Global Arc

This course explores African American history from the Atlantic slave trade up to the Civil War. It is centrally concerned with the rise of and overthrow of human bondage and how they shaped the modern world. Africans were central to the largest and most profitable forced migration in world history. They shaped new identities and influenced the contours of American politics, law, economics, culture, and society. The course considers the diversity of experiences in this formative period of nation-making. Race, class, gender, region, religion, labor, and resistance animate important themes in the course. AAS Subfield: AACL

This course offers an introduction to the major themes, critical questions, and pivotal moments in post emancipation African American history. Traces the social, political, cultural, intellectual, and legal contours of the black experience in the United States from Reconstruction to the rise of Jim Crow, through the World Wars, Depression, and the Great Migrations, to the long civil rights era and the contemporary period of racial politics. Using a wide variety of texts, images, and creative works, the course situates African American history within broader national and international contexts. AAS Subfield: AACL

Assesses the value of religion and its impartations of the historical, ethical, and political in African American life. Courses will also critique African American religion from a broader contextual basis by establishing commonalities and differences across historical and cultural boundaries.

This course investigates the role of police power in reinforcing or challenging racial order in all of its economic, spatial, and gendered manifestations. We pay particular attention to the ways in which commonplace notions of safety and security develop in relation to the history of territorial expansion, war, wealth accumulation, and the racialized distribution of private property.

This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.

This course will explore the causes and manifestations of housing insecurity and instability in the United States today. It will look at the ways that this contemporary housing crisis affects race, class, and gender dynamics in American cities and suburbs. This class will examine the barriers to safe, sound, and affordable housing. In doing so, we will also look at how social activism and movements have attempted to secure housing as a human right while rejecting its commodified status. We will examine how equitable housing policies can reconfigure urban spaces, combat climate change, and reimagine community governance.

A historical overview of Black literary expression from the 19th century to present day. Will emphasize a critical and analytical approach to considering the social, cultural, and political dimensions of African American literature.

In this course, we will develop a history of concepts in Black Studies and explore concepts that are often taken for granted - like freedom, revolution, culture, and politics. We will throw them into crisis to better understand the liminal underpinnings of many of our long-held theoretical and conceptual assumptions. By placing pressure on the concepts upon which we rely, we offer ourselves and those around us alternate terrains of thought and struggle. Much of our exploration and interrogation of these concepts will mobilize the creative theoretical and literary conceptual articulations of Sylvia Wynter.

Why are some events from the past widely recalled, memorialized, and taught in school, while others are consigned to obscurity? How do acts of historical erasure play in processes of exclusion? How have acts of remembering figured in struggles for justice? Using scholarship, memoirs, visual art, and music, this course examines the relationship between "history" and "memory," focusing on the different ways that race and social power have shaped the relationship in the US and across the African diaspora. We will link representations of the past to debate about issues like public monuments, legal redress, and reparations. AAS Subfield: AACL, GRE

African thought continues to be marginalized, even though radical Black intellectuals have shaped a number of social movements and global intellectual history. African youths are innovating new models that are revolutionizing the sciences, law, social and visual media, fashion, etc. In this class, we read classics of African thought and study contemporary African youth culture together to theorize what is happening in Africa today. This includes reading such African theorists as Frantz Fanon, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Achille Mbembe, and researching innovations in contemporary African urban popular culture.