African-American Studies

How have Black radicals embraced the French language and, at times, Frenchness without espousing France’s dominance and its doctrines of assimilation? This course explores the watershed moments from the past three centuries that redefine the articulations of blackness in French, in France and beyond—from revolutionary or constitutional independence in the post-colony to recent social movements in continental Europe. In addition to the opening inquiry, guiding questions for this course include but are not limited to the following. What kinds of state-sanctioned backlash in France have ensued in the face of affirmative reclamations of blackness (e.g. Négritude and Afroféminisme)?  And, what are the historical linkages between Black radicalism in France and the United States? Through an intra-imperial and inter-imperial lens, this course will center contributions from Black writers, artists, and intellectuals of divergent colonial histories with especial consideration to those for whom French and France is their native language and land.

This undergraduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the nonfiction work of the renowned African-American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, whose archives are at Barnard College, her alma mater. Through readings, discussion, and visits to her archives, students will probe this lesser-examined aspect of Shange's oeuvre, including her essays on her life, the arts, food, and other artists and creators. This course invites participants to engage critically with Shange's essays and personal writings while delving into her archive.

Students will identify key themes and literary techniques in Shange's nonfiction and the historical and cultural context in which she wrote these works. We will examine how Shange's nonfiction contributes to her broader work and her perspectives on history, gender, feminism, and race as they intersect in her life as a Black woman artist. Students will develop critical thinking skills through close reading, analysis, and discussion of Shange's nonfiction and will improve their writing skills by composing reflections and essays on Shange's works. They will develop research skills and gain insights into Shange's creative process through firsthand engagement with Shange's archive at Barnard.

This course will introduce students to Black geographies as a spatial expression of Black studies. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. In this course, we will think about space, place, landscape, and ecology through a Black geographic framework, paying attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation. The questions that animate this course are: what are Black geographies? What is the future of Black geographies outside of academia? How can centering a “Black sense of place” in turn transform the way we think about space, place, and power? How does Black Studies account for and understand Black spatial condition, experience, and imaginaries?

The course will begin with an engagement of key works on Black geographies. We will come to see institutional Black geographies as concerned with the Black spatial imaginaries formed in the aftermath of enslavement and colonialism in the Western hemisphere. As such, our readings will center experiences in the United States. We will cover such topics as Black method(s), racial capitalism, regional geographies, carceral geographies, and Black home and infrastructure.

Ultimately, students will be introduced to central themes, concepts and approaches that highlight the spatialization of race and the racialization of space through various technologies that signify places according to new rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, we will examine historical and contemporary macro-community and micro- sub-community (e.g., neighborhood) issues shaping the social, economic and political lives of Black people.

Progressive social movements are often read as critiques of systemic injustice and calls to transform social arrangements. In this framework, activism is largely - if not exclusively - a political project that addresses issues of housing, education, employment, healthcare, elections, labor, sexual violence, immigration, war, and climate, to name a few. Of course, these efforts are central to the long history of freedom struggles. Largely missing from such mainstream conceptions of activism, however, is serious attention to its spiritual work. That is, the ways social movements can transform hearts, minds, and spirits as much as material conditions, public policies, and political arrangements. 

This course explores the intersection of social liberation and spiritual transformation, with particular focus on black and multi-racial freedom struggles in the Americas from the 19th century to today. Conceptually, it covers scholarship that speaks broadly to questions of love, spirituality, ethics, and religion in progressive political movements. Practically, it considers how this rich tradition of spiritual activism may help us confront legacies of injustice and struggle toward a liberated world. 

The Senior Seminar will afford thesis writers the chance to workshop their idea, conduct research and/or interviews, work with the IRB protocols (if necessary), learn to work with archival materials, and perform other research activities prior to writing the thesis. Students who choose to write a capstone paper or conduct a capstone project can choose an elective course the following semester. The Thesis Seminar, conducted in the spring semester, is a workshop-oriented course for Senior Thesis writers organized around honing their writing skills while providing guidance to students in their field/disciplinary-specific projects. For example, a student may choose to write a historical biography of an artist while another may pursue a sociological study of the effects of mass incarceration on voting rights. The instructor of the Thesis Seminar, working with a faculty adviser (dependent on the specific field of inquiry in the thesis), will provide feedback and supervise the writing schedule of the students.

In this seminar, students will learn how to interpret Black Performance through historical, social, and political theory. In studying Black Performance, students will engage strategies of subversion and resistance to dominant ideologies throughout the African diaspora. With a focus on the blues and its other-worldly iterations, we will cover theorists and topics from the Black Radical tradition such as Zora Neale Hurston and American South gothic folklore; Amiri Baraka and the blues; Greg Tate and hip-hop; bell hooks and queering the Black gaze; Fred Moten and abstraction; Angela Davis and imagining abolition, and more. We will pair theory with praxis by engaging masterpieces by Black performing artists in music, dance, comedy, theatre, as well as film and television.

As a seminar, students should prepare to participate in in-depth discussions weekly by completing the reading and viewing assignments. Since the central subject matter is performance studies and visual culture based in African-American studies, an interdisciplinary field, the course has a strong multi-media element. Students should expect to view films regularly, both online and in class. Students are also strongly encouraged to attend outside exhibitions and performances for extra credit. Syllabus is subject to change.

This syllabus has drawn from the research of a community of social justice scholars, including the writers of the #Trans-Justice Syllabus, #Immigration Syllabus, #Black Lives Matter Syllabus, and #The Charlottesville Syllabus.

Through close reading of Frantz Fanon's early, mid-career, and late texts, the lectures of the course aim at presenting Fanon's intellectual trajectory starting with his engagement to fight for France as a tirailleur during the second World War and how his experience of racism in the French military disenchanted him about his standing within the French empire. Like most people from the French colonies, Fanon grasped from his military service that he is a second class citizen.

The lectures, then, engage Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as both a memoir which chronicles his disenchantment with France's promise of liberté égalité, et fraternité for all its citizens and a testament of France's anti-black racist practices which is informed by his experience of anti-black racism.

The lectures then engage with Fanon's writings about how his experiences as a psychiatrist caring for the patients of colonial mental illnesses led to his existential self-revision. 

Finally, the lectures focus on Fanon's magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) to draw out that it was the culmination of Fanon's disenchantment and existential self-revision as the mature expression of his philosophy that violence is a series of practices that French colonizers instilled in the colonies to engage with colonized people and that the logic of revolution requires that colonized people engage in these practices with the colonial establishment.

 

The classical prophetic political tradition derives from biblical prophets like Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah who, with strong words, courageous deeds and abiding faith in the righteousness of their causes, struggled to transform oppressive, exploitive regimes of power into just and equitable political institutions that would “let justice roll down as water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” For millennia this tradition has been a touchstone for peoples throughout the world in their struggles for freedom.

This course will seek to understand the role of the biblical prophetic political tradition in the ongoing struggle of African Americans for political equity and justice in America. Our exploration will range from David Walker’s revolutionary early nineteenth century Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World to the racial claims and counter claims in our contemporary moment.

Please refer to Institute for African American and African Diaspora Studies Department for section-by-section course descriptions.

Please refer to Institute for African American and African Diaspora Studies Department for section-by-section course descriptions.