Framed as a historical introduction to Islamic traditions, this course will explore the political, social, and intellectual histories of Islam as a global tradition from its emergence through the modern period. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the central texts, personalities, events, geographies, institutions, and schools of thought that make up Islamic histories. We will begin by tracing Islam’s political history as it spreads from the Arabian Peninsula and encounters diverse cultures and peoples, before moving on to discuss the development of intellectual sciences and social institutions. In the process of studying Islamic histories, the course will engage several critical issues in the academic study of Islam such as orientalism, authority and writing history, authenticity, and gendered representations of Muslim societies.

Location

Morey Room 502 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)

This course invites you to learn about Black history, life, and experience through the field of Black Studies. During the 1960s, a wave of student activism — amid a period marked by broader social activism, Black freedom struggle, and decolonial movements — echoed across the United States. Legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism were being challenged in all edges of American society. Through sit-ins, strikes, and protests, activists along with community members and organizers sought to compel colleges and universities to recognize the importance of studying Black life, history, and culture. This grassroots movement laid the foundation which led to the formation of Black Studies as a field across campuses.

This course will begin by first establishing a shared understanding of Black Studies, including its historical origins and key theories, concepts, methods, and debates. We then draw on insights that span the humanities and social sciences, including literature, popular culture, music and engagement with cultural studies, history, political theory, and ethnography. Ultimately, we will bridge the historical and contemporary, exploring how insights from Black Studies are essential for addressing present-day challenges and struggles for justice. 

Location

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

This course surveys African American literature of a variety of genres—poetry, drama, autobiography, fiction, and non-fiction—with a focus on the 18th and 19th Centuries. The course interprets this tradition not only as the production of American writers of African descent, but also as a set works that display formal characteristics associated with black cultural traditions. Discussion topics include the meanings of race, the construction of black identity, and literature as historical document. Special attention will be paid to approaching literary texts from a variety of critical perspectives. Featured writers include Phillis Wheatley, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet W. Wilson, Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and more. Course requirements include two formal writing assignments, bi-weekly reading responses, and class participation.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 315 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

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)

Led by Master Drummer Fana Bangoura, the West African Drumming Ensemble is dedicated to the dynamic percussive traditions of Guinea. The ensemble combines the iconic djembe hand drum with a trio of drums played with sticks, known as dunun, sangban, and kenkeni. The powerful, multi-part relationships established by this trio of drums provide a rhythmic foundation for the ensemble, enabling djembe players to develop technique in executing both accompaniment and solo parts. Drawing upon his experience as a soloist with the internationally acclaimed groups Les Percussions de Guinée and Les Ballets Africains, Fana engages ensemble players with a wide repertory of music from various regions of Guinea, including the rhythms of the Susu, Malinke, and Baga language groups.

Location

Strong Auditorium Room 011 (MW 6:30PM - 7:45PM)

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: One of the following: DANC181 & 182, DANC 283, DANC 253, DANC 285. For Drummers one of the following: MUSC 168A, MUSC 168B, MUSC 146 OR to audition, email kerfala.bangoura@gmail.com. 

Location

Spurrier Gymnasium Room 104 (TR 7:00PM - 8:15PM)

This course explores the origins and development of the rift between the Global North and Global South since the fifteenth century, with a focus on how ordinary women and men of the Global South reorganized their lives to meet the challenges and opportunities offered by the following developments in the Global North: the crisis in European feudalism, rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the “new” imperialism of the late nineteenth century. The final section of the course discusses the worldwide impact of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions of the twentieth century.

Location

Morey Room 504 (TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Focusing on works of art, festival arts, art historical writing, and cultural theory from the Caribbean diaspora and particular Caribbean nations, territories, and overseas departments—this course will explore how artists have redefined or expressed blackness. Through examination of varying depictions of Black life, we will ask how have people resisted antiblackness in a region molded by racialized colonial hierarchies and cultural standards?  What constitutes blackness across the Caribbean and how has its definition shifted and multiplied? What constitutes the Caribbean, and in turn Caribbean art?

Location

Hylan Building Room 203 (MW 4:50PM - 6:05PM)

This course deals with questions raised at the intersection of constitutional law and sociological and political science studies of the politics and practice of race in the United States. While studying major court decisions concerning race and slavery, voting, property rights, segregation/de-segregation, criminal justice, voting, discrimination, and affirmative action, we will examine questions such as: what is the role of the legal system in constituting and perpetuating the racial order of the United States? To what extent do court rulings reflect more than they shape what actually happens outside of the legal system? How, if at all, do they shape public opinion? What are the advantages and disadvantages of courts as a tool for social change? Do answers to these questions vary by area of law and/or historical period? The course is largely discussion-based and will include readings in case law, critical legal studies, critical race theory, and works in political science and sociology.

