African-American Studies Courses - Spring 2009

Undergraduate Courses

Introduction to African-American Studies

AFASC1001 Section 001                        Mio Matsumoto; mm936@columbia.edu

Call# 61901; 3 points; Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:10pm-2:25pm.

Room 603 Hamilton Hall

 

This course introduces students to the historical foundation and development of African-American thought, experiences, and politics, as well as the rich sources to which interdisciplinary studies may apply. Its overall aim is for students to deepen their appreciation of how black people, in complex and diverse ways, have confronted the challenges of slavery, segregation, disfranchisement, and civic and material inequality. To do so, the course will include a substantial discussion of what W. E. B. Du Bois called African-American "conditions and actions" --- questions of why and how the problematic conditions changed and developed in American society, and how and why African-Americans have responded to those changes and developments. Interdisciplinary theories relevant to African-American Studies will be introduced to test the potential and limitation of their explanatory powers.

 

 

Topics in the Black Experience Seminar:   Islam in the African-American Experience

AFASC39030 Section 001                            Zaheer Ali; za22@columbia.edu

Call# 83541; 4points; Thursdays, 2:10pm-4:00pm.

Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

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.

 

 

Topics in the Black Experience Seminar:    African-American Foodways

AFASC3930 Section 002                              Courtney Thorsson; ct2362@columbia.edu

Call# 26292; 4points; Wednesdays, 11:00am-12:50pm.

Room758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

From cookbooks to cultural histories, dietary laws, novels, poems, essays, and memoirs, there exists an enormous body of African American culinary writing. We will study a sampling of such texts to open up a discussion of the uses, meanings, and migrations of foods in the African Diaspora, particularly the United States. As the term suggests, “foodways” literature engages with travel and migration. “Foodways” also suggests “ways” of doing things; the term insists on both mobility and multiplicity of practices.

 

Among the key questions we’ll consider in our study of foodways writing: How do the works under consideration construct diasporic subjectivity through food? How do these texts define gender through food? What are the possibilities and limits of the recipe as a form? How does the recipe fit into African American literary traditions of formal experimentation? What are the politics of authorship in the texts under consideration? How is the south (black, global, United States, or otherwise) imagined in these texts? How does each of these texts envision African American motherhood? What is the relationship of food writing to twentieth century movements including black nationalism, black arts, and feminism in their various incarnations? The “melting pot” has been a spectacular failure as a culinary metaphor for race and ethnicity in the United States. Might these foodways texts give us a more useful or nuanced language for talking about race?

 

 

 

Topics in the Black Experience Seminar:   Youth Voices on Lockdown-Rikers Island Academy

AFASC3930 Section 003                              Tongo Eisen-Martin; tce3@columbia.edu

Call #85537; 4 points; Fridays 9:10-11:00am.

Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

Detained. Arrested. Court dates. Sentences. Parole.  Mass incarceration is national policy. Imprisonment, as an institution, process and culture, defines the lives of one-third of young Black men and the overwhelming majority of the Black community where these men are sons, brothers, lovers, friends, customers, clients, former students, church members etc. Those of us who will work together in this seminar will use our education, experience and commitment to join those who challenge the system of mass incarceration that threatens the survival of oppressed people inside the US.  More specifically, we will use the first part of the seminar to prepare ourselves to be effective workshop facilitators at the Island Academy inside Rikers Island Correctional Facility. For most of the semester, using the Freirian approach to popular education, we will facilitate workshops for youth incarcerated at Rikers Island Academy on-site. Incarcerated youth can be articulate and effective resisters who break through the cracks in the pipeline to adult prison. Creative writing workshops for incarcerated youth not only assist those youth in their efforts at individual rehabilitation.

 

The workshops also aim to facilitate a broader political transformation where workshop members—both facilitators and participants-- learn from each other and deepen their understanding of the obstacles to their own liberation and how to overcome them. [In the tradition of Freirian pedagogy, these following objectives are proposed. They may be modified by workshop participants: both the students at Columbia and those in Rikers]

 

1) To understand the scope, function and consequences of mass incarceration of people of color—especially Black and Latino people—in the U.S. This is the critical context of our work.

2) To strengthen understanding of the communities and individuals most impacted by mass incarceration. The first step for any popular educator, according to Paolo Freire is to “listen” to the “learners”—so that lessons or curricula can be designed by and for them.

