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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comic Biography, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels and comic strips, with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will keep a journal with images, themes and reflections and will use Comic Life software to create their own graphic short stories based on historical and/or autobiographical narratives. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative.
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3.00 Credits
Martinican psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon was among the leading critical theorists and Africana thinkers of the twentieth century. Fanon ushered in the decolonial turn in critical theory, a move calling on those both within and outside of Europe to challenge the coloniality of the age and to forge a new vision of politics in the postcolonial period. This course is an advanced seminar devoted to a comprehensive examination of Fanon's political thought. We will begin with an analysis of primary texts by Fanon and end by considering how Fanon has been interpreted by his contemporaries as well as activists and critical theorists writing today.
Prerequisite:
Open to juniors and seniors with a background in Africana Studies, Political Philosophy, and/or Political Theory, or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
During the course of the semester, we shall investigate two broad, interrelated topics: slavery in the antebellum South, and the impact of slavery on Southern civilization. Our approach will be primarily topical. In the first half of the course, we shall look at subjects like the foreign and domestic slave trade, patterns of work and treatment, the nature of the master-slave relationship, resistance and rebellion, and slave cultural, social, and family life. The second half of the course will concentrate on the influence of the institution of slavery on the mind, social structure, and economy of the Old South, and slavery's impact on Southern politics and the decision for secession in 1860-61.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructor's permission
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3.00 Credits
A study of the history of the American South from 1877 to the present. Social, political and economic trends will be examined in some detail: the rule of the "Redeemers" following the end of Reconstruction; tenancy, sharecropping, and the rise of agrarian radicalism; Southern Progressivism; the coming of racial segregation and the destruction of the Jim Crow system during the years of the Civil Rights movement; Southern politics during the depression and post-World War II years.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructor's permission
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3.00 Credits
Courses on "the Harlem Renaissance" have long been standard fare in college curricula, but this rubric is too narrow to encompass the dramatic changes in early 20th century African American culture that made possible the careers of writers like Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Instead, we'll begin with a question: how did the term "urban" became a euphemism for African American culture? A hundred years ago, many informed commentators scorned the notion that African American populations might become other than what they had been for centuries--overwhelmingly rural and Southern. The massive social phenomenon that changed this status, by which millions of impoverished workers sought new lives in the industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West Coast, is arguably the most significant event in African American history in the 20th century, and has become known as "the Great Migration." (Or, the "Great Migrations"--scholars like to pluralize everything these days--it's complicated!) "Black modernisms" should take the plural, too: as we'll see, the concept of modernism in Euro-American culture depended on a racialized theory of history and civilization that consigned people of color to the past (or, occasionally, the future), even as it was irrevocably shaped by influences of, appropriations from, and collaboration with peoples of color who saw modernity as a chance they were determined to claim for themselves. What became known as "the Harlem Renaissance" was the most famous U.S. example of such a cultural movement, but we'll explore it in a longer and more aesthetically, politically, and regionally diverse context. The artists and critics we'll examine, in addition to those mentioned above, may include Hubert Harrison, Jean Toomer, Marita Bonner, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bessie Smith, Richard Wright, David Levering Lewis, Cheryl Wall, and Brent Hayes Edwards.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
The Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended an era of black activism that used the courts to overturn exclusionary practices of American education, opening a new civil rights era that introduced new strategies and tactics of protest. This course introduces students to the themes and issues of the black freedom movement as it transpired after 1954 and continued into the 1980s in the United States. Focusing on African Americans' demands for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and placing their perspectives at the center, the course follows a chronological format that covers the architecture of racial segregation and the culture of Jim Crow; examines the persistence of activism and resistance in the form of direct action, articulations of black power, and attempts at coalition building; explores the intersection of ideology and activism; assesses local, regional, and national perspectives; and uses the black freedom movement as a window onto other social movements, including nationalist and feminist movements. In considering the modern civil rights movement, this course necessarily examines the ways that racial power and privilege in the United States operated to disadvantage specific peoples. Asking how African Americans have differently defined rights, the course also examines diversity among black activists. This course meets the EDI designation in that it examines how "cultures, peoples, and societies have interacted and responded to one another in the past" specifically: by investigating differences and similarities--gender, class, region--among non-white and white Americans; and by using African American experiences to examine the links between access, opportunity, and inequality.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students with instructor's permission
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3.00 Credits
Critics reading minority writing often focus on its thematic--i.e., sociological--content. Such literature is usually presumed to be inseparable from the "identity"/body of the writer and read as autobiographical, ethnographic, representational, exotic. At the other end of the spectrum, avant-garde writing is seen to concern itself "purely" with formal questions, divorced from the socio-historical (and certainly not sullied by the taint of race). In the critical realm we currently inhabit, in which "race" is opposed to the "avant-garde," an experimental minority writer can indeed seem an oxymoron. In this class we will closely read recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers which challenges preconceptions about ethnic literature, avant-garde writing, genre categorization, among other things. The writing done by these mostly young, mostly urban, poets and fiction writers is some of the most exciting being written in the United States today; their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. Reading them forces us to re-think our received notions about literature. Authors to be read include Will Alexander, Sherwin Bitsui, Monica de la Torre, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, Tao Lin, Ed Roberson, James Thomas Stevens, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres.
Prerequisite:
Those taking this as an English class must have previously taken a 100-level English course
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3.00 Credits
Of the many things that distinguish Africana Studies from other fields of knowledge, most remarkable are its creative uses and critiques of disciplinary perspectives. In some instances, a scholar in the field might move between disciplines; in others, a scholar might integrate two or more disciplines into one point of view. Disciplinary creativity accommodates the array of information--written texts, music, visual art, film--that contributes to our understanding of the African Diaspora. This seminar will illuminate the disciplinary nuances and challenges of studying people of African descent. After outlining genealogies of Africana Studies and the field's complicated relationships to social science disciplines, students will closely read classic texts by some of the pioneers in the field and explore their uses of disciplinary perspectives. In the latter half of the course, students will have the opportunity to design and conduct their own research projects with the aforementioned disciplinary concerns in mind.
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3.00 Credits
Any student of Africana Studies swiftly recognizes there is a limitless breadth to what constitutes "Africana experience" and that there are diverse means through which Africana experience is examined. For example, while some scholars utilize a more historical approach to chronicle Africana experience, others study the black body via performance to unearth nuanced meanings of Africana experience. This capstone seminar will explore a variety of methods and strategies for crafting research within the field of Africana Studies. We will focus on approaches that derive from traditional disciplines as well as techniques that have emerged with the advent of dynamic new media and digital technologies. Some of the methodologies we will engage include: historiography; archival research; digital archiving; quantitative data analysis; ethnographic and qualitative analysis; critical textual analysis; reading the body as art and text; blogging and digital publishing; and evaluating films as text. Serving as a practicum, the course will provide considerable background in a variety of methods as well as hands-on learning. Students will have the opportunity to craft a final research project that is best explored through one or more of the methods we examine.
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3.00 Credits
As an epigraph to his novel, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison selects a quotation from Herman Melville's story, "Benito Cereno." In the prologue to Invisible Man, Ellison invokes a sermon that appears briefly in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. In his essays on comedy and American culture, Ellison comments trenchantly on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Melville and Mark Twain were, in many obvious ways, as different as two writers can be. Nonetheless, they also have many surprising similarities, and it is not difficult to understand why both are so important to Ellison. This course will examine the novels, stories, and essays of these three writers, with particular attention to the themes that they have in common and to the traits that make each of them distinctive. Race, slavery, epistemology, and the nature of American democracy are among those themes.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate
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