-001 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues 5:00-7:30

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

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

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

AAS 2559-003 Afro-Creole Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

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

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

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

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.​

AAS 3500 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00

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

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

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

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

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 3:30-6:00

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

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

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

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

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

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

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

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
 

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

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

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

ENAM 3880 Literature of the South (3)

Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

Mon./Wed 10:00-10:50

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

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

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

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

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross​

Tues. 6:30-9:00

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African-American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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

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

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have –and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have –and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

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

Intructor: Latasha Levy

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

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

AAS 2559 Swahili Cultures (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

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

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

Intermediate Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

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

AAS 3500- 2 Slavery to Freedom (3)

Instructor: Giuliana Perrone

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

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

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

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

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

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

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

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

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

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4500-Africa & Mapping Global Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

AAS 4993 Independent Study

Swah 1020 - Introductory Swahili II (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

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

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

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

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

AMST 1559 – Slavery and its Legacies(3)

Instructor: Kelley Deetz

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

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

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

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

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

AMST 2559 – Racial Performances

Instructor: Sylvia Chong

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

ANTH 2589 – Ancient African Cities (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

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

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

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

Intructor: China Scherz

Tues./Thurs., Ruffner Hall 175

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

ANTH 5590 – Ethnography of Africa (3)

Instructor: James Igoe

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

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

ANTH 5885 – Archaeology of Colonial Expansion (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

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

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

DRAM 4592 – Hip Hop Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

DRAM 4593 – Poetry in Motion (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

ENAM 3140 – African-American Literature II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

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

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

ENAM 4840 – Fictions of Black Identity (3)
 

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

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

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

ENCR 4500 – Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

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

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

ENAM 4500 – Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

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

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

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

Instructor: Sarah Ingle

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

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

ENMC 3310 – Major African Americans Poets (3)
 

Instructor: Marvin Campbell

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

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

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

ENMC 3500 – Currents in African Literature (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

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

FREN 3570 – African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

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

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

HIAF 3559 – Slavery in the Atlantic World (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

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

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

HIAF 4501 – African Atlantic World History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

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

HIUS 3072 – The Civil War and Reconstruction (3)

Gary Gallagher

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

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

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

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

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

HIUS 4501 - Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

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

HIUS 4501 – African Americans and the City (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

MUSI 3090 - Performance in Africa (3)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues., Old Caebll Hall 107

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

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

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

PLAP 4810 Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

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

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

RELA 3559 – Magic and Witchcraft (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

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

RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

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

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

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

RELA 4085 – Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa (3)

Instructor:Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton 

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

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

RELG 3800 – African American Religious History (3)

Instructor: Heather Warren

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

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

SOC 3410 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

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

Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation.  Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.

SOC 4640 - Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

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

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

SOC 4750 – Racism (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

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

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

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

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

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

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance in lecture and discussion section, and three written exams.

AAS 1559  Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

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

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have –and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

AAS 2559 The Films of Spike Lee (3)

Intructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

AAS 2559 Sensing Africa (3)

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

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

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

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

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

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.​

AAS 3500 - 001 Musical Fictions (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

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

AAS 3500 - 002 Race and Real Estate (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

AAS 3500 - 003 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

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

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

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

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

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

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

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

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

AAS 4570  Black Women and Work (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

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

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

SWAH 1010 - Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

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

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

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

SWAH 2010 - Intermediate Swahili I (3)

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

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

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

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

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

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

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

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

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

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

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

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison/Marlon Ross

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

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

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

Instructor: Marlon Ross

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

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

AMST 4500 - 5 Documentary and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

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

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. It foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. 

DRAM 4590 The Black Monologues (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

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

ENAM 3500 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

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

ENAM 3510 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

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

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

Instructor: Marlon Ross

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

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

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

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

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

ENCR 4500 Race, Space, Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

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

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

ENGL 1500 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

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

Gilmer Hall 141

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

ENLT 2547 Black Woman Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15,  Nau Hall 142

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

FREN 4811 Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

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

FRTR 3584 African Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

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

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

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

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

HIUS 3559 -1 Sounds of Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

HIUS 3651 Afro American History to 1865 (3)

Instructor: Justene Hill

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

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

HIUS 3654 Black Fire (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

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

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

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

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

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

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

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

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

PLAP 4841 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Instructor: David O'Brien

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

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

PLCP 3012 The Politics of Developing Areas

Instructor: Robert Fatton

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

PLPT 4500 - 001 Freedom, Empire, and Slavery

Instructor: K. Lawrie Balfour

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

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

Religion

RELA 2850 Afro- Creole Religions in the Americas

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

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

Sociology

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Kimberly Hoosier

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

Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation. Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.