3) To develop and improve our skills as popular educators that may serve the needs of incarcerated youth.

 4) To develop and implement curricula for a series of eight workshops among youth incarcerated at Rikers Island.

5) To reflect on our experience at Rikers to not only improve teaching skills but also to strengthen understanding and skills to support incarcerated youth and to challenge the injustices of the “juvenile justice system”.

Graduate Courses

African-American History

AFASG4500 Section 001                       Mia Bay; iraas@columbia.edu

Call #62952; 4 points; Thursdays, 4:00pm-6:00pm.

Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

This course is designed to guide and facilitate research and writing in African-American History. The course's readings, assignments, and discussions combine to prepare students to complete its major assignment: a well-developed research paper on some aspect of American or African-American history. The course will begin with a brief survey of recent discussions of historical writing and African-Americanist historiography, which students will be encouraged to read with an eye to thinking about the themes and theoretical underpinnings involved in their own projects. Readings, however, will never be the major focus of the course: the majority of the class time will be devoted to the development and writing of research paper.

 

 

Topics in the Black Experience:           The Culture of Freedom - Quilombos, Palenques and Maroon Societies in the Americas

AFASG4080 Section 001                       C. Daniel Dawson; cdd2277@columbia.edu

Call#:   75901;    4 points.     Tuesdays, 2:10-4:00pm.

Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

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.

 

 

Topics in the Black Experience: Black European Studies

AFASG4080 Section 002                       Maboula Soumahoro; msoumahoro@barnard.edu

Call#: 06762;     4 points.         Wednesdays, 4:10pm-6:00pm.

Room 758 Schermerhorn Extension

 

The objective of this course will be to account for Blacks and Africans’ presence in Western Europe through the study of the British, German and French contexts. Each context calls for an understanding of particular historical circumstances that will help students understand the consequences of the slave trade, slavery and European colonialism. Furthermore, the examples offered by each nation will put into light the various constructions of the black identity and all their nuances, specifically through the intricacies and interconnection of issues of immigration, citizenship and race.

 

Attention will also be devoted to the impact of African-American and American Blacks expatriates in Europe on the articulation of European black identities. Such a journey will stretch from the intellectuals and artists of the late 19^th century to reach the “New York City Rap Tour” of 1983 that took the Rock Steady Crew, the New York City Breakers, and Afrika Bambaata to London and Paris, thus igniting the hip-hop fever in those two nations. Thus introducing and familiarizing students to the Europe-specific approaches to race, class and gender and the travelling of persons, ideas, and cultures.

Topics in the Black Experience: Readings in Black Atlantic World – The Problem of Liberty

OPEN TO GRADUATE STUDENTS, JUNIOR & SENIOR UNDERGRADUATES

When Bob Marley, in the 20^th century, sang about “these songs of freedom” in Redemption Song, he invoked a long history of struggle for liberty by diasporic Africans. This course follows the problem of liberty in the early Black Atlantic world; all were insisting upon liberty as an essential natural right as a result of Enlightenment currents circulating at the time.  Africans of all stripes (Africans, Afro-British, African-Americans) were seminal to the various definitions of liberty that often excluded them – until they came before courts in England and America, and insisted on their inclusion in the liberty project. In those instances it became clear that their positionality – physical and ideological – in the Atlantic World was crucial to determining their access to liberty.

Through the discussion of various readings, including court cases from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the course looks at diasporic Africans within their broader social and ideological context initially in England when they intersect with the legal realm in a contest over liberty. From England the course traverses the Atlantic to focus particularly on New England – a locale generally considered a champion of liberty but one that wrestles with its own ideologies of liberty.  In America, the course examines the ideology of freedom in the earlier periods and the limits of that ideology.  Can we accept without question the notion that liberty was inexorable and affecting all? In a post-Revolutionary War environment, what do the laws confirm or deny vis à vis slaves “visiting” free states?  Are the enslaved people or property – and what does mean in terms of the law? What are the ways in which the positionality of diasporic Africans in the Black Atlantic World benefit them or create liabilities?   In short, the course interrogates the problem of liberty as Africans and their descendents struggle in a Black Atlantic milieu and seize liberty for themselves through the courts.

This is a good course for anyone interested in engaging the earlier periods of the Black Atlantic, and it also contributes to a broader and deeper understanding of the ideological and legal roots of contemporary questions of natural/human rights.