| AFST 100-01 |
Introduction to Africana Studies
Instructor: Nadia Alahmed
Course Description:
Cross-listed with LALC 121-01. This interdisciplinary introduction to Africana Studies combines teaching foundational texts in the field with instruction in critical reading and writing. The course will cover Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, the creation of African Disaporic communities, the conceptualization and representation of Black culture and identity, and the intellectual and institutional development of Black and Africana Studies.
This course is cross-listed as LALC 121.
|
10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
ALTHSE 207 |
| AFST 220-01 |
Ethnography of Postcolonial Africa
Instructor: James Ellison
Course Description:
Cross-listed with ANTH 230-01. This course is intended as both an introduction to the ethnography of Africa and an examination of postcolonial situations in Africa. We will learn a great deal about the cultural, social, political, and economic diversity of the continent while avoiding the typological thinking that once characterized area studies. Through ethnography we will learn about African cultures, their historical contingencies, and their entanglements in various fields of power. We will assess the changing influences of pre-colonial traditions, colonialism, postcolonial states, and the global economy.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 204 |
| AFST 220-02 |
The Civil Rights Movement: North and South
Instructor: Say Burgin
Course Description:
Cross-listed with HIST 211-03.
The post-World War II movement for African Americans' civil rights is often considered solely in terms of Southern-based groups and events. This class will explode the myth that the civil rights movement was confined to the South by exploring the national character of inequalities, segregation and the movement for Black freedom. With special attention to the years 1945-1975, this class will consider how segregation formed differently in Birmingham versus Alabama, how the fight for school de-segregation included battles in both Little Rock and New York, and how gender shaped protest politics and tactics of the movement across the nation. Key topics will include Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and ideas of leadership; key campaigns in Birmingham, New York, Detroit and elsewhere; important groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and how ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped the movement. An important thread throughout the class will be understanding how racial inequalities came to be "baked into" the structures and systems that shape life in the United States - from housing to education to employment. We'll learn about structural racism through the prism of Black resistance to it.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
ALTHSE 109 |
| AFST 220-03 |
Ecological History of Africa
Instructor: Jeremy Ball
Course Description:
Cross-listed with HIST 284-01.
This course provides an introduction to the ecological history of Africa. We will focus in some detail on demography, the domestication of crops and animals, climate, the spread of New World crops (maize, cassava, cocoa), and disease environments from the earliest times to the present. Central to our study will be the idea that Africa's landscapes are the product of human action. Therefore, we will examine case studies of how people have interacted with their environments. African ecology has long been affected indirectly by decisions made at a global scale. Thus we will explore Africa's engagement with imperialism and colonization and the global economy in the twentieth century. The course ends with an examination of contemporary tensions between conservation and economic development.
|
09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 203 |
| AFST 220-04 |
Pause: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Hip Hop
Instructor: Naaja Rogers
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MUAC 210-01 and WGSS 201-05. This course examines the complex and dynamic relationship between race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop, one of the largest cultural movements in the world. However, since hip hop is more than music, fashion, language, and style, and transcends the commercialization of products both in mainstream U.S.A. and globally, this course sets out to achieve two goals: (1) To introduce students to classic and emergent scholarship in the interrelated fields of critical race theory, feminist and gender studies, and queer theory which will be used to analyze hip hop and (2) to use hip hop as a heterogeneous and constantly shifting cultural and political formation that informs, complicates, and offers new of imaginings of these fields of study. Ultimately, utilizing a primarily interdisciplinary approach, this course will examine the ways in which the historical and contemporary social organizations of sexuality, gender, and race are mutually negotiated, contested, and constructed within and across hip hop music, film, dance, dress, and other sites of cultural performance. Students will have ample opportunity to engage hip hop lyrics, videos, and images throughout the span of the course.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
ALTHSE 109 |
| AFST 320-01 |
(Dis)Figuring the Black Body
Instructor: Lynn Johnson
Course Description:
This course will examine the disparate socio-political values and meanings assigned to the black body, historically and contemporarily. Throughout the term, students will engage with a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and source materials that specifically engage with discourses of black bodily difference (gender, age, able-bodiedness, and weight), usefulness (labor, medical experimentation, and athleticism), and beauty (hair and fashion). Ultimately, we will come to understand the ways in which black bodies have served not only as sites of cultural memory and trauma, but also as signifiers of black cultural pride and resiliency.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
ALTHSE 110 |
| AFST 320-02 |
Education in the African/Black Community: 19th Century to the Present
Instructor: Naaja Rogers
Course Description:
Cross-listed with EDST 391-04. This course investigates the ways that various historical, political, sociological, and psychological issues impact education for African/Black children in the U.S., specifically as it pertains to resources, goals, outcomes, attitudes, and beliefs. To address the historical issues, this course will discuss the importance of education for African/Black people in relation to the growth of educational achievements from 1865 to the present. We will address the politics of education for African/Black people by examining the role that it plays in fostering agency, self-definition, and self-determination and positively transforming and revitalizing African/Black communities. Lastly, this course will survey the sociological and psychological issues that impact the educational experiences of African/Black people. Afrocentric and culturally relevant approaches to education, pedagogy, and teaching will then be introduced and discussed as essential guides for education in African/Black communities.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
ALTHSE 201 |
| AFST 320-04 |
Afro-Arabs and the Changing Discourse on Race in the Middle East and North Africa
Instructor: Nadia Alahmed
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MEST 200-03.
