Global Arc

Within Indigenous art, land often takes center stage: practices rooted in places their practitioners have lived since time immemorial. But displacement has also been fundamental to Native history: land seizure, migrations, and of course, voluntary travels. Objects of Native visual culture have witnessed similar dynamics: collected for museums, appropriated, or designed for exhibition. How have objects moved, and how does movement reveal new avenues for interpretation? How do works anticipate or resist circulation? Reading across art history and Indigenous Studies, we will examine place and movement as analytics for the study of Native art.

This seminar examines Black Latinidad as an epistemology; as a way of knowing that allows us to better understand the historical relationship between race, colonialism and diaspora. Through the analysis of cultural texts: including novels, music, film, and visual art, we will engage in a genealogical examination of Black Latinidad beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and through the present. Expanding the conceptual, geographical and temporal limitations that continue to produce Latinx Studies as a contemporary, U.S. based field of knowledge, our course will engage a historical approach to Latinx thought that centers blackness.

This course will examine the historical, sociological, and political writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century and a foundational figure in the field of African American studies. Close attention will be given to his views of American democracy and identity as well as race and Pan-Africanism. Our aim is to explore and understand the long arc of Du Bois's ideas.

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.