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Undergraduate & Graduate Courses - Spring 2010Undergraduate Courses The purpose of this course is to provide a brief overview of African-American history in a broader, English-speaking Atlantic diasporic context. It concentrates on the many diverse situations that defined various African diasporic experiences in the earlier periods from the 17th century to the early 19th century and will include, when possible, those diasporic Africans who were brought to the North American colonies, and who went to Nova Scotia and England in order to expand our understanding and to encourage our connective vision. The course offers to students whose chief familiarity with African-American history is that of unremitting slavery and oppression, a foundation for a deeper understanding of the ways in which diasporic experiences varied over time and geographies. Like the histories of any group, the history of Africans in America is complex, nuanced, contradictory, rich and varied. Some important themes that run throughout include the nature of liberty, the development of the African Slave Trade, the nature of New World Slavery, autonomy, resistance, literacy, communities, anti-slavery initiatives and law.
August Wilson is hailed as one of America’s greatest playwrights. His award-winning cycle of ten plays, each representing a decade of the twentieth century, explores the continuing saga of black people in America from the turn of that century to its end. His nuanced examination of the profundity of black life from the ontological/existential, to the psycho-emotional, to the socio-cultural and socio-political and beyond, has in important and public ways raised the black ordinary to the level of the epic and the mythical. What is largely overlooked, however, is that Wilson’s plays are also among the most profound explorations of human spirituality in general and black religion in particular of any American creative writer. Through his critiques of the black church, both humorous and biting; his vivid portrayals of the ubiquity of the African American conjure tradition in black worship and culture; and his evocations of Eastern notions of transcendence and enlightenment, Wilson portrays an emotionally rich and culturally fecund collective African American experience struggling to survive spiritual impoverishment at the of hands Western modernity. Through a close reading of Wilson’s plays supplemented by readings in black religion, the sociology and psychology of religion, Eastern metaphysics and philosophical speculation, and the African American conjure tradition and its African roots, this course will explore August Wilson’s fascinating quest to survey the landscape of African American spirituality, valorize its manifold expressions and seek its meaning for America today.
AFAS C3930 Section 002: Topics in the Black Experience This course will examine the relationship between gender and jazz in twentieth century African American literature. Using Robert B. Steptos call and response theory, we will explore how writers such as Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, and Gayl Jones, to name a few, create jazz texts that respond to the call made in the writings of their male contemporaries. From blues poetry to contemporary jazz fiction and autobiography, we will investigate the emergence of the jazz text and its relationship to the classic blues tradition, African American cultural politics, and American Freedom. Readings may include writings by, Xam Wilson Cartier, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Albert Murray, Gayl Jones, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen, among others.
AFAS C3930 Section 003: Topics in the Black Experience Historically proclaimed by some of its adherents as "the Black man's religion," Islam has come to enjoy a unique and special relationship with Black America. Through lectures, readings, discussions, films, and guest speakers, this course will examine the historical origins and development of that relationship. We will pay close attention to the ways that Islam has shaped, and has been shaped by, Black political and cultural discourses on race, class, and gender, to produce a diverse and dynamic African-American Muslim tradition. We will also look at how African-American Muslims have attempted to negotiate their multiple identities as Black, American, and Muslim, resulting in varying approaches to Islam as theorized and practiced by different leaders and movements. By the end of the course, students should come to appreciate not only the distinctions among the different Muslim communities in Black America, but also the ways that they all share a common determination to practice their faith while remaining committed to addressing the specific social, political, cultural, and economic needs of the larger Black and Muslim communities.