The course title is "Changing Discourse on Race in the Middle East and North Africa: Afro-Arabs and Ethno-racial formations in the Region" This interdisciplinary seminar examines the processes of racialization, identity formation and anti-Blackness in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Focusing on the experiences, cultures, and histories of Afro-Arab peoples in the region, the course will highlight how race and racism have been articulated throughout the centuries. It will explore the forces that shaped the discourse on race in MENA: from Sub-Saharan slavery to modern issues like the migrant and refugee crisis, globalization, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the growth and popularization of Hip-hop. Cross-listed with Middle East Studies.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
DENNY 104 |
| AFST 320-05 |
Incarceration, Policing and "Crime" in Modern US History
Instructor: Say Burgin
Course Description:
Cross-listed with HIST 311-02.
The United States of America imprisons more of its residents than almost any other country in the world. How did mass incarceration come to define this country? In this class, we will explore this question by looking at the multiple ways that the US policed and incarcerated various groups throughout the 20th century. We will pay special attention to the ways that lawmakers, police and the courts have historically targeted African Americans, but we will also study how other people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and workers were criminalized. A major learning goal for this class will be understanding that "deviance" and "crime" were constructed categories. We will consider how the meaning of these categories shifted over time and why. Major topics will include chain gang prisoner exploitation; eugenics, the psychiatric creation of "feeble-mindedness," and asylum incarceration; the criminalization of sex work, interracial relationships, labor organizing, and political dissent; jingoism, a "new" Yellow Peril, and Japanese internment; and outlawing drug use and mass incarceration. To gain a deeper understanding of how the criminal courts actually work, students on this class will participate in a court-watching program, for which everyone will receive training.
|
09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
ALTHSE 109 |
| AFST 400-01 |
Writing in Africana Studies
Instructor: Lynn Johnson
Course Description:
This course will build on experiences in the methods course. Students in this course continue research toward and writing of a senior thesis. The emphasis is on writing skills and course material; assignments link those skills to work in Africana Studies. Seniors in the major will work independently with the director of Africana Studies and a second faculty reader (representing a discipline closer to the senior's interest) to produce a lengthy paper or special project which focuses on an issue relevant to the student's concentration. Under the direction of the director of Africana Studies, students will meet collectively two or three times during the semester with the directors (and, if possible, other Africana Studies core and contributing faculty) to share bibliographies, research data, early drafts, and the like. This group will also meet at the end of the semester to discuss and evaluate final papers and projects.
Prerequisites: 100 and 200; four 200/300-level AFST approved courses (2 Africa, 2 Diaspora); three 300-level (in area of concentration).
