Global Arc

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

This course is designed to introduce students to the relationship of the museum as a history-specific institution which arose in the late 18th and early 19th century in Western Europe (and then, the United States), and its relationship to colonial medicine. The course also asks students to imagine other models of medicine and practices of curation juxtaposing historical case studies with current debates in museology and curatorial praxis, around collection histories and the possibility of transforming the museum into a space of healing and repair. Collection visits at Princeton and field trips to Philadelphia will form part of the course.

What is the structural in structural racism? Founding Father John Jay insisted that "those who own the country ought to govern it," and many features of the U.S. constitutional system actively protect and incentivize racism, capital accumulation, and resource hoarding. This course gives particular attention to the two-party system; the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College; the U.S. tax code and welfare state; the reality and mythology of civil rights and anti-discrimination law; and the criminal legal system. AAS Subfield: RPP

Global Blackness is a cross-disciplinary transnational multi-lingual survey course that will introduce students to a range of texts, including film, literature and popular culture produced by and about Black people outside of the United States. Students will learn about the legacy of European expansion in Africa and the Americas, the impact of the transatlantic slave trade beyond the United States, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in places like Haiti and Eritrea, as well as engage with a diversity of Black cultural art, identities, politics, social movements, and expressions that come from these knowledges and beyond.

This course surveys the major debates and conundrums that shaped black political life from the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The primary aim of the course is to introduce students to concepts, events, and themes that are central to the study of contemporary racial politics. For example, students will learn about the determinants of black political behavior, the effects of intra- and inter-group conflict on black politics, the relationship between politics and popular culture, the promises and limits of formal political representation, etc.

This course takes up questions of the plantation and cultural production as a problem for Caribbean and African American studies. What is the plantation zone? How did the plantation change across the nineteenth century? To explore these questions, this course will range across time periods, nations, empires, and disciplines to analyze how plantations were a distinctive institution formed in the Americas. Students will consider how the plantation as a mobile form shaped race, gender, and labor relations beyond its physical boundaries and the various ways African and South Asian diasporic peoples navigated plantation societies.

White nationalism and cult-of-personality authoritarianism have people reaching anew for the F-word. But "fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America", as Langston Hughes wrote in 1936. This reading-intensive seminar explores how Black intellectuals have analyzed and confronted racial fascism in its many iterations around the globe. This course dives deep into essential and challenging Black Studies works, including Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Hall's Policing the Crisis, and Gilmore's Golden Gulag.

How do our intimate relationships reflect larger social structures and political realities? This course explores how friendships among Black writers and cultural workers resist and reshape dominant orders. Drawing on Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and more, students examine friendship as a site of radical care and collective power. The final project is a short film on friendship and freedom dreaming, allowing students to practice filmmaking as a creative method of imagining and enacting social transformation.