Fall 2009
Course Offerings that Fulfill
Africana Studies Requirements
AFST 201-501:
Introductory Course Africana Studies
Instructor: Alain Lawo-Sukam
MWF 10:20-11:10, EDCT 632
Africana Studies is the
multidisciplinary analysis of the lives and thoughts, broadly defined, of
people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world;
this includes their histories, languages, cultures, socio-economic and
political realities as they are made manifest in the
AFST 201-502: Introduction
to Africana Studies
Instructor: Dr. David Donkor
TR
Africana Studies is the
multidisciplinary analysis of the lives and thoughts, broadly defined, of
people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world;
this includes their histories, languages, cultures, socio-economic and
political realities as they are made manifest in the
AFST 302-500: Gateway Course to Africana Studies
Instructor: Dr.
Nicole Castor
TR 3:55-5:10, ZACH 127A
Often only recognized as the home of reggae (Bob Marley, Sean Paul) the countries of the Caribbean (and indeed the larger African Diaspora) have numerous rich and diverse cultures. Looking both at and beyond these stereotypes this course will examine the role of cultural performance-festivals, rituals, music and dance-in linking every day practices of people with larger social forces of politics, citizenship and the economy. How do these post colonial states mobilize culture in building nations, constructing identities and staking positions in the global economy? In the face of commodification, globalization and competing interests how do cultural practices express and reflect the lives of people? Do cultural performances offer a critique of social and economic relations?
In answering these questions we will consider theories of culture, especially in reference to the African Diaspora and the Caribbean. We will explore the dynamics of society and culture, identity and difference (e.g. creolization, syncretism and hybridity) by looking at popular and public cultural forms (including Trinidad Carnival, Haitian Rara, Brazilian Samba and Jamaican Dancehall) within the context of globalization and diaspoora. Course materials will be drawn from articles, monographs, ethnographies, DVDs and audio CDs. As a class we will work through material from major thinkers on the Caribbean and African Diaspora including Fanon, Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and CLR James.
AFST 481-502: Afro-Hispanic Women's Voices
Instructor: Dr. Alain Lawo-Sukam
MWF
As a transatlantic and interdisciplinary course, the students will study the voice(s) of women of African descent in the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas as well as in Africa. Using a range of critical approaches such as postcolonial and feminist theories (third world feminism, black feninism and africana womanism), the course will focus on regions/countries such as the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic), the United States of America, Central & South America (Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Ecuador) and The Republic of Equatorial Guinea (the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa). Mainly through literary texts and social movements we will explore how historically marginalized afro-hispanic women negotiate and/or fight against the dominant discourse, reformulate their identities and address the impact of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion and other factors in their process of self-definition.
AFST 489-501 / COMM 489-501: Black American Popular Culture
Instructor: Dr. Aisha Durham
TR 12:45-2:00, ANTH 312
Students will become acquainted with concepts and theories, cultural criticism, and interpretive approaches to better understand the production, performance and consumption of contempory Black American popular culture.
This course will provide an overall analysis of Black American popular culture. Racial authenticity and notions of "class" will be interrogated, and performative Blackness will be explored as a product and process of a dynamic, transnational political project in constant conversation with other racial and ethnic postcolonial communities in the USA and abroad. Special attention will be paid to the post-civil rights or the post-soul generation of African American youth who are framed by the social order of new racism. Employing Black cultural criticism and social theory, students not only will learn to describe how Blackness is made intelligible in the popular, but students will learn to analyze through "form and function" how marked Black bodies-as cultural consumers and producers of Black American popular culture-are made invisible through surveillance and containment in the public sphere under new racism.
Throughout the course, students will draw from relevant current events, biographies, and hands-on student projects to analyze and discuss Black American popular culture. A cursory background of African American history is useful, but not necessary to fully engage with scholarship about Black American popular culture. This course is multidisciplinary in its approach to "reading" popular culture, which includes mass media as well as folk culture and everyday life. Media (both electronic and print) will be woven throughout the course. In-class videos and guest lectures will supplement required course material, and will serve as springboards to enhance group discussion.
AFST 489-50 2/ FILM 351-500/ENGL 351-500: African American Film
Instructor: Dr. Kimberly Brown
TR 2:40-3:35, ZACH 119C
Contemporary African American Film seeks to explore the theme of African American identity through the genre of film. Using films directed solely by African Americans, this course provides a thematic introduction to contemporary African American cinema from the 1970s to the present. Although this course examines both independent and Hollywood films, particular emphasis will be given to: 1) films that can be considered "revolutionary" in content and/or form, and 2) films that are vested in resisting stereotypical notions of "blackness." We will also discuss the extent to which a film either reproduces or subverts images of black identity presented by mainstream media. By the end of this course, sutdents should expect to have a basic understanding of the major themes and genres that occur in contemporary African American filmic (such as blaxploitation, black masculinity, black feminism, the coming-of-age film, decolonization, folklore, and imprisonment). Students should also be able to analyze a film as a text and to offer sophisticated written critiques of the texts examined.
AFST 489-504 / ANTH 489-503: Global Africana Popular Culture
Instructor: Nicole Castor
TR 3:55-5:10, ANTH 214
This course is designed to introduce you to a variety of critical approaches used in the study of global Africana popular culture. The primary objective of the course is to provide students with the tools to critically analyze these various forms of global popular culture in the African Diaspora and understand them within a broader social context. Although this course will draw on your familiarity with popular culture, we will approach the subject from a scholarly perspective. We will learn how popular culture, in all its various forms, not only reflects the world around us but also how it influences the way we perceive the world.
