African-American Studies

Prerequisites: Students need to register for a section of AFAS UN1010, the required discussion section for this course. From the arrival of enslaved Africans to the recent election of President Barack Obama, black people have been central to the story of the United States, and the Americas, more broadly. African Americans have been both contributors to, and victims of, this “New World” democratic experiment. To capture the complexities of this ongoing saga, this course offers an inter-disciplinary exploration of the development of African-American cultural and political life in the U.S. but also in relationship to the different African diasporic outposts of the Atlantic world. The course will be organized both chronologically and thematically, moving from the “middle passage” to the present so-called “post-racial” moment—drawing on a range of classical texts, primary sources, and more recent secondary literature—to grapple with key questions, concerns, and problems (i.e. agency, resistance, culture, etc.) that have preoccupied scholars of African-American history, culture, and politics. Students will be introduced to a range of disciplinary methods and theoretical approaches (spanning the humanities and social sciences), while also attending to the critical tension between intellectual work and everyday life, which are central to the formation of African-American Studies as an academic field. This course will engage specific social formations (i.e. migration, urbanization, globalization, etc.), significant cultural/political developments (i.e. uplift ideologies, nationalism, feminism, Pan-Africanism, religion/spirituality, etc.), and hallmark moments/movements (i.e. Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, etc.). By the end of the semester, students will be expected to possess a working knowledge of major themes/figures/traditions, alongside a range of cultural/political practices and institutional arrangements, in African-American Studies.

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. 

This course is a Black Studies research and publication design studio. Here, the integrity of “an imagined moral-intellectual community” and the practicalities of writing and publication are held in balance, toward two functional objectives: 

(1) To revise and submit (for publication) an original seminar paper, thesis, or conference paper. 

Following Laura Belcher’s, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, “…(t)he goal of this course is to aid participants in taking their papers from classroom quality to journal quality and in overcoming anxiety about academic publishing in the process. 

(2) To critically survey the field of Black Studies through close reading of its journals—resulting in the production of a consulting report focused on the student’s chosen area. 

This year Souls: Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society returns to Columbia University, where it was founded by Manning Marable in 1999. This course is designed to prepare IRAAS/AAADS to receive custodianship of the journal and reshape its Black radical intellectual project in response to the current moment and prospective futures. 

“[J]ournal work is not only not an arbitrary undertaking, and it is certainly not simply the practice of putting competent scholarly articles into print (though that is avowedly its formal function); rather, it is distinctive for being an intellectual undertaking that is pursued with a certain horizon in mind, namely, the collective constitution of an imagined moral-intellectual community.” (David Scott, Small Axe 50 July 2016) 

Facilitating reflexive, critically engaged, and sustainable writing practices; and focusing on the past and future of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; our hybrid colloquy sessions will typically combine theoretical and methodological discussions, close readings of assigned journals, and ‘workshop’ elements— including sharing of work and occasional short in class writing. We will meet in-person and virtually. Small group work will be required. 

This seminar offers a sustained exploration of the fiction and nonfiction of Jamaica Kincaid, a Caribbean-American writer described by the novelist Tiphanie Yanique as “a fiction writer with a poet’s air and a journalist’s eye.” In Fall 2026, Kincaid will be a Writer-in-Residence at Columbia University, providing students with a rare opportunity to engage directly with her presence and intellectual contributions on campus. The course is organized in two parts: the first half examines Kincaid’s nonfiction—some of her essays, memoirs, and nature writing—while the second half traces her fiction from At the Bottom of the River to See Now Then. Central themes include colonialism and its aftermath, migration and exile, maternal relationships, ecological memory, and cultural displacement. This course emphasizes close reading, critical scholarship, and creative response. Students will be expected to contribute actively to seminar discussions and produce original work that bridges analytical and creative modes.

This seminar examines Afro-Atlantic and indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, histories: conceptions of magic, space, time, and memory. These texts (visual, oral, written) present anti-colonial methodologies that challenge Western linear time and Cartesian space. They are a lens through which we can re-examine art history, history, academia, museums, and the archive. Beginning with Taíno sacred landscapes and BaKongo cosmograms and power entities, the course moves through early colonial Caribbean healing worlds, Kumina ritual practice, Palo Monte spirit technologies, and Vodou metaphysics in Kiskeya (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), through anthropological, theoretical, and artistic texts by Kimbwandende Fu-Kiau, Dianne Stewart, José Oliver, Pablo Gómez, Todd Ramón Ochoa, M. Jacqui Alexander, and others. In concert with readings, we will examine the visual culture of Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous spiritual systems and the art they have inspired, including work by artists José Bedia Valdés (Cuba), Firelei Báez (Dominican Republic), Maria Magdalena Campos Pons (Cuba), and Edouard Duval Carrié (Haiti). Through sustained attention to the visual cultures of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous spiritual practice, death worlds, possession, spirit matter, sacred pedagogy, and film, students will learn to think through indigenous Caribbean, West African, and Afro-Atlantic cosmologies, to interpret ritual and material culture as archives of knowledge, and to situate art, history, and anthropology within broader ontological frameworks. By the end of the semester, students will understand how Black and Indigenous conceptions of magic, space, time, and memory reconfigure how we come to understand the world around us and will produce an original research paper that examines these traditions. 

The objective of the course is to show that the orchestrators of the Harlem Renaissance intended to delineate aesthetic paradigms for African Americans to frame their subjective experiences. And that the orchestrators envisioned the Renaissance project through the formulation of standards for fiction, poetry, drama, music, and art that are cohesive with the socio-cultural experiences of African Americans during the first half of the 20th century. In the course, we will read the essays of Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and WEB DuBois. These essays were the media for the writers to present the aesthetic achievements of their time, while simultaneously promoting the ideals that fiction, poetry, drama, music, and art ought to follow. Close reading of the essays and class discussions will show how the Harlem Renaissance elaborated the criteria that African Americans may follow to derive meaning from their subjective experiences. Moreover, that the Harlem Renaissance shaped African American consciousness by providing the suitable aesthetic compass to understand its relation to the social and cultural institutions. Finally, the course explores how the Harlem Renaissance sought to define both, the aesthetic autonomy and distinctiveness of African Americans.

This graduate pro-seminar for MA students is an intensive introduction to key theoretical frameworks and critical discourses that shape Black Studies. This interdisciplinary seminar provides students with foundational components of the African American intellectual tradition and to Black diasporic thought. The course is organized by themes that reflect the historical and social context of Black life in the US and broader diasporic connections, particularly the cultural, political, economic, and geographic formations that ground Black life.

This course introduces students to central questions and debates in the fields of African American Studies, and it explores the various interdisciplinary efforts to address them. The seminar is designed to provide an interdisciplinary foundation and familiarize students with a number of methodological approaches. 

This Ph.D. seminar explores the inextricable connection between blackness and geographic inquiry by exploring the intersections of Black Studies and Geography. Considering Katherine McKittrick’s claim that Black geographies are ‘the terrain of political struggle itself’ or where the imperative of a perspective of struggle takes place,” we will situate the spatial relations of blackness by placing Black people at the core of spatial production and examine the mechanisms by which this takes place. In this course we ask: what are the limitations and possibilities of traditional geographies and how does Black study attend to these boundaries? How does Black geographic thought produce wider material and conceptual space for geographic knowledge? How does Black Studies account for and understand Black spatial condition, experience, and imaginaries?