Global Arc

This course introduces students to the field of African American Studies through an examination of the complex experiences, both past and present, of Americans of African descent. Through a multidisciplinary perspective, it reveals the complicated ways we come to know and live race in the United States. Students engage classic texts in the field. All of which are framed by a concern with epistemologies of resistance and of ignorance that offer insight into African American thought and practice. AAS Subfield: AACL

The purposes of this course are to assist the student in developing the ability to critically evaluate social science research on the Black experience and to do research in African studies. To accomplish these goals, the course will acquaint students with the processes of conceptualization and basic research techniques, and some of the unique issues in conducting research on the Black experience. A variety of appropriate studies will be utilized.

What is African American music? Is it a set of genres, sound characteristics, or musical approaches? Is it based on who creates, or who receives the music? How has an African American musical tradition undergone continual re-definition, and how might we understand these developments within historical context? This course will address these questions by studying African American music from a variety of perspectives, drawing from historical and critical readings, and sound and visual media.

This course examines resources for and strategies of African American humor from the early twentieth century to the present. We will survey a wide range of cultural expression, including folk poems, literary satire, and stand-up comedy, and we will consider the historical circumstances under which African American humor has flourished. Supplemental reading in the philosophy of comedy will allow us to reflect on the cognitive and affective pleasure that is realized in laughter.

Roderick Ferguson's concept of "Queer of Color Critique" is a method grounded in intersectional feminism which allows us to consider the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality and how economic and political systems are linked to queer identity. We will use Ferguson's methods to examine Black LGBTQ+ representation across various media including documentaries, television, social media, and literature. And we will consider what queer theory has to say about identity formation, spirituality, space making, resistance, and definitions of freedom.

This topics course explores the complex interplay between political, economic, and cultural forces that shape our understanding of the historic achievements and struggles of African-descended people in the United States and their relation to others around the world.

The truism that "race is socially constructed" hides more than it reveals. Have Irish Americans always been white? Are people of African descent all Black? Is calling Asian Americans a "model minority" a compliment? Does race impact who we date or marry? In this course, students develop a sophisticated conceptual toolkit to make sense of such contentious cases of racial vision and division as the uprising in Ferguson. We learn to connect contemporary events to historical processes, and individual experiences to institutional policies, exercising a sociological imagination with the potential to not only analyze, but transform the status quo.

This surveys history of African American art during the long 20th-century, from the individual striving of late 19th century to the unprecedented efflorescence of art and culture in 1920s Harlem; from the retrenchment in Black artistic production during the era of Great Depression, to the rise of racially conscious art inspired by the Civil Rights Movement; from the Black feminist art in the 1970s, to the age of American multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally to the turn of the present century when ambitious "postblack" artists challenge received notions of Black art and racial subjectivity. AAS Subfield: AACL, GRE

This course explores the political development of America's racially disparate punishment regime. We trace the history of US crime policy, moving through US constitutional formation, Reconstruction and lynch law, and Jim Crow punishment in the South and urban North. We focus on punishment in post-civil rights America, and we devote special attention to policing, the death penalty, and the interconnected wars on crime, drugs, immigration, and terror. Our overarching goal is to understand the political construction of crime, colorblindness, and legitimate state violence. AAS Subfield: RPP

What if the real answer to the question "Where are you from?" or "Where did you grow up?" is so complicated that you tend to give a convenient rather than honest answer? This course will explore narratives of youthful cultural and linguistic adaptation by those who have spent their childhood crossing national boundaries. Among the topics of discussion are how the narrators construct meaningful identities and produce a sense of belonging or alienation through narrative.