|
09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
ALTHSE 07 |
| AFST 500-01 |
Black Political Organizing from the Black Power Movement to the Present
Instructor: Lynn Johnson
Course Description:
|
|
| Courses Offered in AMST |
| AMST 200-03 |
Disorderly Women
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Cross-listed with WGSS 101-02. According to Merriam-Webster someone behaves disorderly when they are engaged in conduct offensive to public order. In this course, we will ask which women have been (and still are) considered disorderly, why, and by whom. In an American context, who are these women unsettling, upsetting, and disrupting public order in meaningful ways? Predominantly focusing on the particular intersection of race and gender, in our time together we will prioritize narratives and intellectual and cultural production of African American women who have caused good, necessary trouble throughout US-American history. Engaging with activist work, academic scholarship, fiction, art, and film as significant contributions in the struggle for freedom, civil rights, and equality, we will be guided by Black Feminist activist-intellectuals, artists, and creators such as Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker. From todays vantage point, and two years after the dramatic overturning of Roe v. Wade, it has become evident once more that hard fought victories and progress can never be taken for granted and that our engagement with current (and past) debates about feminism, gender, power, and justice is as pressing as ever.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 211 |
| AMST 200-05 |
"A Black Gaze": How Black Visual Artists Imagine a World Otherwise
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 220-04. Engaging with thought-provoking visual texts -- music videos, photographs, short films, and documentary film -- we come to know an array of contemporary Black artists whose creative practices "reject traditional ways of seeing blackness - ways of seeing that historically depict blackness only in a subordinate relation to whiteness" (Tina M. Campt, 2021). Concerned with images of everyday life that challenge said ways of narrating the Black experience, we will engage with visual texts alongside Campt's book, A Black Gaze. Centered around works of art that point us to the precarity of Black life while celebrating Black joy and beauty, we uncover the productive tension between the harsh realities these artists grapple with and the worlds they imagine in response. One goal of the course is to familiarize students with this cohort of Black visual artists who have powerfully changed the ways we engage with Black visual culture and to make them critically aware of the significant moment we are in. Questions we will ask ourselves are: How does the concept of a Black gaze challenge our ways of seeing the world? How do these artists imagine "a future beyond the confines of the given" and what are this moment's possibilities (and limitations)?
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
DENNY 112 |
| Courses Offered in ANTH |
| ANTH 230-01 |
Ethnography of Postcolonial Africa
Instructor: James Ellison
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 220-01. This course is intended as both an introduction to the ethnography of Africa and an examination of postcolonial situations in Africa. We will learn a great deal about the cultural, social, political, and economic diversity of the continent while avoiding the typological thinking that once characterized area studies. Through ethnography we will learn about African cultures, their historical contingencies, and their entanglements in various fields of power. We will assess the changing influences of pre-colonial traditions, colonialism, postcolonial states, and the global economy.
Offered every fall.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 204 |
| Courses Offered in EDST |
| EDST 391-04 |
Education in the African/Black Community: 19th Century to the Present
Instructor: Naaja Rogers
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 320-02. This course investigates the ways that various historical, political, sociological, and psychological issues impact education for African/Black children in the U.S., specifically as it pertains to resources, goals, outcomes, attitudes, and beliefs. To address the historical issues, this course will discuss the importance of education for African/Black people in relation to the growth of educational achievements from 1865 to the present. We will address the politics of education for African/Black people by examining the role that it plays in fostering agency, self-definition, and self-determination and positively transforming and revitalizing African/Black communities. Lastly, this course will survey the sociological and psychological issues that impact the educational experiences of African/Black people. Afrocentric and culturally relevant approaches to education, pedagogy, and teaching will then be introduced and discussed as essential guides for education in African/Black communities.
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, MR
ALTHSE 201 |
| Courses Offered in FMST |
| FMST 210-04 |
Middle Eastern Francophone Cinema
Instructor: Mireille Rebeiz
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FREN 305-01 and MEST 200-02. This class provides a general overview of Francophonie in the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Mashreq (Levant). It focuses on the relationship between previously colonized Arab countries like Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and their former colonizer France. It examines literary and film productions from these countries and aims to show the way by which French and Arabs are represented in these narratives. It also seeks to study the human rights issues raised during the colonial and postcolonial areas, such as women's rights, legal and illegal migration, war, resistance to oppression and terrorism, cultural and religious identities.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
BOSLER 314 |
| FMST 220-04 |
"A Black Gaze": How Black Visual Artists Imagine a World Otherwise
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AMST 200-05. Engaging with thought-provoking visual texts -- music videos, photographs, short films, and documentary film -- we come to know an array of contemporary Black artists whose creative practices "reject traditional ways of seeing blackness - ways of seeing that historically depict blackness only in a subordinate relation to whiteness" (Tina M. Campt, 2021). Concerned with images of everyday life that challenge said ways of narrating the Black experience, we will engage with visual texts alongside Campt's book, A Black Gaze. Centered around works of art that point us to the precarity of Black life while celebrating Black joy and beauty, we uncover the productive tension between the harsh realities these artists grapple with and the worlds they imagine in response. One goal of the course is to familiarize students with this cohort of Black visual artists who have powerfully changed the ways we engage with Black visual culture and to make them critically aware of the significant moment we are in. Questions we will ask ourselves are: How does the concept of a Black gaze challenge our ways of seeing the world? How do these artists imagine "a future beyond the confines of the given" and what are this moment's possibilities (and limitations)?
