Course Offerings (GSAS Bulletin)

Proseminar in Africana Studies
G11.2000  Core requirement. 4 points.
Introduces incoming M.A. students in Africana studies to significant areas and topics of research as well as the primary methods of inquiry that have defined the study of African and African diasporic cultures, their political economies and histories since the mid-16th century. The course explores concepts and methods that intersect knowledge and their production in Africa and its worldwide diasporic communities. The course examines these broad themes in Africa and the new world as well as in Europe and Asia Pacific. Topics include Pan-Africanism, nationalism and nationalist movements, civil rights and independence movements, urban social and political issues, cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, migration and immigration, black feminism, and black cultural studies.
 
Seminar: Visual Studies
G11.2303  4 points.
This seminar explores how the trope of “blackness” is mediated over a range of ideas, images, and expressions of social difference in cinema. Screenings and readings examine how popular cinema, ranging from black independence to the commercial “mainstream,” deals not only with issues of race and color, but how these issues intersect, and interact, with other social categories of difference(s) mainly related to class, sexual orientation, and gender but including many others. The course explores such issues as seeing beyond the “black-white binary” model of race relations; gendered perspectives on “blackness” and black women’s filmmaking; the cultural and political dynamic between blackness and gayness on the screen; and issues of class, caste, and “colorism” in cinema. The course also examines a number of ideas and theories related to the material, including passing, double consciousness, unmarked difference, and creolization.

Colloquium in Women’s History: Race and Reproduction
G11.2600  4 points.
From the policies, priorities, and perversions of slave owners to the pronatalist campaigns of colonial Africa, to the family planning programs that are a hallmark of liberalism and development in the postcolonial world, and, most recently, to the promotion of assisted reproduction technologies among western elites, race and reproduction have always been among the primary axes on which large-scale political, economic, cultural, social, and intellectual processes are configured. Because reproduction connects the intimate experiences of individuals to larger historical structures and forces and because reproduction is such a fundamental (if varied) biological and social experience, this topic in particular lends itself to comparative work. This course explores issues in the history of race and reproduction, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on American and African contexts. This cross-cultural breadth helps students to consider the relationship between biological experiences (which are often portrayed as universal) and sociocultural context. Through readings, students consider how different disciplinary orientations (social history, medical anthropology, feminist theory, art history, etc.) approach women’s history both methodologically, theoretically, and in terms of narrative and analytic strategies.

Exodus: The Politics of Black Liberation
G11.2610  4 points.
Seminar on the struggle for cultural and political autonomy in the United States among African Americans, primarily in the urban North, who rejected the church-based nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. Focuses on
the “Negro” or African side of what
W. E. B. DuBois called Afro-American “double-consciousness.”

To the Mountaintop: The Movement for Civil Rights
G11.2612  4 points.
Seminar on the struggle to end racial segregation and discrimination in the former slave societies of the United States. Focuses on the “American” side of what W. E. B. DuBois called the Afro-American “double-consciousness.”

Steal Away: African Atlantic Religious Culture
G11.2614  4 points.
This seminar is a comparative study of African Atlantic religious celebration, primarily in the context of Afro-Christianity, but touching on Islam, “Voodoo,” Santería, and Candomblé. Although designed for graduate students, this seminar is also open to seniors with a GPA of 3.65 or better, who may choose to take the seminar on a pass-fail basis.

Topics in Postcoloniality
G11.2645  4 points.
Explores and interrogates the notion of the “postcolonial” in relation to certain key aspects of contemporary African and/or Caribbean societies, cultures, and histories. Individual areas of investigation include theories of Africa and Africans, Caribbean literary theory, modern postcolonial theory and its applicability and relevance to recent developments in the African continent and its diaspora, new identity formations, African and Caribbean cultural studies, nationalism and the nation-state, creolization, and theories of resistance.

Haiti in the Caribbean Context
G11.2652  4 points.
Francophone communities in the Caribbean are as different from each other as they are different from their Anglophone and Hispanophone neighbors. This course concentrates on the representation of Haiti, arguably the most distinctive Caribbean country in the region and the second independent republic in the hemisphere, in the imagination of Caribbean writers. It is as much an introduction to key issues in Haitian politics, history, and culture as an investigation of the impact of Haiti on the rest of the hemisphere. The latter aspect of the course is examined through a number of texts that react to Haiti and are drawn from literature for the most part but also from history and anthropology in the 20th century.

Resiting Resistance: From Nation to Diaspora in Caribbean Writing
G11.2654  4 points.
In the islands of the Caribbean archipelago, plantation slavery and later schemes of indentureship left in their wake diverse groups of people who were cut off from their communities of origin. Ethnic and cultural heterogeneity was further intensified by prolonged periods of colonization, making Caribbean societies some of the oldest colonies in the West. Because of their unusual hybrid genesis, they could neither be seen as “western” nor could they be considered “native,” that is, distinctly “other.” This course looks at the Caribbean archipelago in terms of its fragmented island spaces, the dominance of the sea, and the influence of the Atlantic world. Theorizing Caribbean identity is treated not in terms of an inherent wholeness or cultural unity in the region but of open-ended cultural interaction. Caribbean literary theories manifest a connectedness and cross-cultural relocation that mark all the major literary movements. Some of the central paradigms addressed are nationalism, cosmopolitanism, creolization, and relationality.

Afro-Latino Culture and History
G11.2802  4 points.
Latinos are now called “the nation’s largest minority,” outpacing African Americans and thereby signaling a benchmark in the changing meaning of what it means to be American. In public accounts of this dramatic shift, Latinos are commonly counterposed against African Americans in mutually exclusionary terms: either you are Hispanic or you are black. Little if any attention goes to the huge though uncounted black Latino population, the group that fits neatly in neither the Hispanic nor the black category and yet may play a decisive role in the emerging cultural configurations and political alignments of our times. This course examines the profound sociological and cultural implications of the growing Afro-Latino presence in light of recent theorizing on race and diasporas. After an overview of the historical background of African-descendant peoples in the Spanish-speaking Americas, the course then traces the longstanding social experience of black Latinos in the United States. Along with a discussion of migration patterns and community formations, there is a focus on narrative accounts of Afro-Latino life and on the traditions of cultural expression; special attention goes to Afro-Latino poetry and to the rich history of Afro-Latino music through the generations, from rumba, mambo, and Cubop to salsa, Latin soul, and hip-hop. Finally, the course turns to the possible theoretical and political consequences of this increasingly self-conscious transnational identity formation.

A representative sample—not an exhaustive list—of affiliated courses in other departments follows.

CINEMA STUDIES

Third World Cinema
H72.1107  4 points.

Brazilian Cinema I
H72.2117  4 points.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Topics in Caribbean Literature
G29.2650  4 points.

FRENCH STUDIES

France and Francophone Africa
G46.2412  4 points.

HISTORY

African American History
G57.1782  4 points.

African Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade
G57.2555  4 points.