Location

Dewey Room 2110D (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

As this year marks the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop, this course wishes to explore one of the most genius art forms produced across the black diaspora. Taking notes from graffiti artists, beat-makers, DJ Cool Herc, LL Cool J to Queen Latifah, Lil Kim to Lil Nas X, Kanye to Drake, Young Thug to Post Malone, Nicki Minaj to Meghan Thee Stallion,  Cardi B and many more—we will engage the (non)rigor of gender across this global phenomenon. Particularly, we will examine the representation of genders in hip-hop music and culture— as they are performed, produced, and communicated in the visual, sonic, and textual forms. The complex representation of Black people in the context of hip-hop requires much conversation, especially as Black gender and sexuality has a historical position in the underbelly of our society. What is produced in mainstream performances of hip-hop? What are the stakes for Black women and Black men, as the circulation of their likenesses are tethered to diverse messages? What do we miss when the beat or the rhyme is prioritized? How do black femme, trans, non-binary, and queer masculine folks inform the music and culture? Where is Hip-Hop going and what is it teaching us about the possibilities for our (non)gendered futures?

Location

Dewey Room 2110D (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Does it matter where our power comes from? Why or how and to whom? This course uses anthropological case studies of different kinds of energy sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, water, solar, wind) and different kinds of electrification (centralized grids versus micro-grids) around the world to think about the relationship between energy, environments, power, and culture with a specific focus on intersectional gender and sexuality. How do energy practices and cultural norms of racialized gender shape each other in various places around the world, and to what effects? What might empirical attention to how people talk about and use energy help us to understand about the energy transitions and climate crises of the 21st century?

Location

Morey Room 205 (MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM)

Addressing the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS in the United States, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Haiti, and elsewhere, this uniquely interdisciplinary course will incorporate insights from the fields of public health, medical anthropology, and ethnomusicology. Studying the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the lens of musical expression, we will ask how individuals and communities affected by HIV/AIDS have mobilized musical sound in response to the disease. Topics addressed within the class will include musical representations of HIV/AIDS within queer communities; the use of music in public health campaigns to raise awareness about the disease; and the mobilization of musical performance within grassroots support groups for individuals affected by HIV/AIDS.

Location

Lattimore Room 540 (TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

This course examines some of the major public policy issues affecting the Black community.  We begin with a survey of the public policy making process at the local and federal levels.  The rest of the course deals with the specific groups, conflicts, institutions, and structural constraints governing the formation of public policy in the areas of education, poverty, affirmative action, and crime.  We will ask questions about the origin and nature of the problems in these areas, the explanations of why some policies and not others have been adopted, and the strengths and weaknesses of competing policy solutions.

Location

Meliora Room 219 (MWF 9:00AM - 9:50AM)

Experience dancing African styles from traditional cultures of Guinea, West Africa, as well as studying cultural history and context from which and in which they are practiced and performed. Technical emphasis will focus on musicality and complex choreographic arrangement. Students will practice dances and drum songs. Required outside work includes performance attendance, video viewing, text and article analysis, research and written work.

Location

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

Lorraine Hansberry, on March 1, 1959, delivered the closing address of the American Society of African Culture's “First Conference of Negro Writers.” Hansberry advocated for transnational black solidarity, rooted in her belief “that the ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African people and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever.” On October 25, 1963, Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, in a speech at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, called for the study of Africa to be African-centered and be concerned with peoples of African descent in the Americas and the Caribbean. Nkrumah was mandating the African scholar with duty of becoming an active agent in the production of knowledge about the Black Diaspora of the Americas and the Caribbean. Shortly before his death, Malcom X articulated the “importance of realizing the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country and the struggle of our people in the world”. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination invites the student to be attentive to the forces that are shaping global black studies, a field that encompasses a wider scope of expression of Africans and people of African descent arising out of shared historical determinants such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and other racialized oppressive ideologies. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination acknowledges the centrality of the African American experience in the construction of a global blackness shaped shared experiences of oppression struggle, and emancipation. Representing African Americans in the African Imagination focuses on the representation of the Black American experience in the literary and cultural productions of Africans, Antilleans, and Black Europe. Taught in English.

Location

Lechase Room 163 (MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

How does Black Paris, as the lived experience of today marginalized immigrants, as a site of the production of a certain understanding of blackness, contribute to our understanding of the global black condition? This course is a study of Black Paris, as imagined by generations of Black cultural producers. Paris is a space of freedom and artistic glory that African American writers, soldiers and artists were denied back home. For students from French colonies, Paris was the birthplace of Negritude, the cultural renaissance informed by the Harlem Renaissance. Black Paris, for those caught in poor suburbs, calls to mind images of riots, dilapidated schools, but also rap music and hip-hop, elements of transnational black imagination that sometimes speaks the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In English

Location

Lechase Room 161 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

The peoples of southern Africa’s fifteen states freed themselves from the yoke of European and settler colonialism in different ways. In some countries, Africans pursued, from the time of World War II, a nationalist agenda whose principal objectives were limited to political independence. In other colonies, however, frustrated nationalists became revolutionaries, determined to achieve both political and economic autonomy. With the support of peasants and workers, the radicalized leadership launched guerrilla wars that turned portions of southern Africa into bloody battlefields from the late 1960s to the fall of apartheid in 1994.

