African-American Studies

This course is a broad survey of art from the Caribbean region, spanning indigenous Taíno, Kalinago, and Garifuna art, contemporary art of the Caribbean and its diaspora, and art from the colonial era. The course will cover the history of the region including indigenous cultures from first Columbian contact to today, European exploration, arrivals, and conceptions of the “New World,” plantation economies, the transatlantic slave trade, the Haitian Revolution, art of maroon communities, and the syncretism of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices like Vodou, Santería, Palo Monte, and the Abakuá. Throughout the semester, we will examine definitions of the term “Caribbean.” We ask if the term should be limited geographically to the Caribbean basin or take on a more cultural valence, expanding to places like Louisiana and Brazil, both of which share significant historical and cultural similarities with the countries from the Caribbean basin. Major themes of the class will include the impacts of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the formation of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, and legacies of the colonial era in contemporary art.

The Freedom School is an experimental praxis course where students engage the histories, theories, and practical tools of social justice organizing. Our purpose is to explore the possibilities of connecting conceptual knowledge to concrete action.

The course is rooted in a rich legacy of youth organizing popularized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was an experiment that sought to, among other things, increase black voter registration and establish civic education in the rural south. While the effort consisted of over 40 initiatives, an educational program - Freedom Schools - endured through generations and represented a novel approach to activism. What began as an effort to educate high school students became one of the country’s largest initiatives in intergenerational community organizing as students ranged from seven to seventy years old. Freedom School courses varied from history and civics to math and foreign languages, but the fundamental lessons were deep democracy, self-determination, and grassroots leadership.

This course carries on this tradition of student and community-based activism as we confront old and new forms of racial oppression and social injustice. Throughout the semester students will have the opportunity to (1) study social movement histories and theories, (2) learn practical organizing skills, (3) engage in community-based research, (4) build relationships with local civic institutions, and (5) co-create a service learning project based in Harlem.

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.

"It seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor...How the Black writer responds to that presence interests me." Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984

When Alice Walker went "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston " she embarked on a quest for a literary ancestor, an artist, and creator, who, as Toni Morrison writes in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984, is "of the tribe and in it." Who are these "timeless people" we call our ancestors? What stories, traditions, and wisdom have they passed on to help us better understand ourselves and each other? What is our role in preserving their stories? How might they inspire us to tell our own? Using the essays "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" and "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" as starting points, this seminar explores the intricate relationship between writers and scholars and their literary ancestors who are also, at times, mentors and friends. We examine how they have delved into the lives and works of their chosen literary ancestors, using scholarly analysis, personal reflections, memoir, travelogue, and other creative methods to probe, honor, challenge, and expand our view and understanding of their predecessors.

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.

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.

This lecture and discussion course explores aspects of the origins, style development, aesthetic philosophies, historiography, and contemporary conventions of African American musical traditions. Topics covered include:  the music of West and Central Africa, the music of colonial America, 19th-century church and dance music, minstrelsy, musical theater, music of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, and film music. Special attention is given to the ways that Black music produces “meaning” and to how the social energy circulating within it articulates myriad issues about American identity at specific historical moments.  The course will also engage other expressive art forms from visual and literary sources in order to better position music-making within the larger framework of African American aesthetics. 
 

This course explores and examines the history and politics of the carceral state; theories of freedom and unfreedom; and the writings of political prisoners, with an emphasis on the long movement for the abolition - not only of prisons and punishment - but of a world that needs prisons and punishment. Conceptually, it covers intellectual work that speaks broadly to questions of confinement, freedom, and abolition. And practically, it considers how the tradition of abolitionist and anti-prison organizing and activism can help us confront ongoing legacies of injustice and struggle toward a liberated world.

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

This course introduces key methods, practices and modes of Black Studies. The course will consider both the history of the field of Black Studies from its disciplinary origins in the turbulent Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and the longer arc of scholars studying the lives of Black peoples in the diaspora and African continent. It will be important to understand how Blackness is placed as both peripheral to the western episteme, outside of what Hegel called the “Theater of History,” as well as central to its discursive imaginings of the universals of nation, race, capitalism, aesthetics, society and the human. In response to this epistemic challenge, the class will explore the interdisciplinary modalities of the field that draw from a range of archival, historiographic, ethnographic, analytical, qualitative, and creative methods, particularly attentive to how and why works in Black Studies often combine two or more of the aforementioned methods.