This course uses film, novels, and historical studies to examine the following themes in the making of modern Africa: the forging of new national identities, creation of wage laborers, and the restructuring of agricultural work, gender, and social age. Students will also explore how African women and men have sought to redefine their place in the global economy before, during and after the Cold War, against the backdrop of new opportunities and challenges presented by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, hunger, international debt, and engagement with China.

Location

Morey Room 501 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

When Oprah Winfrey founded a secondary school for girls in post-apartheid Johannesburg, she was following a long tradition of African American solidarity with the equally oppressed black population of South Africa. Forged in the 1780s by black north Atlantic mariners, the solidarity would encompass the following areas of life before and during the apartheid era: evangelical ties between African American churches and South Africa’s independent church organizations; the spread of the ideals of Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, impact of the Harlem Renaissance on African popular township culture, and the cross-fertilization of political ideologies originating on both sides of the Atlantic. This course is about South Africans’ dreams for liberation, dreams that were realized when Cuba’s armed intervention helped liberate Angola, Namibia, and ultimately apartheid South Africa and its global allies.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 304E (W 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Engaging an extraordinary diversity of sound, this course explores some of the world's major traditions of musical performance, including classical, ritual, and ceremonial music from around the globe. Through weekly reading and listening assignments, we will study musical sound structures within a variety of social, political, and religious contexts, investigating relationships between music, people, and place. In addition to well-known modes of music making, we will look at many fascinating but less familiar forms of musical expression, such as aboriginal pop music from Australia, the throat-singing traditions of Tuva and Mongolia, and the freedom songs of South Africa. The course will culminate in a semester-long final project.

Location

Strong Auditorium Room 011 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This introductory survey focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese conquests and colonization of the region that we now know as Latin America. Contrary to popular belief, the Conquest was constantly negotiated. Indigenous and African rebels, French and Dutch pirates and religious minorities eroded the Iberian hold on this vast territory. Primary source readings are an important component to this class and will introduce you to the writings of Inca nobles, Spanish conquistadors, and free African merchants. As a result, our course focuses on the vibrant societies defined as much by their cultural mixture as by their inherent political, social and economic inequality. The course ends with a brief glimpse at the Latin American independence movements. No prior knowledge of Latin American history or Spanish/Portuguese language is necessary for this course.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 270 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Humans and machines, infrastructure and architecture, community, and culture: how do these relationships shape our imagination of sounds and music? Through practice-based research, we will explore the aural environments generated by the industrial and post-industrial history of cities along the Rust Belt, studying, for example, how Industrial Fordism’s merger of human and machine informed the rise of sample culture and machine-based rhythm and music. Using Detroit as our case study, we will examine how African-American arts, culture, and history, combined with the rise of the automobile industry, produced Detroit Techno as way for artists to respond to the sonic architecture of their environment. Meanwhile, we will be making our own field recordings of our local urban environments and electronically processing them into tones and beats, and then sequencing and mixing our research into sonic productions using non-screen-based hardware devices. Not open to seniors.

Studio Art lab supply fee applied.

Location

Sage Arts Center Room 103 (MW 10:25AM - 1:05PM)

The Eastman Mbira Ensemble provides a hands-on introduction to the ancient and sophisticated musical tradition of the Shona mbira of Zimbabwe. Visiting Zimbabwean guest artists will also offer students the opportunity to delve more deeply into traditional musical practices and their cultural and spiritual context. Songs are taught aurally so no musical experience or training is required. May be repeated for credit.

Location

Eastman Theatre Room B12A (M 6:30PM - 8:00PM)

In this course, students will work on expanding their repertory of rhythms from Guinea, West Africa, and on improving their playing technique on the djembe, dunun, sangban, and kenkeni. In particular, we will concentrate on learning extended solo sequences for the djembe, and more advanced arrangements played on the dunun, sangban, and kenkeni. Students will also work on developing skills specific to performance, adding choreographed onstage movement to complement their drumming. Pre-requisite: At least one semester of previous enrollment in the Intro West African Percussion Ensemble.

Location

Dewey Room B315 (MW 6:30PM - 7:45PM)

An art form of self-defense with aerobic and dance elements that brings together these harmony of forces. Through looking into history, movement and culture, students will gain self-confidence, power, flexibility, and endurance in a positive environment with proper progressions. Open to those of any background and fitness level. Capoeira allows you to balance the body, mind, and soul by enabling one to break through limits and revitalize oneself for everyday life.

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (MW 6:30PM - 7:50PM)

Sansifanyi is an ensemble that provides various performance opportunities both on and off-campus for intermediate and advanced students of African dance & drumming. Instructor Kerfala Bangoura trains ensemble members in a performance style that integrates dance, drumming, vocal song, and narrative elements. Dancers who enroll in Sansifanyi will learn choreographic techniques for West African dance and gain experience dancing as soloists. Dancers will also learn focus on rhythmic timing and on drumming while dancing. Drummers enrolled in Sansifanyi will learn extended percussion arrangements and techniques for accompanying choreography. They will also learn how to play the breaks required of lead drummers. 
Prerequisites: Audition on first day of class OR for Dancers one of the following: DAN181&182, DAN283, DAN253, DAN285. For Drummers one of the following: MUSC168A, MUSC168B, MUSC146. Email kerfala.bangoura@gmail.com with questions.