Location

Morey Room 504 (R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is a survey of some of the canonical and some of the most exciting contemporary works in the field of African-American political thought. We begin with foundational texts from Walker, Delany, Douglass, Wells, Du Bois, Garvey, Baldwin, King, and Malcolm X. In the first half of the course we will focus on questions such as: What is the nature of the wrong(s) African Americans have suffered in the United States? What sustains systems of domination and exclusion? What responses, in addition to condemnation, do these systems of domination merit? What does the long history of white domination in the United States say about ideals of liberalism and democracy? And what is the way forward? In the second part of the course, we will read contemporary works dealing with reparations, collective responsibility, obligations to solidarity/allyship, and epistemologies of ignorance.

Location

Lechase Room 163 (MWF 11:50AM - 12:40PM)

The purpose of this course is to explore what has been called "democratic community economics" (Jessica Gordon-Nembhard) and its relevance for addressing deep, persistent political-economic problems in African American Communities. The focus will be on a set of alternative institutional arrangements including producer and consumer cooperatives, community development credit unions and community land trusts and specifically their roots in African American politics, their various current manifestations, and their potential contemporary policy relevance for promoting sustainable, local, community development.

Location

Harkness Room 210 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

Taught by a long-time member of Les Ballets Africains, the national ballet of Guinea, instructor Fana Bangoura will introduce students in this course to dynamic dance traditions of West Africa and will join with them the power of percussion. Students will also become familiar with the origins and cultural significance of each dance, and the songs that accompany them. By breaking down the drum parts alongside the traditional dance movements, students experience dancing and drumming in perfect unison. This opportunity is geared for both drummers and dancers and is highly recommended for all skill levels.

Location

Todd Union Room 107 (WF 4:50PM - 6:05PM)

Monsters in popular culture represent and reinforce the changing thoughts and emotions toward what it means to be human and fit for society. When it comes to race, gender, and sexuality, popular culture has often used monsters to destroy or discipline individuals who live outside societal norms. This is called the making of black monstrosity. This course takes this historical trend seriously, diving into the ways monsters have been used to harm Black people, but also how notions of the black monster has been deployed as tool of revolt against unjust society. Turning to case studies, primarily within the twenty-first century--from visual black monstrosity in cinema, animation, digital art, and comics—we will explore how a certain monster-imaginary contributes to the discourse and perception of race and racialized bodies in America.

Location

Hylan Building Room 202 (MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM)

Sansifanyi offers experienced dancers the opportunity to study West African dance forms as well as studying cultural history and context from which and in which they are performed at a professional level. This course requires a high degree of student commitment. Dancers who enroll in Sansifanyi will learn choreographic techniques for West African dance and gain experience dancing as soloists. They will also focus on rhythmic timing, and on advanced skills such as how to combine movement with drumming. In addition to the time students spend in class, dancers in the ensemble are expected to spend several hours per week researching, reading, writing, viewing videos, text and article analysis, practicing, and choreographing various rhythms, songs, movements, and sequences. Dancers must also be available for performances both on and off campus throughout the semester.   Clusters: Improvisation and the Creative Process, Movement and Culture, Dance and Performance. Prerequisite: Audition on first day of class or for dancers, one of the following: DANC 181/182, DANC 283, DANC 253, DANC 285: For drummers one of the following: MUSC 168A, MUSC 168B, MUSC 146

Location

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

Are we experiencing the end of the world? Popular culture and the media broadcast endless news suggesting the end of human civilization: infertility crises, weather disasters, GMO monsters, class warfare, mass extinction, infectious diseases, even zombies. This course investigates representations of environmental apocalypse and the new geological era of the Anthropocene in order to understand the cultural politics and history of anxiety about end-times and the meaning of nature, planet, and ecology in our lives.

Location

Hylan Building Room 105 (MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This seminar engages the experiences, writings and political ambitions of individuals typically excluded from discussions of the Atlantic. Key concepts such as Atlantic creoles and the Black Atlantic will be debated in light of recent studies on Sephardic merchants, African healers and Native American intellectuals. In order to contextualize their lives, this course will focus on the Iberian and South Atlantic from the early sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Our initial readings will center on the circulation of Native American commoners and elites to Spain and will be complemented by seminal ethnohistorical studies. The second part of the course will take on the construction of a South or Lusophone ocean that weaves together the histories of Brazilian, Angolan and Portuguese actors. Students will revise and resubmit an original research paper on a topic of their choice.

Location

Rush Rhees Library Room 305 (M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is an introduction to the study, practice, and politics of Black feminist theory. In this class, we will delve into the historical, theoretical, political, and creative expressions of this school of thought from the nineteenth century to the present. To achieve this, we will engage a wide variety of critical, cultural, and creative texts including but not limited to journal articles and essays, speeches, literature, performance, music, film, and so on. We will additionally incorporate a variety of intersectional perspectives on Black feminist theory with regards to race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, nation, etc. In so doing, the class aims to examine the relationship between theory and praxis in the development and ongoing evolution of the history, politics, activism, and art of Black feminisms.

Location

Lechase Room 141 (TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM)