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AFST B150 Topics in the African American Experience

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Topic will varies.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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AFST B202 Black Queer Diaspora

Fall 2024

This interdisciplinary course explores over two decades of work produced by and about Black Queer Diasporic communities throughout the circum-Atlantic world. While providing an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the Black Queer Diaspora, this course examines the viability of Black Queer Diaspora world-making praxis as a form of theorizing. We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific Black Queer Diasporic forms of peacemaking, erotic knowledge productions, as well as the concept of "aesthetics" more broadly. Our aim is to use the prism of Blackness/Queerness/Diaspora to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies. By the end of this course students will have a strong understanding of how systems of power work to restrict the freedoms of Black Queer and Trans communities, and how Black LGBTQ people have lived, organized, and created in spite of and in response to these oppressions. This interdisciplinary undergraduate upper-level course will utilize academic texts accompanied by poetry, fiction, film, television, and visual art to understand Black Queer and Trans subjectivities.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; History of Art.

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AFST B204 #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere

Spring 2025

#BlackLivesMatterEverywhere: Ethnographies & Theories on the African Diaspora is a interdisciplinary course closely examines political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual mobilizations for Black Lives on local, global and hemispheric levels. We will engage an array of materials ranging from literature, history, oral histories, folklore, dance, music, popular culture, social media, ethnography, and film/documentaries. By centering the political and intellectual labor of Black women and LGBTQ folks at the forefront of the movements for Black Lives, we unapologetically excavate how #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere has a long and rich genealogy in the African diaspora. Lastly, students will be immersed in Black queer feminist theorizations on diaspora, political movements, and the multiplicities of Blackness.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Anthropology; General Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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AFST B206 Black Latinx Americas: Movements, Politics, & Cultures

Not offered 2024-25

This interdisciplinary course examines the extensive and diverse histories, social movements, political mobilization and cultures of Black people (Afrodescendientes) in Latin America and the Caribbean. While the course will begin in the slavery era, most of our scholarly-activist attention will focus on the histories of peoples of African descent in Latin America after emancipation to the present. Some topics we will explore include: the particularities of slavery in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution and its impact on articulations of race and nation in the region, debates on "racial democracy," the relationship between gender, class, race, and empire, and recent attempts to write Afro-Latin American histories from "transnational" and "diaspora" perspectives. We will engage the works of historians, activists, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists who have been key contributors to the rich knowledge production on Black Latin America.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; General Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Museum Studies.

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AFST B234 Advancing Racial Justice: Engaging with Community Organizat

Fall 2024

This course will provide opportunities for students to engage with a diverse group of Philadelphia area community-based organizations and/or the neighborhoods of those they serve. Through time in the field, reflection essays, small group work, and class readings and discussions, students will learn about and how to use racial equity tools (RET) and develop an understanding of: the theories, practices, and levels of DEIAR, the dynamics of system-wide change, and the impact of transformative and restorative justice on individuals, organizations, and communities.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Praxis Program.

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AFST B300 Black Women's Studies

Fall 2024

Black Feminist Studies, which emerged in the 1970s as a corrective to both Black Studies and Women's Studies, probes the silences, erasures, distortions, and complexities surrounding the experiences of peoples of African descent wherever they live. The early scholarship was comparable to the painstaking excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women's literature going back to the nineteenth century. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students closely examine the historical, critical and theoretical perspectives that led to the development of Black Feminist theory/praxis. The course will draw from the 19th century to the present, but will focus on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on "western" and global feminisms. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and of race, to gender, class, and sexuality. We will conclude the course with the exploration of various expressions of contemporary Black feminist thought around the globe as a way of broadening our knowledge of feminist theory.

Writing Intensive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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ANTH B367 Policing the Crisis 2020: Police Narrative and Black Lives Matter

Spring 2025

The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, led to a collapse in public support for the police. Radical demands to defund or abolish the police gained prominence and public legitimacy. This course studies the ways that police and their allies have worked to reassert police authority in the years since 2020. We will draw on Stuart Hall's classic essay, "Policing the Crisis," which examined police propaganda after a similar upheaval in the 1970s. Using Hall's work as a model, we will design and conduct a research project, using archival and qualitative methods to track the reassertion of police authority since 2020. At the end of the course, we will publicize our findings.

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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ARCH B101 Introduction to Egyptian and Near Eastern Archaeology

Fall 2024

A historical survey of the archaeology and art of the ancient Near East and Egypt.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Museum Studies.

