[R] This interdisciplinary introduction to Black Studies combines the teaching of foundational texts in the field with instruction in reading and writing. The first half of the course employs How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren as a guide to the careful reading of books focusing on the slave trade and its effects in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Important readings in this part of the course include Black Odyssey by Nathan Huggins, Racism: A Short History by George Frederickson, and The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James. The second half of the course addresses important themes from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Beginning with The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, it proceeds through a range of seminal texts, including The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. This part of the course utilizes Revising Prose by Richard Lanham to extend the lesson in reading from the first half of the semester into an exploration of precision and style in writing. Computer exercises based on Revising Prose and three short essays--one on a single book, another comparing two books, and the last on a major theme in the course--provide the main opportunity to apply and reinforce skills in reading and writing learned throughout the semester. After taking this course, students at all levels of preparation should emerge not only with a good foundation for advancement in Black Studies but also with a useful set of guidelines for further achievement in the humanities and the social sciences.
Each section limited to 20 students. Fall semester: Visiting Professor Polk. Spring semester: Professor Drabinski.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Spring 2025[R] In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe underdevelop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass-roots pressure? Is the underclass problem a matter of structure or agency? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course.
Each section limited to 20 students. Fall semester: Professor Ferguson. Spring semester: Visiting Professor Drabinski.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as BLST 203 [D] and WAGS 203.) This course focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century texts by black women writers based in Africa and the Americas. We will consider the stylistic choices that these women writers make in response to the broad range of challenges confronting them within the modern and postcolonial contexts in which they write. The reading list varies from year to year. This year we will read works by Edwidge Danicat, Marie Elena John, Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Adichie and Suzan-Lori Parks.
Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Bailey.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as BLST 204 [A] and MUSI 105.) This course focuses on twentieth-century African popular music; it examines musical genres from different parts of the continent, investigating their relationships to the historical, political and social dynamics of their respective national and regional origins. Regional examples like highlife, soukous, chimurenga, and afro-beate will be studied to assess the significance of popular music as a creative response to social and political developments in colonial and postcolonial Africa. The course also discusses the growth of hip-hop music in selected countries by exploring how indigenous cultural tropes have provided the basis for its local appropriation. Themes explored in this course include: the use of music in the construction of identity; popular music, politics and resistance; the interaction of local and global elements; and the political significance of musical nostalgia.
Fall semester. Five College Professor Omojola.
2023-24: Not offered[D] What happens to culture in the transition between Africa, Europe, and the Americas? What new forms of subjectivity, community, and culture emerge in the Americas? How do these new forms help us clarify the specifically African sense of "diaspora"? How does the experience of "the black Atlantic" alter our understanding of history and the development of ideas? In addressing these questions, this course examines themes of hybridity, double-consciousness, Modernity, and diaspora in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. Our attention will center on the work of Paul Gilroy, whose reflections on black Atlantic cultural formations have broken new theoretical ground over the past two decades. Gilroy's work will allow us to engage theoretically with the peculiar historical dynamics of the black Atlantic, which, in turn, enables us to attend at some depth to this particular diasporic consciousness through characterizations of literature, art, philosophy, and music. Alongside Gilroy, we will read other core theoretical texts on the black Atlantic by Du Bois, Césaire, Fanon, Wright, Baldwin, and others. In order to establish context and some points of contrast, we will also read important texts on the philosophy of history and history of ideas by Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Bhabha. These varied reflections on the black Atlantic and the dynamics of cultural development help us understand the distinctive character of the African diaspora and its hybrid intellectual productions.
Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered
(Offered as BLST 214 [A] and MUSI 106.) This course concentrates on the lives and music of selected West African musicians. Departing from ethnographic approaches that mask the identity of individual musicians and treat African societies as collectives, this course emphasizes the contributions of individual West African musicians whose stature as master musicians is undisputed within their respective communities. It examines the contributions of individual musicians to the ever continuous process of negotiating the boundaries of African musical practice. Individuals covered this semester include Babatunde Olatunji (Nigerian drummer), Youssou N’Dour (Senegalese singer), Kandia Kouyate (Malian jelimuso) and Ephraim Amu (Ghanaian composer). The variety of artistic expressions of selected musicians also provides a basis for examining the interrelatedness of different African musical idioms, and the receptivity of African music to non-African styles.
Omitted 2012-13. Five College Professor Omojola.