Every day we are exposed to thousands of images, sounds and experiences that we understand as natural - as just the way the world is. But this everyday life we take for granted is anything but natural. It is both the product and the creator of a shared world view. We will examine a wide range of subjects (such as film, festivals, music) using a wide range of critical approaches (such as critical theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory and cultural studies) in a variety of international locations (Ghana, Cuba, Brazil, and Trinidad) so that we can better understand the circulation, production and consumption of popular culture around the globe. Our class is organized around four major themes, in three to four week modules, explored through articles, monographs, ethnographies, DVDs and audio CDs.
Instructor: Dr. Glenn Chambers
TR 11:10-12:25, GLAS 008
The "African Diaspora is defined as those persons of black African descent living outside Africa regardless of how long they have been physically removed from the continent. The course will focus on the historical and cultural experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Americas, Europe, and Asia from the fourteenth through the twentieth century."
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Instructor: Dr. Shona Jackson
TR
*Writing Intensive
"Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creole." In 1990, this was the bold statement on Caribbean identity put forward by three Martiniquan writers. They sought to reject the prevailing ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic and other categorizations of Caribbean peoples and instead place greater emphasis on the cross-cultural dynamism of the region, on the overlapping cultures of difference and similarity that have managed to unite the archipelago between North and South America, mainland nations and marginal areas such as the Nicaragual Mosquito (Miskito) coast and the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica.
With this statement, the authors of In Praise of Creoleness grapple with long-standing questions about what in fact is Caribbean identity, given the regions's colonial history and lack of political or national unity. In this senior seminar, we will read different theories about Caribbean identity from the 20th century, from anthropology, soicology, and other disciplines as we examine Caribbean cultural expression in literature, film, and art. Our goals are twofold: 1) to discover whether Caribbean culture gives us more fluid expressions of identity than theory and what is the relationship of Caribbean cultural expression to various social, political and economic structures and 2) to look at what Caribbean identity theorizing brings to the field of postcolonial studies and vice versa. Students will be encouraged to look at popular depictions of Caribbean identity including oral expression, such as music, and performance, such as Carnival, both in the region and its diaspora.
Instructor: Dr. Mikko Tuhkanen
TR 11:10-12:25, BLOC 203
*Writing Intensive
This seminar looks at a number of "passing narratives" in the various traditions of U.S. Literatures. The term "passing" denotes an attempt at crossing over the boundaries of seemingly immutable differences as race and gender, or an effort at "closeting" one's sexuality. Historically prevalent particularly in African-American literature, passing narratives problematize our notions of self and other, authenticity and counterfeiting, identity and performance. The examples we discuss come from short stories, novels, and films. We will read these together with a number of theoretical texts dealing with questions of difference and identity at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructor: Dr. Qwo-Li Driskill Mikko Tuhkanen
MWF
*Writing Intensive
Rhetoric can be broadly defined as the intentional analysis and/or creation of any sort of communication. With a particular focus on cultural rhetorics-the intersections of rhetoric, cultures, and systems of power-this class will examine rhetoric's relationship with contemporary constructions of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and disability. We will examine the ways these constructions intersect and relate to one another and to modern rhetorical theory. Further, we will consider writing, performance, visual rhetorics, and material rhetorics within our understanding of what constitutes "rhetoric." This course will include texts by Gloria Anzaldúa, Eli clare, Bell Hooks, E. Patrick Johnson, Robin D. G. Kelley, audre Lorde, and Aurora Levins Morales.
Instructor: Dr. Albert Broussard
TR 11:10-12:25, ARCA 107A
This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of history of African Americans in the United States to 1877. This course will be divided into three sections, each centered on a series of arguments concerning a specific chronological period. The first section (roughly 1600-1700s) will examine the various elements of African culture and society, the creation of an international slave trade, the importation of slavery to North America and the definitions of race. The second section (roughly 1770s-1850s) will explore the impact slavery and race had on the U.S. constitution, the idea of being African American, the existence of free black communitites, the expansion of slavery, and the idea of slave culture and religion. The final section (1850s-1877) will focus on the larger political implications of slavery, the burgeoning abolitionist movement, the coming of the Civil War, and the quest for equality during Reconstruction.
HIST
Instructor: Dr. Glenn Chambers
TR
Drawing heavily on the legacies of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, this course focuses on the establishment of the links between the decline of plantation societies and its role in defining late 19th and 20th century cultural, social, and political movements in the region. In order to promote a further understanding of the multi-cultural aspects of Caribbean societies, the course will focus on the English, French, and Spanish speaking islands and the individuals who helped to define Caribbean consciousness in the regiona and abroad.
Instructor: Dr. Larry Yarak
MWF
This course will examine selected topics in the history of the African peoples from the earliest times up to about 1800.
The principal topics include: the origins of humankind in Africa (we are, on the best scientific evidence available, all Africans by descent); the development and spread of food production and
metallurgy; the rise of long-distance trade and the formation aof states and empires; the spread and impact of Christianity and Islam; and the rise of the Atlantic trade in commodities and enslaved Africans and the resultant modern African diaspora. The primary purpose of this course is to provide the student with a foundation for understanding modern Africa through the study of its peoples' early economic, social and political history, and appreciation of their forms of cultural expression: art, architecture, literature (oral and written), and ritual. This course takes both a continental and interdisciplinary approach to the past; that is, it is not concerned with the history of a single nation-state or region, but rather with that of an entire continent, and it makes use of methods and analyses taken from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanitites. Be prepared to learn about new approaches to the study of history and new ways of thinking about Africa!