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ARTD B138 Hip Hop Lineages

Fall 2024

Hip Hop Lineages is a team-taught practice-based course, exploring the embodied foundations of Hip Hop and its expression as a global phenomenon. Offered on a pass/fail basis only.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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ARTD B141 African Diaspora: Beginning Technique

Not offered 2024-25

The African Diaspora course cultivates a community that centers global blackness, dance, live music, and movement culture. Embody living traditions from a selection of peoples and countries including Guinea, Ghana, Mali, Brazil, and Cuba. Offered on a pass/fail basis only.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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ARTD B210 Sacred Activism: Dancing Altars, Radical Moves

Not offered 2024-25

How do practices of embodiment, choreography, artistry, performance, testifying, and witnessing guide us to transformative and liberation action in our lives? This course excavates the adornment of beings/bodies and the making of sacred spaces for embodied performance, introspection, and ceremonial dance. We will take up the notion of the being/body as an altar and the importance of costume and garb in setting the scene for activism, ritual, and staged offerings. The cognitive has gotten us here, what might continuums of believing in the being/body unveil? Expect to dance, move, write, discuss, create projects, and engage in a variety of textual and media resources. We will work individually and collectively for communal learning. The content for this course will be steeped in the lives, cultures, and practices of black and brown folks. This is a writing and dance attentive course. No dance experience necessary, just courage to move.

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ARTD B348 Ensemble: African Diaspora Dance

Not offered 2024-25

Dance ensembles are designed to offer students significant opportunities to develop dance technique and performance skills. Students audition for entrance into individual ensembles. Original works choreographed by faculty or guest choreographers are rehearsed and performed in concert. Students are evaluated on their participation in rehearsals, demonstration of commitment and openness to the choreographic process, and achievement in performance. Preparation: This course is suitable for intermediate and advanced level dancers. Concurrent attendance in at least one technique class per week is recommended. Students must commit to the full semester and be available for rehearsal week and performances in the Spring Dance Concert.

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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CSTS B108 Roman Africa

Not offered 2024-25

In 146 BCE, Rome conquered and destroyed the North African city of Carthage, which had been its arch-enemy for generations, and occupied many of the Carthaginian settlements in North Africa. But by the second and third centuries CE, North Africa was one of the most prosperous and cultured areas of the Roman Empire, and Carthage (near modern Tunis) was one of the busiest ports in the Mediterranean. This course will trace the relations between Rome and Carthage, looking at the history of their mutual enmity, the extraordinary rise to prosperity of Roman North Africa, and the continued importance of the region even after the Vandal invasions of the fifth century.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; History.

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EDUC B200 Community Learning Collaborative: Practicing Partnership

Spring 2025

One of the four entry-point options for student majoring or minoring in Education Studies, this course is open to students exploring an interest in educational practice, theory, research, and policy. The course asks how myriad people, groups, and fields have defined the purpose of education, and considers the implications of conflicting definitions for generating new, more just, and more inclusive modes of "doing school" informed by community-based as well as academic streams of educational practice. In collaboration with practicing educators, students learn practical and philosophical approaches to experiential, community-engaged learning across individual relationships and organizational contexts. Fieldwork in an area school or organization required

Writing Attentive

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Child and Family Studies.

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EDUC B217 Lessons in Liberation: Rejecting Colonialist Power in Edu

Not offered 2024-25

Formal schooling is often perceived as a positive vestige of colonization, yet traditional practices continue a legacy of oppression, in different forms. This course will analyze education practices, language, knowledge production, and culture in ways especially relevant in the age of globalization. We will explore and contextualize the subjugation of students and educators that perpetuates colonialist power and implement practices that amplify the voices of the marginalized. We will learn lessons in liberation from a historical perspective and consider contemporary influence, with a cross-continental focus. Liberatory education practices have always existed, often on the margins of colonial forces, but present nonetheless. This course will support students' pursuit of a politics of resistance, subversion, and transformation. We will focus on the development of a critical consciousness, utilizing abolitionist and fugitive teaching pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy as tools for resistance. Students will engage with novels, documentaries, historical texts, and scholarly documents to explore US and Cape Verdean education as case studies. In this course, we will consider the productive tensions between an explicit commitment to ideas of progress, and the anticolonial concepts and paradigms which impact what is created to achieve education liberation.

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EDUC B260 Reconceptualizing Power in Education

Not offered 2024-25

The systematic critical exploration of the influence of power in education requires attention and re-conceptualization; this course investigates the following question: how can power be redistributed to ensure equitable educational outcomes? We will examine the production of transformative knowledge, arguing the necessity for including creativity and multi-disciplinary collaboration in contemporary societies. Supporting students' pursuit of a politics of resistance, subversion, and transformation will allow for the rethinking of traditional education. We will also center the intersections between race, class, gender, sexuality, language, religion, citizenship status, and geographic region, assessing their impact on teaching and learning. Weekly fieldwork required.

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EDUC B266 Geographies of School and Learning: Urban Education Reconsidered

Spring 2025

This course examines issues, challenges, and possibilities of urban education in contemporary America. We use as critical lenses issues of race, class, and culture; urban learners, teachers, and school systems; and restructuring and reform. While we look at urban education nationally over several decades, we use Philadelphia as a focal "case" that students investigate through documents and school placements. Weekly fieldwork in a school required.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Child and Family Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Praxis Program; Sociology.

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EDUC B282 Abolitionist Teaching for Education Revolution

Not offered 2024-25

This course will focus on the development of a critical consciousness, utilizing abolitionist teaching pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy, as tools for social transformation and resistance. Postcolonial Theory and Critical Race Theory will be utilized as lenses for understanding the impact of white supremacy in deeply rooted institutions. Formal schooling is often perceived as a positive vestige of colonization, yet traditional practices often continue a legacy of oppression, in different forms. Postcolonial Theory provides a variety of methodological tools for the analysis of education and culture that are especially relevant in the age of globalization, necessitating the reconceptualization of citizenship. Critical Race Theory offers a set of tenets that can be used to contextualize subjugation and implement practices that amplify the voices of the marginalized. Afro-centrism and Critical Black Feminism inform a revolutionized education, which can, and should, support students' pursuit of a politics of resistance, subversion, and transformation. Students will engage with novels, documentaries, historical texts, and scholarly documents to explore US education as a case study. Experiential trips to Afrocentric and non-traditional educational spaces add depth to our work. In this course, we will consider the productive tensions between an explicit commitment to ideas of emancipation and progress, and the postcolonial concepts and paradigms which impact what is created in the achievement of education revolution.

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EDUC B308 Inquiries into Black Study, Language Justice, and Education

Not offered 2024-25

Growing out of the Lagim Tehi Tuma/"Thinking Together" program (LTT), the course will explore the implications for education in realizing the significance of global Black liberation and Black Study/ies-particularly in relation to questions of the suppression and sustenance of language diversity and with a focus, as well, on Pan-Africanism-by engaging with one particular community as a touchstone for learning from and forwarding culturally sustaining knowledge. Prerequisites: Two courses, at least one in Education, with the second in Africana Studies, Linguistics, Sociology, or Anthropology; or permission of the instructor.

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ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.

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ENGL B247 Introduction to 20th Century African American Literature

Fall 2024

This survey course is an introduction to some of the major authors, canonical texts, and defining critical debates of African American literature from 1899-1989. Selected authors will include Angelina Grimké, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. Contending with the entanglements of socio-political and aesthetic questions the course will explore the following themes: the roots of African American literature as a "peasant" literature; the role of white funders and audiences in African American literature; racial uplift ideology and the politics of class; questions of gender and sexuality; the Black Arts Movement; geographical (urban vs rural) divides and ecological elements of the tradition. The course will revolve around close-reading and (written) interpretation within (and beyond) the historical and literary context of the works in question. Readings include novels, short stories, poetry, drama, autobiography and essays from across the 20th century. The course is open to all and assumes no prior knowledge of African American literature.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies.

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ENGL B271 Transatlantic Childhoods in the 19th Century

Spring 2025

This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose American and British experiences of, and responses to, emergent ideas and ideals of childhood in the child-obsessed nineteenth century. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès called the "invention of childhood," we'll explore the ways in which children came to be defined between 1800 and 1900, in relation to such categories as law, labor, education, sex, play, and psychology, through examinations of both "literary" works and texts and artifacts from a range of other discourses and spheres. We'll move between American and British examples, aiming to track the commonalities at work in the two nations and the effects of marked structural differences. Here we'll be especially attentive to chattel slavery in the U.S., and to the relations, and non-relations, between the racialized notions of childhood produced in this country and those which arise out of Britain's sharply stratified class landscape. If race and class are produced differently, we'll also consider the degree to which British and American histories and representations of boyhood and girlhood converge and diverge across the period. We'll close with reflections on the ways in which a range of literary genres on the cusp of modernism form themselves in and through the new discourses of childhood and evolving figures of the child.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Child and Family Studies.

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ENGL B277 Speculative Futures, Alternative Worlds

Not offered 2024-25

Just as colonization is an act of speculative fiction, imagining and violently imposing a different world, so too does decolonization rely on the power of imagination. This course will explore how Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian American cultural producers deploy speculative fiction to interrogate white supremacy and imperialism and to imagine decolonial futures. We will analyze representations of racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, environmental destruction, and anti-immigrant discrimination in works by writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Octavia Butler, Sabrina Vourvoulias, N.K. Jemison, Ken Liu, Alex Rivera, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, as well as anthologies such as Walking the Clouds and Nets for Snaring the Sun. In doing so, we will probe the role that literature, film, and graphic narratives can play in decolonizing knowledge. Students will be also introduced to key theoretical concepts such as modernity/coloniality; ethnic futurisms (Afro-Futurism, Latinxfuturism, Indigenous Futurism, etc.); marvelous realism; survivance, and social death that will help them unpack the critical work accomplished by genre fiction and query the ways in which the aesthetic imagination can contribute to social justice.

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ENGL B307 Literature in and of Philadelphia, 1682-1865

Not offered 2024-25

Love and freedom are words that constantly intertwine in the literatures of Philadelphia's self-fashioning. Known, of course, as the City of Brotherly Love, William Penn's projected utopia of religious freedom was, before the Civil War, the hotbed of political, racial, cultural and sexual revolution. The city where, in the shadow of plague and rising racism, the first non-violent Civil Rights protests took place and where Black Americans forged a literature of both freedom and beloved community. A city where, under lenient Quaker law, marriage laws allowed for greater sexual freedom than elsewhere in the country, where women were better educated than anywhere else in the world, and where experiments in gender equality and indeed, gender diversity, were able to proceed in relative peace. In this course, and in the city itself, we will examine literature written in and about Philadelphia before the Civil War, exploring how and why Philadelphians engaged questions of love, freedom and non-freedom. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program and make use of the city's archives, museums and historical sites.

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches

Spring 2025

How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of "nature," conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign "ecofeminism?" Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls "Black Feminist Ecological Thought."

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.

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ENGL B374 African-American Childhoods

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores the literatures of African-American childhood from the late nineteenth century until the present day. We will explore "classic" works of children's literature by authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Walter Dean Myers, Virginia Hamilton, Jacqueline Woodson, James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, June Jordan, Angie Thomas and others- alongside artifacts from a range of other spheres such as textbooks, chapbooks, and the overall rise of a new child-centered periodical culture at the turn of the twentieth century. We will pay especial attention to the ways in which the intertwined categories of literacy and property have shaped racialized notions of childhood in the United States. In addition to close textual analysis, we will engage with major theoretical works in the field of childhood and identity studies, while also investigating firsthand what can be learned via the physical examination of children's books held in ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥'s Ellery Yale Wood Collection.

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ENGL B382 Speculative Futures, Alternative Worlds

Not offered 2024-25

Just as colonization is an act of speculative fiction, imagining and violently imposing a different world, so too does decolonization rely on the power of imagination. This course will explore how Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian American cultural producers deploy speculative fiction to interrogate white supremacy and imperialism and to imagine decolonial futures. We will analyze representations of racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, environmental destruction, and anti-immigrant discrimination in works by writers, filmmakers, and artists such as Octavia Butler, Sabrina Vourvoulias, N.K. Jemison, Ken Liu, Alex Rivera, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, as well as anthologies such as Walking the Clouds and Nets for Snaring the Sun. In doing so, we will probe the role that literature, film, and graphic narratives can play in decolonizing knowledge. Students will be also introduced to key theoretical concepts such as modernity/coloniality; ethnic futurisms (Afro-Futurism, Latinxfuturism, Indigenous Futurism, etc.); marvelous realism; survivance, and social death that will help them unpack the critical work accomplished by genre fiction and query the ways in which the aesthetic imagination can contribute to social justice.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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FREN B005 Intensive Intermediate French

Fall 2024

The emphasis on speaking and understanding French is continued; literary and cultural texts are read and increasingly longer papers are written in French. In addition to three class meetings a week, students develop their skills in group sessions with the professors and in oral practice hours with assistants. Students use internet resources regularly. This course prepares students to take 102 or 105 in semester II. Open only to graduates of Intensive Elementary French or to students placed by the department or recommended by their instructor from 002 regular. Two additional hours of instruction outside class time required. Additional meeting hours on Tuesday and Thursday will be scheduled according to students availability. Prerequisite: FREN B002IN (intensive) or Placement exam. Approach: Course does not meet an Approach

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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FREN B208 La diversité dans le cinéma français contemporain

Not offered 2024-25

Until the closing years of the 20th century, ethnic diversity was virtually absent from French cinema. While Francophone directors from Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa debunked colonialism and neocolonialism in their films, minorities hardly appeared on French screens. Movies were made by white filmmakers for a white audience. Since the 1980's and the 1990's, minorities have become more visible in French films. Are French Blacks and Arabs portrayed in French cinema beyond stereotypes, or are they still objects of a euro-centric gaze? Have minorities gained agency in storytelling, not just as actors, but as directors? What is the national narrative at play in the recent French films that focus on diversity? Is it still "us against them", or has the new generation of French filmmakers found a way to include the different components of French identity into a collective subject? From Bouchareb to Gomis, from Kechiche to Benyamina and Jean-Baptiste, this course will map out the visual fault lines of the French self and examine the prospects for a post-republican sense of community. This course will be taught in French. Open to non-majors. There will be a weekly screening on Sunday, 7:00pm-9:00pm.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Film Studies.

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FREN B211 The Arts and Healing: The Many Facets of West Africa

Not offered 2024-25

This course will borrow from Achille Mbembe's views of Africa in which it is decolonization that ushered a temporal rupture which made possible a wide array of futures for the continent. After an introduction on the history of the region (background, French influence and gender relations), the 360 students will be able to examine local and global knowledge and their potentialities on the ground through a variety of approaches that include healing practices related to well-being in various areas of life, through the arts, literature, music and film. It is this exchange with both diasporic and local artists and thinkers, through lectures, readings and workshops at ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ and in Senegal that students will be able to find some of the answers this cluster is raising. They will investigate the consequences of decolonization into the present through a series of modules and examine the differences, consequences and overlap of all the knowledge.s, creativity and futures that exist on and for the continent.

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FREN B224 Racisme et antiracisme en France

Not offered 2024-25

Co-constructed with students, this course considers the genealogy of French racism as a socio-political construct and as a system of domination. We will analyze how racism "made in France" was designed, theorized, and deployed, but we will also study how its legacy is deconstructed and questioned by contemporary artists whose work focuses on the French colonial history. Art will be examined as a response to the violence of racism and discrimination - a process by which creators find their agency, their voice, and their strength, emancipating the person from the victimization framework. The class will be taught in French and will include interactions with the artists.

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HART B365 Exhibiting Africa: Art, Artifact and New Articulations

Not offered 2024-25

At the turn of the 20th century, the Victorian natural history museum played an important role in constructing and disseminating images of Africa to the Western public. The history of museum representations of Africa and Africans reveals that exhibitions-both museum exhibitions and "living" World's Fair exhibitions- has long been deeply embedded in politics, including the persistent "othering" of African people as savages or primitives. While paying attention to stereotypical exhibition tropes about Africa, we will also consider how art museums are creating new constructions of Africa and how contemporary curators and conceptual artists are creating complex, challenging new ways of understanding African identities.This course was formerly numbered HART B279; students who previously completed HART B279 may not repeat this course.

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HIST B102 Introduction to African Civilizations

Spring 2025

The course is designed to introduce students to the history of African and African Diaspora societies, cultures, and political economies. We will discuss the origins, state formation, external contacts, and the structural transformations and continuities of African societies and cultures in the context of the slave trade, colonial rule, capitalist exploitation, urbanization, and westernization, as well as contemporary struggles over authority, autonomy, identity and access to resources. Case studies will be drawn from across the continent.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies.

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HIST B156 The Long 1960's

Not offered 2024-25

The 1960s has had a powerful effect on recent US History. But what was it exactly? How long did it last? And what do we really mean when we say "The Sixties?" This term has become so potent and loaded for so many people from all sides of the political spectrum that it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction; myth from memory. We are all the inheritors of this intense period in American history but our inheritance is neither simple nor entirely clear. Our task this semester is to try to pull apart the meaning as well as the legend and attempt to figure out what "The Sixties" is (and what it isn't) and try to assess its long term impact on American society.

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HIST B200 The Atlantic World 1492-1800

Not offered 2024-25

The aim of this course is to provide an understanding of the way in which peoples, goods, and ideas from Africa, Europe. and the Americas came together to form an interconnected Atlantic World system. The course is designed to chart the manner in which an integrated system was created in the Americas in the early modern period, rather than to treat the history of the Atlantic World as nothing more than an expanded version of North American, Caribbean, or Latin American history.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Anthropology; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Peace Justice and Human Rights.

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HIST B212 Pirates, Travelers, and Natural Historians: 1492-1750

Not offered 2024-25

In the early modern period, conquistadors, missionaries, travelers, pirates, and natural historians wrote interesting texts in which they tried to integrate the New World into their existing frameworks of knowledge. This intellectual endeavor was an adjunct to the physical conquest of American space, and provides a framework though which we will explore the processes of imperial competition, state formation, and indigenous and African resistance to colonialism.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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HIST B236 African History since 1800

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Africa since 1800

Not offered 2024-25

The course analyzes the history of Africa in the last two hundred years in the context of global political economy. We will examine the major themes in modern African history, including the 19th-century state formation, expansion, or restructuration; partition and resistance; colonial rule; economic, social, political, religious, and cultural developments; nationalism; post-independence politics, economics, and society, as well as conflicts and the burden of disease. The course will also introduce students to the sources and methods of African history.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; International Studies; International Studies.

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HIST B237 Themes in Modern African History

Section 001 (Spring 2024): Public History in Africa

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies; Museum Studies.

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HIST B243 Topics: Atlantic Cultures

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Maroon Communities - New World

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Current topic description: The course explores the process of self-emancipation by slaves in the early modern Atlantic World. What was the nature of the communities that free blacks forged? What were their relationships to the empires from which they freed themselves? How was race constructed in the early modern period? Did conceptions of race change over time?

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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HIST B265 Colonial Encounters in the Americas

Not offered 2024-25

The course explores the confrontations, conquests and accommodations that formed the "ground-level" experience of day-to-day colonialism throughout the Americas. The course is comparative in scope, examining events and structures in North, South and Central America, with particular attention paid to indigenous peoples and the nature of indigenous leadership in the colonial world of the 18th century.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; International Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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HIST B337 Topics in African History

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Cities, Epidemics, Pandemics
Section 001 (Spring 2024): Hist of Global Health Africa
Section 001 (Spring 2025): Cities, Epidemics, Pandemics

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Topics vary.

Current topic description: In recent decades, the world has experienced an increasing threat for public health from the emerging infectious diseases that have provoked epidemics and pandemics. The course will focus on the impact of epidemics and pandemics on cities in Africa. We will discuss the issues of public health history, social and cultural history of disease as well as the issues of the history of medicine. We will examine the histories of global initiatives to control disease in Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective (history, and social and biomedical sciences), using case studies from across the continent.  We will explore various themes, such as the anxiety and panic caused by the disease outbreaks; the state, medical, and popular responses; the politics of disease control; the conflicts of interests between the interests of commerce, public health and civil liberties; and the health disparities within cities. We will focus on the colonial and postcolonial cities in Africa. We will also explore the questions regarding the sources of African history and their quality.

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies; International Studies; International Studies.

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HIST B349 Topics in Comparative History

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Topics vary.

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HLTH B115 Introduction to Health Studies

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

The multidisciplinary foundation for the health studies minor. Students will be introduced to theories and methods from the life sciences, social sciences, and humanities and will learn to apply them to problems of health and illness. Topics include epidemiological, public health, and biomedical perspectives on health and disease; social, behavioral, and environmental determinants of health; globalization of health issues; cultural representations of illness; health inequalities, social justice, and health as a human right.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Health Studies.

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INST B210 Popular Uprisings in Global Perspective

Not offered 2024-25

In recent years, popular uprisings and protest movements have mobilized hundreds and thousands of people in different parts of the world to demand a radical overhauling of existing systems and changes in political leadership. These uprisings have raised a series of questions that will be the focus of this class. What are the catalysts, underlying causes and demands of these protest movements? What can we learn from the grassroots organizing that allowed these movements to gain momentum? All too often popular uprisings in the Global South in particular, are seen as representing the failures and limits of revolutionary action and politics rather than their potential and promise. What then, do recent popular uprisings reveal about the limitations and relevance of various theoretical approaches to explaining revolutionary phenomena and action? How might local scholars and activists analyzing the popular uprisings taking place in their countries, allow us to develop new vocabularies and frameworks for understanding popular protests and revolutionary action elsewhere? Students will explore these questions through a series of case studies including Sudan, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, France, Ethiopia and India.

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INST B301 Politics of Aid and Humanitarianism

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores the relationship between humanitarian aid, politics and the legacy of colonialism. Our goal will be to historicize and contextualize humanitarian policies and practices through specific case studies which can include, but will not be limited to: Haiti, Sudan, USA, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Palestine, Somalia, Brazil, Nicaragua and the Philippines. We will use these case studies to explore topics such as the militarization of aid and the politicization of emergency assistance. We will also be looking to non-traditional sources such as novels, films, NGO documents and congressional hearings to gain insight from the perspectives of those impacted by and/or shaping humanitarian policies and practices. Finally, we will examine the ways 'non-Western' actors and humanitarian organizations are reshaping the field of humanitarianism and relationships across the Global South more broadly.

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ITAL B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Not offered 2024-25

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? In this course we will read some pivotal theoretical texts from different fields, with a focus on race&ethnicity and gender&sexuality. Each theory will be paired with a masterpiece from Italian culture (from Renaissance treatises and paintings to stories written under fascism and postwar movies). We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shaped what we are reading. Class conducted in English, with an additional hour in Italian for students seeking Italian credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Comparative Literature; English; French and Francophone Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; German and German Studies; History of Art; Philosophy; Russian.

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ITAL B218 Early-Modern Intersections: A New Italian Renaissance

Fall 2024

The period or movement commonly referred to as the Renaissance remains one of the great iconic moments of global history: a time of remarkable innovation within artistic and intellectual culture, and a period still widely regarded as the crucible of modernity. Although lacking a political unity and being constantly colonized by European Empires, Italy was the original heartland of the Renaissance, and home to some of its most powerful and enduring figures, such as Leonardo and Michelangelo in art, Petrarch and Ariosto in literature, Machiavelli in political thought. This course provides an overview of Italian culture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century by adopting a cross-cultural, intersectional, and inter-disciplinary approach. The course places otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins, with the main aim to look at pivotal events and phenomena (the rise of Humanism, courtly culture, the canonization of the language), not only from the point of view of its protagonists but also through the eyes of its non-male, non-white, non-Christian, and non-heterosexual witnesses. The course ultimately challenges traditional accounts of the Italian Renaissance by crossing also disciplinary boundaries, since it examines not only literary, artistic, and intellectual history, but also material culture, cartography, science, technology, and history of food and fashion. All readings and class discussion will be in English. Students seeking Italian credits will complete their assignments in the target language.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; History; History of Art.

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PE(D) B111 Hip-Hop: Lineages

Fall 2024

Students learn basic movements from hip-hop, funk, house, breakin' and other contemporary urban styles. The course aims to expand the student's dance skills while increasing their knowledge of the history of hip-hop and providing a sophisticated understanding of the potential of hip hop as an art and social form. This course is open to all levels of experience. (Full Semester, 2 PE Credits)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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POLS B243 African and Caribbean Perspectives in World Politics

Not offered 2024-25

This course makes African and Caribbean voices audible as they create or adopt visions of the world that explain their positions and challenges in world politics. Students learn analytical tools useful in understanding other parts of the world. Prerequisite: POLS 141 or 1 course in African or Latin American history.

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POLS B368 Comparative Racial Justice Movements, US and South Africa

Not offered 2024-25

The movements against white supremacy in South Africa and the United States during their respective eras of apartheid and Jim Crow are known to have intersected with one another, and many of their participants understood them as part of the same global struggle. But how well do the South African anti-apartheid movement and the American civil rights movement compare with one another? Even if the contours of their enemy-state-sponsored, systemic racism-were remarkably similar and the movements had overlapping ideological foundations, they still faced different political opportunity structures that shaped their trajectories. In the first half of the course, we will compare these two movements-their ideologies, their strategies, their obstacles, their successes, and their failures-in order to better understand what it means, and what it takes, to mount a movement for racial justice in a white supremacist society. In the second half of the course, we will then look at contemporary movements in the two countries in order to understand the possibilities for racial justice movements when de jure apartheid and segregation have (largely) been defeated. It is now, with South Africa lacking any sort of real Black Lives Matter movement, that it seems that the two countries have finally parted ways. Our job will be to understand why and how that is the case, but also to consider whether there is as much divergence as it appears. Can we situate service delivery protests in the Black South African townships and BLM marches in the United States within the same struggle that anti-apartheid freedom fighters and civil rights activists knew they shared? Prerequisite: At least one previous class in Political Science or Africana Studies or permission from the professor.

