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  • AFR 206: African Dance and Percussion

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Students will learn dance and music traditions from the African continent. To more fully understand the art form, students will also study the culture and history of the African regions in which selected dance and music evolved. This course can be taken for academic and /or PE credit. Prerequisite:    Dance 100 or permission of instructor
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  • AFR 211: Race and the Environment

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    In contemporary societies, race remains an enduring impediment to the achievement of equality. Generally understood as a socially meaningful way of classifying human bodies hierarchically, race manifests itself in a number of arenas, including personal experience, economic production and distribution, and political organization. In this course, we will explore how race emerges in local and global environmental issues, like pollution and climate change. We will begin with a review of some of the landmark texts in Environmental Studies that address "environmental racism," like Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie and David Pellow's Garbage Wars. We will examine how and to what extent polluting facilities like landfills, oil refineries, and sewage treatment plants are disproportionately located in communities of color; we will also pay attention to how specific corporations create the underlying rationale for plotting industrial sites. After outlining some of the core issues raised in this scholarship, we will turn to cultural productions--like literature, film, and music--to understand how people of color respond to environmental injustice and imagine the natural world.
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  • AFR 214: Jazz Theory and Improvisation II

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    A continuation of Music 203, this course builds upon theoretical knowledge, performance and aural skills developed previously. Students will deal with more complex theoretical and performance issues, such as modal interchange and minor key harmony, use of symmetric scales, commonly-used reharmonizations of the blues and "I Got Rhythm" chord progressions, and Coltrane's "Three Tonic" harmonic system. Prerequisite:    Music 203 (formerly Mus 212) or permission of the instructor
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  • AFR 216: Black Politics in the United States

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Historically, African Americans have been treated as group members rather than as individuals by mainstream society; consequently, a very unique set of political attitudes and behaviors have developed among Blacks in the United States. This course explores the political history of African Americans as well as the relationship between African Americans and the American political system. Political elites as well as individual citizens and grassroots movements have influenced Black politics. In turn, we will focus on how national, state, and local governments have affected African American communities through the implementation of policies?some of which have been discriminatory while others have been aimed to ameliorate racial disparities. We will also analyze how Black Americans have responded through the political system. Since this course (nor any course) has the capacity to explore the vast history of Black politics, we will focus primarily on contemporary, African American politics between 1960 and the Obama era. Class time will be divided between lectures and class discussions.
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  • AFR 217: Race

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Althea Gibson to the Williams Sisters. Julius (Dr. J) Irving to Michael Jordan. Jesse Owens to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Throughout the 20th century, black athletes have broken through Jim Crow restraints, challenged racial stereotypes, and taken their sports to new heights of achievement. In this course, students will explore a range of black athletes in the 20th century, paying particular attention to the attitudes, stereotypes and experiences they endured. In addition, this course will prompt students to analyze the representation, perception, and commodification of black athletes in popular media forms. Students will trace trends, shifts and themes in representations of blackness across different sports and historical periods. Topics under study may include resistance against and affirmation of athletes as role models, racial slurs in sports broadcasting, common themes in commercialized images of the black male athlete, and distinctions in media coverage based on race and gender. Texts will include everything from critical essays and sociological studies to commercials and documentary films. In their final projects, students may put their newfound knowledge to the test by exploring their campus or hometown to investigate the role that race plays on their own playing field. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of black athleticism are manipulated to increase financial strength and institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to combat it. Prerequisite:    Open to all
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  • AFR 220: Introduction to African American Writing

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Toni Morrison has described her writing as guided by a musician's imperative always to hold something in reserve, to leave her audience wanting something more. It's a simple idea, but a strange one--that a reader's desire might be fulfilled only by its increase, that its satisfaction requires that it is never enough. African American writing, in all its richness and variety, moves between never enough and something more; this course will introduce just a few of the historical experiences, intellectual currents, cultural resources, thematic preoccupations, and formal strategies encountered in this writing, and consider how and to what ends African American literary tradition(s) have been organized, in critical and polemical ways, by individual writers and scholars, and by artistic and political movements. We'll forego the perspective of a grand overview, diving right in instead, and we won't necessarily always reach for the best-known titles by the most famous authors. In any case, by the end of the course, you should be prepared to have more left to read than you did at the beginning. Prerequisite:    A 100-level English course
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  • AFR 222: Modern African Societies

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Africa is a place of extremes: its nation-states are some of the world's youngest and poorest; its societies are some of the most diverse and most unequal; and its landscapes are some of the most stunning, fertile, and severe. This sociological study of the continent will focus on the larger sub-tropical or sub-Saharan region. We will utilize both macro-level and micro-level approach, connecting the workings of the state and other large-scale institutions such as markets and NGOs (nongovernment organizations) to the most intimate behaviors of individuals such as marrying, starting families, building households, making livelihoods, and migrating. By the end of the course, students will have familiarity with the most relevant (and controversial) topics in African affairs: religion, sexuality, gender, corruption, ethnic identity, HIV/AIDS, and health care. Students will also have a stronger understanding of Africa's place in the world and the processes that perpetuate its under-development.
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  • AFR 223: Popular Music and Resistance in Africa and the African Diaspora

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Whether discussing the independence campaigns of African states during the 1950s/60s, the Civil Rights Movement unfolding concurrently in the United States, or 20th century class struggles in the Caribbean and South America, mass-mediated musics have given voice to popular resistance to social, economic, political, racial and cultural disenfranchisement. This course explores popular music as an oppositional tool in Africa and the African Diaspora. A selection of "protest" genres and styles including Afrobeat, Chimurenga, Be-bop, Reggae and Hip-hop will provide case studies for approaching music as politically charged text, allied to specific moments of social change. Relationships between music and Negritude, Pan Africanism, Afrocentrism and other Nationalist ideologies that unify black struggles on all sides of the Atlantic will be examined. However, students will also situate specific case studies within local cultural histories framed by geographical boundaries of nation-state in order to critically explore intersections between genre identity and political discourse. Lectures will make generous use of audio/visual materials.
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  • AFR 253: Comparative Race and Ethnic Politics

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    Since its founding, the United States has had to balance the American creed of equality for all, on one hand, with racial inequality, on the other hand. Is this challenge something exclusive to the United States? This course will provide students the opportunity to compare and contrast how race and ethnicity are constructed across the globe as well as how race and politics interact in various countries. We will examine the phenomena of race and ethnicity in the political development of several countries including the U.S., South Africa, France, Australia and Brazil. We will ask: What is the difference between race and ethnicity? What role do countries and their institutions play in developing racial ideologies and racial hierarchies? Is there such thing as a racial democracy? Is there a difference between the U.S's "race problem," Latin America's "shade problem" and Europe's "immigrant problem"? By the end of the class, students will have a broad knowledge of the similarities and differences of racial and ethnic issues across the globe.
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  • AFR 256: Politics of Africa

    3.00 Credits
    Williams College

    This course provides a broad introduction to the politics of contemporary Africa, emphasizing along the way the diversity of African politics. It seeks to challenge the widespread image of African politics as universally and inexplicably lawless, violent, and anarchic. This course begins by examining the nature and legacies of colonial rule and nationalist movements. From there, we consider the African state, highlighting the factors that have made some states weak and others strong. The course then turns to how ethnicity, class and civil society operate as bases of political mobilization. Finally, the course analyzes the causes, consequences and limitations of the recent waves of political and economic liberalization across Africa.
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