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.

At each discussion section meeting, one or more students will be responsible for leading the section in a general discussion about that week's readings. They will present the key ideas within the assigned readings, making connections with information from previous readings and lectures from class. Each student's initial presentation should be about 10 minutes in length, and accompanied by a one or two page outline or short paper. If more than one student is assigned to a particular week, they should meet together prior to class to determine which topics or readings each individual will present. All grades are based  on individual performances, not by the group as a whole.

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.

Following up on Black Performance Studies I (Spring 2026), this seminar explores the elasticity of historical narratives through the genius of Black performance. Inspired by the blues sung by Sammie in the groundbreaking film “Sinners,” directed and written by Ryan Coogler, this course will explore cultural portals and crossroads such as the juke joint, ocean, sycorax, stage, and studio. We will rely upon strategies of time travel and shapeshifting as key methods towards survival but also deep study. Given the current-day context of AI, propaganda, and systemic attack against public arts, cultural, and civic institutions, this course brings us back to basics in terms of writing, reading, and creating original work. In other words, we will workshop how to tell stories that compel readers and audiences to listen with intent and purpose. Students will learn how to read art and culture as social texts by studying masterworks of Black Performance vis-à-vis visual culture, media, fine arts, and performing arts, including dance and music production. 

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 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. 

The class will be run as both deep study and performance workshop. In performance studies, performing is a method for analysis and synthesis. So throughout the course, we will use performance and performativity as modes of thinking through ideas including improvisation. Students will be trained in cultural studies theory, criticism but also, as cultural makers, movers and shakers. 

This course reads the long Black intellectual and artistic tradition for its prescriptive stream: not only its description of Black life or its correction of the racist record, but its instruction-- in how to live a good life. Where the dominant canon of the good life runs from Aristotelian eudaimonia through the contemporary science of happiness; this tradition has theorized flourishing from music, literature, and the art of everyday life evident in the Black proverb, sermon, kitchen, and dance floor — it has largely gone unread as philosophy. Organizing that archive around five values (pleasure, duty, rest, friendship, and making) and across the diaspora from Havana to Harlem, Port of Spain to Nairobi, the course proceeds as an ethnography of an idea.

Black thought is most readily admitted into the curriculum as evidence of the wound —suffering, power, and subjection — while the normative question of how one ought to live tends to remain the European canon’s to keep: the Greeks are granted eudaimonia, and Black studies the seminar on its own subjection. This course relocates that question. Following Hurston’s account of vernacular form (“Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 1934) and Gwaltney’s ethnography of ordinary Black thought (Drylongso, 1980), it treats everyday practice as already-constituted theory and reads it as such.

The habit of mind here insists on the preciousness of Black life as a present, non-foreclosed claim —aliveness rather than impossibility. Taking seriously and departing from Hartman’s, where beauty remains shadowed by a death still arriving. The departure is temporal and paradigmatic:

Alongside Hartman’s central analytic of subjection and recovery of the “beautiful experiment” inside the wayward life (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019); this course reads from inside and after the end (Sun Ra Arkestra, It's After the End of the World, 1971)— amid and after the levees break(ing), within and after an epi-  ot pan- demic, for example— for aliveness as a totality rather than as the negative of antiblackness (Quashie, Black Aliveness, 2021), and for the tradition’s own instruction in how to live (Griffin, Read Until You Understand, 2021; Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989). The good life is approached not as a future the revolution will deliver or the empire permit, but as a present claim. It is offered in the spirit Du Bois named when he sat with Aristotle and Aurelius “with no scorn nor condescension” (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903): not a minority report, but a philosophy of flourishing.

The Black experience has been studied intensively by social scientists and humanists but also explored by writers and artists. This class examines in detail the concepts and categories that have been employed to document and analyze the lives of Black peoples across the diaspora. The course surveys different traditions of research, writing, and other forms of critical examination and creative exploration. Its objective is to prepare students for the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies. The class is discussion based with weekly readings and invited guests who will share work and offer insights on their disciplinary methods in Black Studies. The course is open only to graduate and undergraduate majors in African American and African Diaspora Studies. Students will be required to write short, weekly commentaries. Over the course of the seminar students will develop a thesis prospectus, including annotated bibliography, and present the final prospectus to the class. Exceptions may be made for other students at the instructor’s discretion.

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?