|
03:00 PM-04:15 PM, TF
DENNY 112 |
| Courses Offered in FREN |
| FREN 305-01 |
Middle Eastern Francophone Cinema
Instructor: Mireille Rebeiz
Course Description:
Cross-listed with MEST 200-02 and FMST 210-04. This class provides a general overview of Francophonie in the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Mashreq (Levant). It focuses on the relationship between previously colonized Arab countries like Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and their former colonizer France. It examines literary and film productions from these countries and aims to show the way by which French and Arabs are represented in these narratives. It also seeks to study the human rights issues raised during the colonial and postcolonial areas, such as women rights, legal and illegal migration, war, resistance to oppression and terrorism, cultural and religious identities. Prerequisite: FREN 231 or 232
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
BOSLER 314 |
| Courses Offered in HIST |
| HIST 211-03 |
The Civil Rights Movement: North and South
Instructor: Say Burgin
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 220-02.
The post-World War II movement for African Americans' civil rights is often considered solely in terms of Southern-based groups and events. This class will explode the myth that the civil rights movement was confined to the South by exploring the national character of inequalities, segregation and the movement for Black freedom. With special attention to the years 1945-1975, this class will consider how segregation formed differently in Birmingham versus Alabama, how the fight for school de-segregation included battles in both Little Rock and New York, and how gender shaped protest politics and tactics of the movement across the nation. Key topics will include Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and ideas of leadership; key campaigns in Birmingham, New York, Detroit and elsewhere; important groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and how ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped the movement. An important thread throughout the class will be understanding how racial inequalities came to be "baked into" the structures and systems that shape life in the United States - from housing to education to employment. We'll learn about structural racism through the prism of Black resistance to it.
|
10:30 AM-11:45 AM, TR
ALTHSE 109 |
| HIST 284-01 |
Ecological History of Africa
Instructor: Jeremy Ball
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 220-03. This course provides an introduction to the ecological history of Africa. We will focus in some detail on demography, the domestication of crops and animals, climate, the spread of New World crops (maize, cassava, cocoa), and disease environments from the earliest times to the present. Central to our study will be the idea that Africa's landscapes are the product of human action. Therefore, we will examine case studies of how people have interacted with their environments. African ecology has long been affected indirectly by decisions made at a global scale. Thus we will explore Africa's engagement with imperialism and colonization and the global economy in the twentieth century. The course ends with an examination of contemporary tensions between conservation and economic development.
Offered every two years.
|
09:30 AM-10:20 AM, MWF
DENNY 203 |
| HIST 311-02 |
Incarceration, Policing and "Crime" in Modern US History
Instructor: Say Burgin
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 320-05.
The United States of America imprisons more of its residents than almost any other country in the world. How did mass incarceration come to define this country? In this class, we will explore this question by looking at the multiple ways that the US policed and incarcerated various groups throughout the 20th century. We will pay special attention to the ways that lawmakers, police and the courts have historically targeted African Americans, but we will also study how other people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and workers were criminalized. A major learning goal for this class will be understanding that "deviance" and "crime" were constructed categories. We will consider how the meaning of these categories shifted over time and why. Major topics will include chain gang prisoner exploitation; eugenics, the psychiatric creation of "feeble-mindedness," and asylum incarceration; the criminalization of sex work, interracial relationships, labor organizing, and political dissent; jingoism, a "new" Yellow Peril, and Japanese internment; and outlawing drug use and mass incarceration. To gain a deeper understanding of how the criminal courts actually work, students on this class will participate in a court-watching program, for which everyone will receive training.
|
09:00 AM-10:15 AM, TR
ALTHSE 109 |
| Courses Offered in LALC |
| LALC 121-01 |
Introduction to Africana Studies
Instructor: Nadia Alahmed
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 100-01. This interdisciplinary introduction to Africana Studies combines teaching foundational texts in the field with instruction in critical reading and writing. The course will cover Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, the creation of African Disaporic communities, the conceptualization and representation of Black culture and identity, and the intellectual and institutional development of Black and Africana Studies.This course is cross-listed as AFST 100.
|
10:30 AM-11:20 AM, MWF
ALTHSE 207 |
| Courses Offered in MEST |
| MEST 200-02 |
Middle Eastern Francophone Cinema
Instructor: Mireille Rebeiz
Course Description:
Cross-listed with FMST 210-04 and FREN 305-01. This class provides a general overview of Francophonie in the Maghreb (North Africa) and the Mashreq (Levant). It focuses on the relationship between previously colonized Arab countries like Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and their former colonizer France. It examines literary and film productions from these countries and aims to show the way by which French and Arabs are represented in these narratives. It also seeks to study the human rights issues raised during the colonial and postcolonial areas, such as women's rights, legal and illegal migration, war, resistance to oppression and terrorism, cultural and religious identities.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
BOSLER 314 |
| MEST 200-03 |
Afro-Arabs and the Changing Discourse on Race in the Middle East and North Africa
Instructor: Nadia Alahmed
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 320-04.