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (TR 6:45PM - 8:15PM)

Originated in the boroughs of New York City, hip hop has grown to become a global phenomenon, influencing the lives of countless individuals with the core ideals of peace, unity, love and having fun. The class will provide a look into the historical origins and social importance of hip hop culture. The main focus will be on the original dance of hip hop culture - breaking, (also known as bboying). The class format is geared towards physical movement along with lectures, videos and opportunities to attend events in the community.

Location

Todd Union Room 107 (MW 8:00PM - 9:15PM)

Since the turn of this century, there’s been an outpouring of film and television adaptations written and directed by black artists. Among the most recent is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2022 Hulu miniseries of Octavia Butler’s 1979 speculative fiction novel Kindred. As well as Barry Jenkins’s Academy Award-winning film Moonlight (2016), adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished semiautobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. And outside the US there’s plenty more, like Wanuri Kahiu’s groundbreaking Rafiki (2018), which the filmmaker based on Monica Arac de Nyeko’s short story “Jambula Tree,” shifting the setting from Uganda to Kenya. In this course we’ll move through a series of pairings, studying the adapted film or series alongside the work that inspired it. What gets lost, what remains, and what’s created anew when a work of literature moves to the screen? We’ll study fiction, film, and television from around the world, looking at how black artists from North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean reimagine the work of others. Our readings and screenings will lead us to an array of topics, such as slavery, transnational migration, colorism, time travel, and perhaps most persistently, the space of black queer desire and belonging.

Location

Lechase Room 143 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

American Culture? Is there such a thing? This class will explore, discuss and debate this question and some more: If there is an American culture, how can we tackle it? How does anthropology, famous for its research away from home, help us understand current major debates in the United States? How do outsiders understand and evaluate American culture? Is there a return of religion to American public life? How do Americans address power relations, class, gender, ethnicity and race? To tackle these questions we will use assigned readings, films, and current events seen through print and electronic media.

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (F 10:00AM - 12:20PM)

This course explores the relationship between the environment and social inequality, focusing specifically on issues of gender, race, and class. Is there a connection between sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction? Using intersectional feminist analysis, we will investigate the historical roots of modern dualist constructions that juxtapose humans and the environment, men and women, creating an anthropocentric, racialized, and gendered framework that produces and maintains social inequalities and a destructive attitude toward the environment. Topics may include the following: historical ideas about nature and environment; eco-imperialism; eco-feminism; climate change and its connection to issues of race, gender, and class; justice and sustainability; poverty and natural resources; food justice; natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and their context, and others. The course features an optional three-day excursion to the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness.

Location

Morey Room 501 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This upper-level seminar will analyze the arrival of over 6 million Africans to Latin America and their impact on the Portuguese and Spanish societies of the Western Hemisphere from 1500 to 1867. We will properly begin the study the African Diaspora in Latin America by studying the transition from Indigenous slavery to African slavery in Bahia, Brazil. The following weeks will cover the emergent demand for African laborers in the urban centers of Mexico, Colombia, Cuba and Peru. Throughout the class we will study the creative and creolizing cultural processes that accompanied the African presence in the region.

Location

Genesee Hall Room 308 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

This course provides an introduction to the key concepts and theories in the field of Black Geographies. We will draw on a range of interdisciplinary texts to explore how Black communities continue to shape and interact with space, place, and the environment. In doing so, we will pay particular attention to Black place making, memory work, and spatial politics. In addition, we will explore how the field of Black Geographies provides us with tools to further understand political struggles against legacies of anti-Blackness, enslavement, colonialism, carcerality, and policing. 

This course has three main areas of focus: First, we will read foundational texts in order to establish a shared basis for what constitutes Black Geographies, as well as the origins of the field of study. Next, we will work through key branches of Black Geographies, with focus areas that include racial capitalism; plantation logics; diaspora; gender and sexuality; food; ecology, carcerality and policing; and urban space. Lastly, drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s premise that “freedom is a place”, we will explore the transformative visions of Abolition Geography. 

Location

Lattimore Room 413 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Autobiography is the foundation of the tradition of African American literature. It is also a genre that performs the construction of identity and represents the role of narrative in that process. Therefore, autobiography is not only “writing about a life by oneself,” but also the life of the self in the form of writing. This course surveys the tradition of autobiographical writings by African Americans, from slave narratives to recent bestsellers, in order to promote an understanding of autobiography as a narrative form shaped by its historical context as well as the imagination, memory, aesthetic choices, and political purposes of the author. In addition, the course provides students with insights into African American culture and history.  Readings include texts by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Barack Obama, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X, and more. Requirements include two formal writing assignments, bi-weekly reading responses, and participation in class discussion.

Location

Meliora Room 224 (MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course provides a comprehensive survey of African American theatre history and African American dramatic literature from the 1970s until the contemporary period. In this course, we will explore the historical, political, and aesthetic influences that Black theatre has had on African American history and culture. In doing so, we will witness changing and often challenging perceptions, responses, and critiques to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. With an emphasis on dramatic literature, the course aims to engage students with the development of Black theatre and performance in America. Thus, this course will ruminate on the following questions: What is a Black play? What is the relationship between Black theatre and the broader American theatre? How has Black theatre and performance been utilized as a site of political resistance? How have Black theatre and performance contributed to Black identity formation?

Location

Hylan Building Room 206 (MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

In Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon wrote, “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” In the United States, popular cultural understandings of race have often located blackness within the body: in DNA, in blood, in skin, in hair texture, in facial features. How does race get mapped onto the body? In this interdisciplinary course on race and embodiment, students will encounter texts and writing assignments prompting them to think critically about how black bodies ‘matter’ in the contemporary U.S. Course materials and assignments will encourage students to explore how blackness intersects with other social categories such as gender and class at the site of the body, while exploring how these categories are socially constructed and can and should be troubled, blurred, and contested in the practice of social life. The dual themes of intersectionality and visuality will act as a frame for our explorations.

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

In this course we will slowly, closely, intensely, and meditatively study novels by Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, Linda Hogan, and Leslie Marmon Silko. And we will also learn how to narrate and write our own environmental stories.

INSTRUCTOR PERMISSION REQUIRED. NOT OPEN TO SENIORS.

Location

Lechase Room 124 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Students will experience dancing African styles from the traditional cultures of Ghana and Guinea, West Africa. Technical emphasis will focus on foot patterns and placement, as well as developing the proper physical stance for African dance styles. Students will practice the dances and drum songs called Kpanlogo & Gota from Ghana, and Yankadi, Makru, & Kuku from Guinea, as well as various other selections. Outside work is required, including performance attendance, video viewing, article analysis, and journaling. Students can expect to gain a broadened perspective on contemporary West Africa and its cultural practices.

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

The goal of this class is as straightforward as it is difficult: our aim is to become better listeners.  We will work toward this goal by listening to what the sounds, sights, and cultural narratives of Japanese hip hop have to tell us about Japan, America, race, ethnicity, transpacific confluence, the ethics of performance, and other pertinent topics.  After a brief discussion of the common characteristics of good listeners, we begin by reviewing foundational works of hip hop studies on both sides of the Pacific.  From here, we move to the history of hip hop in Japan.  We will also consider the proliferation of hip hop culture across Japanese artforms and platforms (anime, television, film, street art, novels, political protests, and so on).  In order to provide a point of comparison, this course also includes an "interlude" on jazz Japan.  All viewings, listenings, and readings will include English subtitles.

Location

Lattimore Room 401 (F 4:50PM - 7:30PM)

This course will examine the varieties of thought about, and practice of, civil disobedience within social movements, with an emphasis on contemporary activism. When, why, and how do communities choose to push back against structures of violence and injustice? Throughout the semester, we will study canonical texts? of modern resistance history speeches, writing, direct action protests, art and will consider the role of this form of counter-conduct within larger campaign strategies to build power from below and get free.

Location

Meliora Room 224 (T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is about the politics of racial subordination and emancipation in the United States.  We begin by thinking about different explanations of the rise, dynamics, and persistence of racial domination in the United States and of the cultural and political challenges to it.  We will pay special attention to the Great Migration, the subsequent emergence of blacks as an important constituency of the Democratic Party, the Civil Rights Movement, and the role of race in structuring current party divisions.  Next, we will examine the politics of black communities.  Topics include the legacy of the demobilization of the Civil Rights movement and the channeling of political activity into electoral institutions; the politics of urban regimes; the challenge to political solidarity posed by increasing economic and social inequality within the black community; the Black Lives Matter movement; and debates about the effectiveness of identity-based, class-based, and coalitional strategies of political mobilization.  In conclusion, we will reflect upon the differences between the nature and dynamics of racial subordination today compared to the past and what, if any, prospects for change there are.

Location

Gavett Hall Room 202 (WF 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

Female genital cutting encounters vaginal cosmetic surgeries at the intersection of poverty and wealth, race and class, barbaric practices and the pleasure principle. Bodies of poor, African, and mostly black women and children embody a fateful condition that can be redeemed by technologies of progress and humanitarian discourses. This course invites students to challenge assumptions related to agency, race, class, the representation of the body, and the fragmented transnational sisterhood. The discussion expands to bodies caught in domestic violence, rape, lynching, and skin whitening. Readings and films: Alice Walker's "Warrior's Marks" and "Possessing the Secret of Joy"; "Manya Mabika"; "Fantacola"; "Sarabah"; "Women with Open Eyes"; "Black Sisters, Speak Up"; "The Suns of Independence"; "Desert Flower"; and Maryse Condé's "Who Slashed Célanire Throat?" Conducted in English.

Location

Lechase Room 182 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (TR 6:45PM - 8:15PM)

Experience in an applied setting supervised on site. Approved and overseen by a University instructor.

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed thru the instructions for online independent study registration.

Independent research courses provide students an opportunity to conduct original research that makes an intellectual or creative contribution to their discipline or assist with faculty-led research.