2023-24: Not offered[A] This course examines prose fiction by selected African writers published between the mid-twentieth century and the present. We will explore the writers’ treatment of a range of issues, particularly those pertinent to post-colonial and post-independent African societies. These include: the ways African countries have fashioned themselves in the age of modernity, migration and the formation of diasporas, and the experiences of women. We will be especially attentive to how the intersections between European novelistic conventions and African oral traditions impact form in these works. We will focus on writings from Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa and examine works by such writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Adichie, and Yvonne Vera.
Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Lecturer Bailey
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as BLST 231 [US] and HIST 247 [USp; or may be included in AF concentration, but not AF for distribution in the History major.]) This course is a survey of the history of African American men and women from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The content is a mixture of the social, cultural, and political history of blacks during two and a half centuries of slavery with the story of the black freedom struggle and its role in America’s national development. Among the major topics addressed: the slave trade in its moral and economic dimensions; African retentions in African American culture; origins of racism in colonial America; how blacks used the rhetoric and reality of the American and Haitian Revolutions to their advancement; antebellum slavery; black religion and family under slavery and freedom; the free black experience in the North and South; the crises of the 1850s; the role of race and slavery in the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War; and the meaning of emancipation and Reconstruction for blacks. Readings include historical monographs, slave narratives by men and women, and one work of fiction.
Combined enrollment limited to 50 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Moss.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Fall 2019, Spring 2023(Offered as BLST 241 [US] and HIST 248 [US; or may be included in AF concentration, but not AF for distribution in the History major].) This course is a survey of the social, cultural, and political history of African American men and women since the 1870s. Among the major topics addressed: the legacies of Reconstruction; the political and economic origins of Jim Crow; the new racism of the 1890s; black leadership and organizational strategies; the Great Migration of the World War I era; the Harlem Renaissance; the urbanization of black life and culture; the impact of the Great Depression and the New Deal; the social and military experience of World War II; the causes, course and consequences of the modern civil rights movement; the experience of blacks in the Vietnam War; and issues of race and class in the 1970s and 1980s. Readings and materials include historical monographs, fiction, and documentary films.
Limited to 50 students. Omitted 2012-13.
2023-24: Not offered[D] In the moment of anti-colonial struggle, what meanings can be found in cultural forms and expressions? Are the colonized suffocated by the violence of history and the imposition of foreign cultural forms? Or is another language, poetics, community, and politics possible? How might another language, poetics, etc., redefine the meaning of blackness after colonialism? In this course we will examine these questions as they arise in the anti-colonial movements of mid-twentieth century Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Our readings will engage questions of nation, identity, language, and the cultural and political meaning of diaspora in the Surrealist and Negritude movements. In particular, we will examine the complex and subtle debate between theorists, artists, and poets René Ménil, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Senghor regarding the theory and practice of anti-colonial culture and politics. What are the limits and possibilities of Surrealism and its conception of "the marvelous"? How is that conception of the marvelous transformed and politicized in the pan-African context of the Negritude movement? What does blackness mean in these two movements? How are questions of race transformed by the Surrealist and Negritude methods of cultural and political creation? As well, we will consider the lesser-known contributions by Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, and Jane Nardal to these movements and consider crucial questions of gender in the politics of cultural meaning. Last, we will measure the veracity of Surrealism and Negritude in relation to the political movements, poetry, and plastic arts produced by those movements, with special attention to Césaire's Martinique and Senghor's Sénégal.
Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered[D] During the middle decades of the twentieth century, existentialism dominated the European philosophical and literary scene. Prominent theorists such as J-P Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put the experience of history, alienation, and the body at the center of philosophical and literary life. It should be no surprise, then, that existentialism appealed to so many Afro-Caribbean and African-American thinkers of the same period and after. This course examines the critical transformation of European existentialist ideas through close readings of black existentialists Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris, paired with key essays from Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty. As well, we will engage black existentialism not just as a series of claims, but also a method, which allows us to read works by African-American writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison in an existentialist frame. Lastly, we will consider the matter of how and why existentialism continues to function so centrally in contemporary Africana philosophy.