AFAS C3930 Section 004: Topics in the Black Experience What is the meaning of sovereignty in the Caribbean region? What are the differences between sovereignty, autonomy, and independence for the people and polities of the Caribbean Sea? Building from these essential questions, this course examines the politics of sovereignty and their relation to debates about freedom in the (post)colonial Caribbean. Through readings, lectures, and film screenings, we will ask questions about what decolonization means for the people of the region and will pay particular attention to those places that have not acquired (formal) independence, among them Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The core of the readings come from the social sciences, and the main trajectories of research to be considered include: political philosophies of sovereignty, cultural and psychological approaches to autonomy, Haiti’s role in Caribbean articulations of freedom, and the role of “development” in neocolonial politics. Through a critical, interdisciplinary examination of anthropological, sociological, literary, and historical texts, students will investigate the possibilities and challenges of both defining and deconstructing the meaning of sovereignty in the 21st century Caribbean. Graduate Courses
AFAS G4080 Section 001: Topics in the Black Experience The graduate-level seminar on the life and times of Malcolm X provides an original and challenging reinterpretation of one of the most prominent American leaders of the twentieth century. By the end of the seminar, I hope you will come to appreciate the meaning of literary scholar Edward Said’s remark, when he suggested in his book, Representations of the Intellectual that the goal of non-Western intellectuals “cannot be to replace a white policeman with his native counterpart, but rather … the invention of new souls.” Malcolm Little invented and re-invented himself many times, as “Detroit Red,” “Jack Carlton” (in 1944, when Malcolm worked briefly as a bar entertainer and drummer at Manhattan’s Lobster Pond nightclub), “Satan” (during Malcolm’s first year in prison), “Malcolm X,” and “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.” But in a larger political context, Malcolm strove to motivate the construction of “new souls.” Oppressed people, Malcolm X had learned, could not become free unless they were first made to feel themselves to be “new souls.”
This seminar will investigate the cultural contributions of Africans in the formation of the contemporary Americas. There will be a particular focus on the African religious traditions that have continued and developed in spite of hostile social and political pressures. Because of their important roles in the continuations of African aesthetics, the areas of visual art, music and dance will be emphasized in the exploration of the topic. This seminar will also discuss two important African ethnic groups: the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria, and the Bakongo of Central Africa. It will highlight the American religious traditions of these cultures, e.g., Candomblé Nago/Ketu, Santeria/Lucumi, Shango, Xangô, etc., for the Yoruba, and Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Macumba, Kumina, African-American Christianity, etc., for the Bakongo and other Central Africans. In the course discussions, the Americas are to include Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, the United States and numerous other appropriate locations. There will also be a focus on visual artists like Charles Abramson, Jose Bedia, Juan Boza, Lourdes Lopez, Manuel Mendive, etc., whose works are grounded in African based religions. In addition, we will explore how African religious philosophy has impacted on every-day life in the Americas, for example in the areas of international athletics, procedures of greeting and degreeting, culinary practices, etc. Honey is My Knife: African Spirituality in the Americas will include presentations by innovative guest scholars Dorothy Desir; Marta Morena Vega, Alex LaSalle and Thomas Desch: The seminar will include an extensive use of audio-visual materials including slides, videos and audio recordings.
AFAS G4080 Section 003: Topics in the Black Experience This seminar on African American religion is open to graduate students, and advanced undergraduates with prior background in the subject. Specifically, this course centers its queries around developments during the period commonly referred to as the “post-Civil Rights era,” (but which has also often been framed through the related rhetorics of “postmodern,” “postcolonial” and “post-Soul”). To this end, readings and discussions will explore the spiritual dimensions of black culture—both within formal religious traditions, but also more broadly as they are observed in the arts, politics and popular culture—during the latter half of the twentieth century. Additionally, specific attention will be paid to major themes, challenges, questions and quandaries that have shaped the inter-disciplinary study of African American religion in recent years. Finally, taking a cue from critical race theory, questions of agency, power and difference will be foregrounded, as witnessed in how religious discourses and practices negotiate such categories as race, class, gender and sexuality.
This seminar is designed (1) to acquaint students with some of the classic literature and arguments that represent the African-American intellectual tradition, such as works by W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and Frantz Fanon; (2) to introduce students to the recent scholarship of key Black Studies intellectuals, such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornel West, Leith Mullings, Molefi Asante, Barbara Ransby, Lee D. Baker, Nikhil Singh, Mark Sawyer, Joy James, and Angela Davis; and to address major issues that challenge the African-American community in the twenty-first century, such as the Hurricane Katrina crisis of 2005, and racism in the U.S. prison industrial complex. From these diverse readings, students should develop a critical understanding of the contours of recent African-American Studies scholarship. This seminar examines the intersection of race, gender and nation in the formation of hierarchical social systems and their legitimating ideologies. A leading premise of this course is that racial ideologies are, foundationally, claims about the heritability of socially produced and imagined difference—claims that muster, mimic and articulate notions of difference associated with a variety of social distinctions, including sex/gender, class and nation-based identities. Accordingly, this seminar will situate the process of racialization within the wider problematic of political subjectivity and direct attention to the symbolic and structural organization of modern, hierarchical social systems.
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