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Undergraduate & Graduate Courses - Spring 2009Undergraduate Courses Fall 2009
This course examines ideas and theories by African-American, Caribbean and African scholars and writers. It reviews the impact of the black intellectual tradition in the social sciences and humanities. Authors include W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver C. Cox, C. L.R. James, Harold Cruse, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis and Thomas Sowell. We will examine the various interpretations & debates by black intellectuals in the field of African-American Studies. By examining a variety of viewpoints and perspectives, including black feminism, existentialism, cultural nationalism, Marxism, Afrocentrism and integrationism students should acquire solid understand of the rich complexities of black thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
AFAM major/concentrator required class; 2nd, 3rd and 4th year students only AFAS C3930 Section 001: Topics in the Black Experience "Exploring Black Chicago" Call #22596, 4 points Tuesday: 11:00am - 12:50pm 758 Schermerhorn Extension Carla Shedd, cs2613@columbia.edu This course will critically examine the sociology of the Black experience in Chicago from the early 20th century to the present. We will use works of non-fiction, fiction, film, and music to explore the following themes: migration to the "Promised Land" from the South, racial violence, housing policy, civil rights struggles, Black entrepreneurship, class cleavages, crime, and much more. AFAS C3930 Section 003: Topics in the Black Experience African American religious and artistic traditions have long garnered attention both as sites of intellectual inquiry and as objects of popular imaginations; yet they are often treated as belonging to two mutually exclusive spheres. This course places the two in conversation by exploring how religion has figured into efforts to theorize a racial aesthetic. Through an engagement with critical debates regarding racial art (i.e. New Negro, Negritude, Black Arts, New Black and Hip Hop aesthetics) this course explores what significance black artists and intellectuals have attributed to religion and spirituality in their critical and creative visions. Is religion perceived to help or hinder black cultural aesthetics? Are there specific religious ideas, practices and traditions that black artists have been turned to (or rejected) for inspiration? And why are certain spiritual idioms viewed as anathema to the aims of African American culture and politics. These and other questions will help to organize a wide-ranging survey of black cultural production (i.e. criticism, literature, music, visual culture) during the twentieth century.
AFAS C3930 Section 003: Topics in the Black Experience This course is an ethnomusicological approach to the study of African-American popular music. We will examine the cultural and historical circumstances that contribute to the creation of different African-American musical styles including the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and hip hop. We will pay particular attention to the themes of agency, gender, and politics in understanding how particular genres arise at certain times and places. Graduate Courses Fall 2009
Africans in the Americas had various ways of resisting slavery and oppression including work slowdowns, breaking of tools, destruction of crops and property, revolt and escape from captivity. This course, The Culture of Freedom, will discuss the important societies formed by self-liberated Africans including quilombos and mocambos in Brazil, palenques and cumbes in the Spanish speaking Americas, and maroon societies in the United States, South America and the Caribbean. In addition to creating the first non-indigenous republics in the Americas, maroons gave us pioneering ideas about social responsibility and individual rights, concepts that are still operative in our social philosophy. Revolts and runaways also gave the Americas some exceptional leaders who are still celebrated as national heroes. The Culture of Freedom course will further investigate the numerous quilombos, palenques and maroon societies that still exist, as well as how their ubiquitous ideas are represented in all spheres of society from the arts to cyberspace. Guest speakers this semester include: noted photographer, Oscar Frasser; quilombos-palenques NYU researcher, Yuko Miki and University of Texas-Austin linguist Ian Hancock.
****Junior & Senior undergraduate students allowed;
Today Martin Luther King, Jr. is hailed as the peaceful protester, the iconic orator who sacrificed his life to fulfill his dream of non-violent racial integration in America. Obscured by this domesticated image is King the left-leaning intellectual and political strategist, King the progressive minister whose spirituality transcended the bounds of the Church, and King the evolving articulator of an economic vision so radical that, if realized, could have greatly altered the balance of power in our nation. This course will explore the intellectual currents and experiences that helped to shape King’s social vision, from the searing political critiques of the biblical prophets, to the “soul-force” of Mahatma Gandhi, to the revolutionary writings of Karl Marx ****Senior undergraduate students allowed****
This seminar surveys historical, sociological, and anthropological literatures on political and social movements in Africa and the African Diaspora. The course is structured with a distinctive theme and topic for each week cutting across the 20th century. They include rural/agrarian political movements and organizations, the movements of the poor and urban workers, the political movements of "elites," and the tradition and heritage of Pan-Africanism. The seminar will also engage students in serious theoretical and conceptual discussions. ****Junior & Senior undergraduate students allowed**** |