Omitted 2012-13. Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered[R] This seminar prepares students to conduct independent research. Although it concentrates on the field of Black Studies, it serves as a good introductory research course for all students in the humanities and social sciences regardless of major. The first part of the course will intensively introduce students to the library through a series of readings, exercises, and discussions aimed at sharpening the ability to locate information precisely and efficiently. The second part of the course will introduce research methods in three important areas of Black Studies: the arts, history, and the social sciences. Faculty members of the Black Studies Department, departmental affiliates, and visitors will join the class to present their own ongoing research, placing particular emphasis on the disciplinary methods and traditions of inquiry that guide their efforts. Also in the second part, through individual meetings with professors, students will begin developing their own research projects. The third part of the course will concentrate more fully on development of these projects through a classroom workshop. Here students will learn how to shape a topic into a research question, build a bibliography, annotate a bibliography, shape a thesis, develop an outline, and write a research proposal, or prospectus.
This class is required of Black Studies majors. It is open to non-majors with the consent of the instructor. Although BLST 111 and 200 are not required for admission, preference will go to those who have taken one or both of these courses.
Limited to 20 students. Spring semester. Professors Castro Alves and Ferguson.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024(Offered as BLST 313 [A] and ARHA 138.) In the traditionally non-literate societies of Africa, verbal and visual arts constitute two systems of communication. The performance of verbal art and the display of visual art are governed by social and cultural rules. We will examine the epistemological process of understanding cultural symbols, of visualizing narratives, or proverbs, and of verbalizing sculptures or designs. Focusing on the Yoruba people of West Africa, the course will attempt to interpret the language of their verbal and visual arts and their interrelations in terms of cultural cosmologies, artistic performances, and historical changes in perception and meaning. We will explore new perspectives in the critical analysis of African verbal and visual arts, and their interdependence as they support each other through mutual references and allusions.
Fall semester. Professor Abiodun.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as ARHA 353 and BLST 315 [A]) Through a contrastive analysis of the religious and artistic modes of expression in three West African societies--the Asanti of the Guinea Coast, and the Yoruba and Igbo peoples of Nigeria--the course will explore the nature and logic of symbols in an African cultural context. We shall address the problem of cultural symbols in terms of African conceptions of performance and the creative play of the imagination in ritual acts, masked festivals, music, dance, oral histories, and the visual arts as they provide the means through which cultural heritage and identity are transmitted and preserved, while, at the same time, being the means for innovative responses to changing social circumstances.
Spring semester. Professor Abiodun.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as BLST 331 [US] and HIST 353 [AF].) Students will encounter the Black Freedom struggle through the literature, music, art, and political activism of the Black Arts Movement. The artistic corollary to Black Power, the Black Arts Movement flourished in the 1960s and 1970s as artists/activists sought to put a revolutionary cultural politics into practice around the country. The Black Arts Movement had far-reaching consequences for the way artists and writers think about race, gender, history, identity, and the relationship between artist production and political liberation. We'll read work by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Larry Neal, among others. We'll also trace the movement's extension through local political battles and the emergence of new institutions, including theaters, journals, and Black Studies programs. We'll consider the overlap of the Black Arts Movement with other political currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, explore its relationship to Black feminism, and trace the influence of the Black Arts Movement in hip-hop and film.
Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Visiting Lecturer Rabig.
2023-24: Not offeredFall and spring semesters. Members of the Department.
Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024(Offered as BLST 401[D] and HIST 468 [LA].) The seminar traces historically the rise and development of black liberation theology across the black diaspora, particularly in the Caribbean, Africa, England and the U.S. Two central questions structure this course: How did disenfranchised and diasporic Christian communities reinterpret the biblical text according to their lived experiences? How did their faith and new theologial formulations inform their political praxis? The dialogical encounters between Marxism and Christianity, black liberation theology and anti-colonial politics, Christian theology and anti-black racism and sexism from the 1960s to the present, will underpin the weekly readings and discussions. Students will read the central texts in the large field of liberation theology, and black liberation theology in particular, from thinkers such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, James H. Cone, Delores S. Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, Katie G. Cannon, Desmond Tutu, Alan Boesak, John Mbit, Elgelbert Mvent, and Anthony Reddie.
Not open to first-year students. Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Castro-Alves.
2023-24: Not offeredThis seminar provides students an opportunity to study closely the works of a single great African American intellectual, such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, or Toni Morrison. The specific topic for the course will be announced and available from the Black Studies Academic Department Coordinator four months in advance each time it is taught. Readings will include major and minor works of the author, secondary sources such as biographies and literary criticism, and archival resources when available at a local or regional library. Classes will place a strong emphasis on in-depth discussion of individual works and class participation will constitute a substantial proportion of the final grade. Students will also be required to develop their own research project that will serve as the basis for a 20-25-page term paper, due at the end of the semester. Students will also be asked at the discretion of the instructor to report to the class from time to time regarding the progress of their research project.
