Global Arc

This seminar will interweave the history of New York City with the history of dance across the twentieth century. It will use the work of dancers, choreographers, and critics to illuminate social, political, and cultural trends in New York's urban life. Topics include dance in working-class leisure, dance as cultural activism during the Popular Front and Black Arts eras, immigration and assimilation in NYC, and the impact of urban renewal on communities and the performing arts.

Through the course of study, readings, and lectures, majors apply their AAS knowledge into developing independent writing and research assignments, leading to the senior thesis. In AAS, the thesis is the culminating research informed by a student's subfield and a subject of inquiry of the student's choosing. Majors will workshop their thesis for clarity and improvement and also practice becoming conversant about their research by contextualizing their work alongside pertinent contemporary issues and news stories.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year. Required works-in-progress submissions, their due dates, as well as how students' grades for the semester are calculated are outlined below.

This course examines the selected non-fiction writings of one of America's most influential essayists and public intellectuals: James Baldwin. Attention will be given to his views on ethics, art, and politics--with a particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy.

In these topics courses, students encounter the intellectual tradition and cultural practices that inform the emergence and development of African American studies as a field of study in the academy. Focusing on aesthetic repertoires and historical dynamics situated primarily in the United States, students learn how to examine the patterns and practices that have defined and transformed Black people's lives. Courses in the AACL subfield are typically cross-listed with English, History, Religion, American Studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Antipathy toward "Critical Race Theory" has led policymakers to restrict curriculum, ban books, and even fire teachers. But what is Critical Race Theory? This reading-intensive lecture course introduces sophomores to some of its foundational scholarship. Lectures and readings contextualize Critical Race Theory in the history of the civil rights movement, especially the hard won but limited impact of civil rights legal victories. The course concludes by considering how the actual framework of Critical Race Theory is useful for analyzing the contemporary attack on Critical Race Theory.

This course focuses on the representation of slavery and unfree labor in historical and contemporary artistic production, in a global context. It follows the lead of contemporary artists who have 'returned' to the plantation, and whose work consequently compels us to explore more closely the implications and afterlives of the plantation in our contemporary moment. Like these artists, this course also uses the lens of repair to look back at the plantation's visual histories, and to track its legacies in the present, while also considering what a term like repair can look for us now, and in the future.

This course asks: What is Black feminist literature? We will attend to the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century novels and the theoretical premises of key texts in Black feminist criticism that serve as touchstones for the field. We will analyze representations of gender, sexuality, class, and race and question our definitions of habituated terms and reading methods. We will cultivate an active reading practice that enables our capacity for critical analysis, creative writing, and their intersection.

This course examines the lives and legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker. These three figures were central to the Black Freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century and stand as examples of different models of leadership and organizing that remain influential today. Through their biographies and writings, we will examine the complexities of the Black Freedom movement, the overlap and contrasts of their philosophies, and their styles of leadership. Biography and primary source material will guide our efforts. AAS Subfield: AACL

This course examines the lives, labors, cultures, and experiences of Black women in the United States from slavery to Emancipation and throughout the twentieth century. The class will pay particular development to the historical, social, economic and political factors that contributed to the rise of Black feminist consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. AAS Subfields: AACL, RPP