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SOCL B200 Urban Sociology

Not offered 2024-25

How do social forces shape the places we live? What makes a place urban? What is a suburb and why do we have them? What's environmental racism? Why are cities in the US still highly racially segregated? We will take on these questions and more in this introduction to urban sociology. Classic and contemporary urban social theories will inform our investigations of empirical research on pressing urban issues such as housing segregation, the environment, suburbanization, transportation and inequality. The course has a special focus on the social, economic and political forces that shape in urban space in ways that perpetuate inequality for African Americans.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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SOCL B225 Women in Society

Fall 2024

In 2015, the world's female population was 49.6 percent of the total global population of 7.3 billion. According to the United Nations, in absolute terms, there were 61,591,853 more men than women. Yet, at the global scale, 124 countries have more women than men. A great majority of these countries are located in what scholars have recently been referring to as the Global South - those countries known previously as developing countries. Although women outnumber their male counterparts in many Global South countries, however, these women endure difficulties that have worsened rather than improving. What social structures determine this gender inequality in general and that of women of color in particular? What are the main challenges women in the Global South face? How do these challenges differ based on nationality, class, ethnicity, skin color, gender identity, and other axes of oppression? What strategies have these women developed to cope with the wide variety of challenges they contend with on a daily basis? These are some of the major questions that we will explore together in this class. In this course, the Global South does not refer exclusively to a geographical location, but rather to a set of institutional structures that generate disadvantages for all individuals and particularly for women and other minorities, regardless their geographical location in the world. In other words, a significant segment of the Global North's population lives under the same precarious conditions that are commonly believed as exclusive to the Global South. Simultaneously, there is a Global North embedded in the Global South as well. In this context, we will see that the geographical division between the North and the South becomes futile when we seek to understand the dynamics of the "Western-centric/Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system" (Grosfoguel, 2012). In the first part of the course, we will establish the theoretical foundations that will guide us throughout the rest of the semester. We will then turn to a wide variety of case studies where we will examine, for instance, the contemporary global division of labor, gendered violence in the form of feminicides, international migration, and global tourism. The course's final thematic section will be devoted to learning from the different feminisms (e.g. community feminism) emerging out of the Global South as well as the research done in that region and its contribution to the development of a broader gender studies scholarship. In particular, we will pay close attention to resistance, solidarity, and social movements led by women. Examples will be drawn from Latin America, the Caribbean, the US, Asia, and Africa.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.

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SOCL B276 Making Sense of Race

Spring 2025

What is the meaning of race in contemporary US and global society? How are these meanings (re)produced, resisted, and refused? What meanings might we desire or imagine as alternatives? In this course, we will approach these questions through an array of sources while tracking our own thinking about and experiences of raced-ness. Course material will survey sociological notions of the social construction of race, empirical studies of lived experiences of race, and creative fiction and non-fiction material intended to catalyze thinking about alternative possibilities.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.

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SOCL B324 Du Bois and Sociology: The Racialized Self in Modernity

Not offered 2024-25

W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered a liberatory sociology of emancipation grounded in rigorous empirical investigation of social problems and a theory of the racialized self in modernity. In this course, we will examine the Du Boisian roots of American sociology, studying some of his most influential texts for insights into how sociology can address important current public conversations about dismantling racist and exploitative structures of oppression.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: Africana Studies.

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SOCL B329 Race, Class & Gender: Intersectionality & the Social World

Not offered 2024-25

This course takes an in-depth look into how racism, classism, and sexism perpetuate inequality as well as scholarly debates and engagements with intersectionality theory. We will critically engage with intersectionality theory and explore scholarship that applies intersectionality theory to a variety of social arenas including families, activism, education, sexuality, politics, health, work, and more. By the end of the course, you should be able to identify contemporary scholarly debates surrounding intersectionality theory and evaluate its applications across sociological works. Throughout the semester we will practice synthesizing readings, crafting original arguments, and critical writing skills.

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SOCL B338 The Black Diaspora in the US: African and Caribbean Communities.

Not offered 2024-25

An examination of the socioeconomic experiences of immigrants who arrived in the United States since the landmark legislation of 1965. After exploring issues of development and globalization at "home" leading to migration, the course proceeds with the study of immigration theories. Major attention is given to the emergence of transnational identities and the transformation of communities, particularly in the northeastern United States.

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