Not open to first-year students. Open to sophomores with the consent of the instructor. Recommended requisite: BLST 300. Limited to 20 students. Omitted 2012-13. Professor Ferguson.
2023-24: Not offered[US] Ralph Waldo Ellison wrote Invisible Man to confirm the existence of the universal in the particulars of the black American experience. The same can be said of the larger aim of this course. It will provide students with the opportunity to explore the broadest themes of Black Studies through the careful reading of a particular text. Due to its broad range of influence and reference, Invisible Man is one of the most appropriate books in the black tradition for this kind of attention. The course will proceed through a series of comparisons with works that influenced the literary style and the philosophical content of the novel. The first part of the course will focus on comparisons to world literature. Readings will include James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo; and H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man. The second part of the course will focus on comparisons to American literature. The readings in this part of the course will include Herman Melville, The Confidence Man; William Faulkner, “The Bear”; and some of Emerson’s essays. The last part of the course will focus on comparisons with books in the black tradition. Some of the readings in this part of the course will include W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk and Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery. Requires 20-25 page research paper.
Limited to 15 students. Open to juniors and seniors. Preference given to Black Studies majors. Spring Semester. Professor Ferguson.
2023-24: Not offeredSpring semester. Members of the Department.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025(Offered as BLST 236 [US] and WAGS 330) From the modern era to the contemporary moment, the intersection of race, gender, and class has been especially salient for people of African descent—for men as well as for women. How might the category of sexuality act as an additional optic through which to view and reframe contemporary and historical debates concerning the construction of black identity? In what ways have traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity contributed to an understanding of African American life and culture as invariably heterosexual? How have black lesbian, gay, and transgendered persons effected political change through their theoretical articulations of identity, difference, and power? In this interdisciplinary course, we will address these questions through an examination of the complex roles gender and sexuality play in the lives of people of African descent. Remaining attentive to the ways black people have claimed social and sexual agency in spite of systemic modes of inequality, we will engage with critical race theory, black feminist thought, queer-of-color critique, literature, art, film, “new media” and erotica, as well as scholarship from anthropology, sociology, and history.
Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Visiting Professor Polk.
2023-24: Not offered(Offered as BLST 245 and PHIL 245.) What is distinctive about African-American experience? How does that distinctiveness bear on the theory and practice of philosophy and philosophical thinking? And how does the African-American philosophical tradition alter conventional philosophical accounts of subjectivity, knowledge, time, language, history, embodiment, memory, and justice? In this course, we will read a range of African-American thinkers from the twentieth century in order to develop an appreciation of the unique, critical philosophical voice in the black intellectual tradition. Our readings of works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Anthony Appiah and Cornel West will open up crucial issues that transform philosophy's most central problems: knowing, being, and acting. As well, we will consider the cluster of thinkers with whom those works are critically concerned, including key texts from nineteenth century German philosophy, American pragmatism, and contemporary existentialism and postmodernism. What emerges from these texts and critical encounters is a sense of philosophy and philosophical practice as embedded in the historical experience--in all of its complexity--of African-Americans in the twentieth century.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered[US] This course offers a systematic study of the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, drawing on the whole range of his life and writing in order to assess his importance for theorizing race, racism, and the human condition. What do we mean by "race"? How is our understanding of history, consciousness, and hope transformed by the experience of anti-black racism? What is the role of gender, class, and nation in theorizing race and racism? In Du Bois' early work on these questions, especially his masterpiece Souls of Black Folk, we encounter some of the most significant foundational work in the black intellectual tradition. Themes of double-consciousness, the color line, and the veil set many of the terms of discussion for the twentieth century and after. In this course, we will read this early work closely, but also consider the development of his later thought in historical and intellectual context, putting Du Bois in dialogue with his contemporaries William James, Booker T. Washington, Josiah Royce, and others, as well as considering contemporary appropriations of his work. Lastly, we will read Du Bois critically by considering recent scholarship on his often fraught relationship to questions of gender, class, and transnational identity. Across these readings, we will develop a deep, engaged appreciation of the scope and power of Du Bois' thinking and the fecundity of his intellectual legacy.
Fall semester. Visiting Professor Drabinski.
2023-24: Not offered