The course title is "Changing Discourse on Race in the Middle East and North Africa: Afro-Arabs and Ethno-racial formations in the Region" This interdisciplinary seminar examines the processes of racialization, identity formation and anti-Blackness in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Focusing on the experiences, cultures, and histories of Afro-Arab peoples in the region, the course will highlight how race and racism have been articulated throughout the centuries. It will explore the forces that shaped the discourse on race in MENA: from Sub-Saharan slavery to modern issues like the migrant and refugee crisis, globalization, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the growth and popularization of Hip-hop. Cross-listed with Middle East Studies.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, TF
DENNY 104 |
| Courses Offered in MUAC |
| MUAC 210-01 |
Pause: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Hip Hop
Instructor: Naaja Rogers
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 220-04 and WGSS 201-05. This course examines the complex and dynamic relationship between race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop, one of the largest cultural movements in the world. However, since hip hop is more than music, fashion, language, and style, and transcends the commercialization of products both in mainstream U.S.A. and globally, this course sets out to achieve two goals: (1) To introduce students to classic and emergent scholarship in the interrelated fields of critical race theory, feminist and gender studies, and queer theory which will be used to analyze hip hop and (2) to use hip hop as a heterogeneous and constantly shifting cultural and political formation that informs, complicates, and offers new of imaginings of these fields of study. Ultimately, utilizing a primarily interdisciplinary approach, this course will examine the ways in which the historical and contemporary social organizations of sexuality, gender, and race are mutually negotiated, contested, and constructed within and across hip hop music, film, dance, dress, and other sites of cultural performance. Students will have ample opportunity to engage hip hop lyrics, videos, and images throughout the span of the course.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
ALTHSE 109 |
| Courses Offered in WGSS |
| WGSS 101-02 |
Disorderly Women
Instructor: Anna Neumann
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AMST 200-03. According to Merriam-Webster someone behaves disorderly when they are engaged in conduct offensive to public order. In this course, we will ask which women have been (and still are) considered disorderly, why, and by whom. In an American context, who are these women unsettling, upsetting, and disrupting public order in meaningful ways? Predominantly focusing on the particular intersection of race and gender, in our time together we will prioritize narratives and intellectual and cultural production of African American women who have caused good, necessary trouble throughout US-American history. Engaging with activist work, academic scholarship, fiction, art, and film as significant contributions in the struggle for freedom, civil rights, and equality, we will be guided by Black Feminist activist-intellectuals, artists, and creators such as Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker. From todays vantage point, and two years after the dramatic overturning of Roe v. Wade, it has become evident once more that hard fought victories and progress can never be taken for granted and that our engagement with current (and past) debates about feminism, gender, power, and justice is as pressing as ever.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
DENNY 211 |
| WGSS 201-05 |
Pause: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Hip Hop
Instructor: Naaja Rogers
Course Description:
Cross-listed with AFST 220-04 and MUAC 210-01. This course examines the complex and dynamic relationship between race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop, one of the largest cultural movements in the world. However, since hip hop is more than music, fashion, language, and style, and transcends the commercialization of products both in mainstream U.S.A. and globally, this course sets out to achieve two goals: (1) To introduce students to classic and emergent scholarship in the interrelated fields of critical race theory, feminist and gender studies, and queer theory which will be used to analyze hip hop and (2) to use hip hop as a heterogeneous and constantly shifting cultural and political formation that informs, complicates, and offers new of imaginings of these fields of study. Ultimately, utilizing a primarily interdisciplinary approach, this course will examine the ways in which the historical and contemporary social organizations of sexuality, gender, and race are mutually negotiated, contested, and constructed within and across hip hop music, film, dance, dress, and other sites of cultural performance. Students will have ample opportunity to engage hip hop lyrics, videos, and images throughout the span of the course.
|
01:30 PM-02:45 PM, MR
ALTHSE 109 |