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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
This course will explore the coming together of ideas on witchcraft and rituality as discourses and practices of power, gender, race, and sexuality in colonial and imperial moments. We will examine history, literature, films, and social theory dealing with different forms of self-identified and interpellated forms of "witchcraft" such as questions of sorcery, brujeria, shamanism, voodoo/hoodoo, and santeria/palo - all as complex and multivalent sites of productive power. We will look at how discourses and experiences marked and claimed "witchcraft" intersect with ideas and practices of rituals in the everyday lives and perceptions of colonial, postcolonial, national, and transnational subjects in different locations. Students will take into consideration these questions in relation to broader topics such as colonialism/postcolonialism, imperialisms, and transnationalisms, as well as within critiques of modernisms versus traditionalisms. This course will specifically focus on Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and African diasporic contexts.
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4.00 Credits
Images of black people, often considered distinct, foreign, and "other", that abounded in European art reveal the nature of encounters between Europeans and blacks, and expose the power dynamics inherent in European assumptions of superiority and economic control. American slavery spawned a different trajectory of images of blacks that served to maintain the political and cultural domination of whites. This course will examine the art and explore the ideas inherent in representations of blacks from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century in Europe and North America.
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4.00 Credits
This course explores a range of interpretive strategies for representing the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and their aftermaths throughout the Afro-Atlantic World. We explore representational initiatives in slave castles, museums, historic houses and plantations, battlefields, reconstructed heritage communities, memorials, monuments, and other sites of memory in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. How may diverse voices and perspectives on a painful past best be represented? How is the imperative to communicate historically accurate narratives to be balanced with concerns to engage and entertain visitors and to avoid traumatizing audiences? We also explore the more nuanced, embodied forms, including ritual performance, through which the slave trade is remembered or evoked in people's everyday experiences, throughout the Afro-Atlantic world.
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4.00 Credits
This seminar explores black struggle in America's northern cities, beginning in World War II and stretching throughout the 1970's. We study African American electoral politics, grass-roots protests, controversies over school integration and busing, the segregated urban landscape, and the idea of "the North" as a definable region of its own. This course introduces students to figures as disparate as Malcolm X, Ed Brooke, Shirley Chisholm, and Jackie Robinson.
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4.00 Credits
In few realms have there been such high stakes for, as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois so famously put it, "outthinking and outflanking the owners of the world," as in African Americans' quest for just, safe, and prosperous places to call home. This course is an interdisciplinary investigation of some of the spaces and places from the colonial era through the present that African Americans have created, occupied, tried to endure or escape, worked to make livable, and struggled to keep despite continuing opposition.
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4.00 Credits
New technology and democratized access to digital media powerfully impact strategies aiming to heighten global awareness of local issues and are integral to efforts seeking to inspire empathy, political engagement, social activism, and charitable giving. With a focus on race, gender, and identity, this course will explore the portrayal of the human condition across cultures in feature films, documentaries, and photography. Students will have the opportunity to create their own multimedia projects.
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4.00 Credits
This course introduces students to the general outlines of African geography and history, as well as key controversies in the study of African health, social life, arts, and politics. Our aim is to give students a fundamental vocabulary and interdisciplinary methodology for the study of Africa. Throughout, we assume that Africa is not a unique isolate but a continent bubbling with internal diversity, historical change, and cultural connections beyond its shores.
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4.00 Credits
Material culture study has much to offer in its own right and as an avenue into, and challenge to other fields. This course investigates intersections and disjunctions between material forms-- foodways; spiritual, religious, and healing practices; artisanal, craft, and visual art creations; and more-- and both the documents on which historians depend and the claims anthropologists and sociologists have made about the character of the African Diaspora, especially within what is now the United States.
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4.00 Credits
Why have social orders like Apartheid South Africa and White Supremacy in segregated America that are based on extreme racial, gender and national oppression always generated often violent, hallucinatory fictions of the racial and gender identities of the oppressed? And why have the oppressed in turn often internalized these sorts of fictions and also produced counter-fictions that more or less conform to the same violent, phantasmic logic? In this course, we will explore how these fictions and counter-fictions are reproduced and challenged in some of the most powerful, canonical works of drama, fiction and cinema by South African and African American authors and filmmakers. As the Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe once famously remarked: "where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it." To this end, we will pay special attention in the course to how, both in form and in content, race and gender always seem, constitutively, to intersect in these fictions and counter-fictions. The course is thus a study in the dark, violent but generative cultural unconscious of modern racialized and gendered identities.
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4.00 Credits
Although journalists and media critics around the world have heaped deserved acclaim on The Wire, many people do not recognize its contribution to social science. Students in this seminar will watch, critique, and discuss selected episodes of The Wire along with assigned readings on urban inequality that relate to these episodes. The assigned readings will feature academic books and research articles that describe and analyze life and experiences in inner city neighborhoods, as well as the social, economic, political, and cultural factors that shape or influence these experiences.
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