African-American Studies

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.

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.

Historically, archives have often served purposes of social control and territorial dominance through constructing normative accounts that assert authority about whose and which pasts are collectively significant. But Black people and Black communities have long documented their own histories , pointing to the possibility for archives to create “new histories of who we are (self-representation), who we were (identity construction), and who we want to be in this space (empowerment)” (Burgum, 2020, p. 9). Engaging historically displaced and disenfranchised communities as interpreters and investigators disrupts what counts as real knowledge and allows for a larger reading of archival data into alternative historical narratives – imagining not only what happened in the past, but also what could have been. What, then, are Black archives? What possibilities might they bring to assembling histories and experiences od Black life that are not reducible to presumed and documented experiences of racialized inequality and dispossession? How might we imagine, as Saidiya Hartman (2008) writes, “what cannot be verified…to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance”?This course seeks to answer these and other questions as students navigate claims to authority inherent to archives, and the potential for archives to transcend their role in preserving a normative past and serve as a site of imaginative politics for those whose pasts are not always deemed collectively significant. Our readings and conversations will be organized around several themes, including care, home, refusal, fugitivity, and repair. Through our study of everyday individuals participating in archival acts of observing, recording, collecting, framing, we will build understanding of how social, political, and economic processes and practices of the past continue to shape our lives.

Please refer to Institute for Research in African American Studies for section course descriptions: http://iraas.columbia.edu/

Please refer to Institute for Research in African American Studies for section course descriptions: http://iraas.columbia.edu/

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.

This undergraduate/graduate seminar examines the history of Black revolutionary movements for decolonization from the era of slavery to the late twentieth century. While studies of what historians have called “Black Internationalism” have emerged over the past ten years, the revolutionary and decolonial legacies of Black Freedom movements have tended to be overshadowed by nation-centric models of Black Studies that tend to predominate in the field. This course poses long-standing questions for a new generation of students. How have Black revolutionary thinkers and movements analyzed the racial, class, gendered, and sexual dimensions of colonization? How have they confronted colonial state power and envisioned postcolonial transformation? What obstacles did these movements face? What lessons can be learned from revisiting Black revolutionary traditions? The course employs both intellectual history and social movement methodologies so that students can develop the tools to examine histories of decolonization and the visions of freedom that they inspired. While the class begins with the foundational struggles against slavery, the bulk of the course focuses on the revolutionary struggles of the mid-late 20th century, when a wide array of decolonization movements from Ghana and the Congo, to Cuba and the United States, attempted to challenge Euro-American imperial domination. The course’s diasporic focus, including struggles for decolonization in Africa, prompts students to explore the connections and resonances across national borders and colonial frontiers.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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