Undergraduate Course List
*All courses are 3 credits unless noted otherwise
AFROAM 101. Introduction to Black Studies, 4 credits (I,DU)
Interdisciplinary introduction to the basic concepts and literature in the disciplines covered by Black Studies. Includes history, the social sciences, and humanities as well as conceptual frameworks for investigation and analysis of Black history and culture.
AFROAM 111. Survey African Art
Major traditions in African art from prehistoric times to present. Allied disciplines of history and archaeology used to recover the early history of certain art cultures. The aesthetics in African art and the contributions they have made to the development of world art in modern times.
AFROAM 113. African Diaspora Arts
Visual expression in the Black Diaspora (United States, Caribbean, and Latin America) from the early slave era to the present.
AFROAM 117. Survey of Afro-American Literature, 4 credits (AL,DU)
The major figures and themes in Afro-American literature, analyzing specific works in detail and surveying the early history of Afro-American literature. What the slave narratives, poetry, short stories, novels, drama, and folklore of the period reveal about the social, economic, psychological, and artistic lives of the writers and their characters, both male and female. Explores the conventions of each of these genres in the period under discussion to better understand the relation of the material to the dominant traditions of the time and the writers' particular contributions to their own art. (Planned for Fall)
AFROAM 118. Survey of Afro-American Literature II, 4 credits (AL,DU)
Introductory level survey of Afro-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, including DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Walker, Morrison, Baraka and Lorde. (Planned for Spring)
AFROAM 132. African-American History 1619-1860, 4 credits (HS,DU)
This course will examine important developments and issues in African American history from the initial arrival of African slaves to Virginia until the Civil War. We will focus on the Black experience under slavery and the struggle for emancipation. Key topics to be discussed include the Atlantic slave trade, the evolution of African American communities and culture, free Black communities, the distinct experience of Black women, and Black protest traditions. (Planned for Fall)
AFROAM 133. African-American History Civil War-1954, 4 credits (HS,DU)
Major issues and actions from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Focus on political and social history: transition from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction; the Age of Booker T. Washington; urban migrations, rise of the ghettoes; the ideologies and movements from integrationism to black nationalism. (Planned for Spring)
AFROAM 151. Literature & Culture, 4 credits (AL,DU)
This course explores relevant forms of Black cultural expression that have contributed to the shape and character of contemporary Blackness. Topics to be discussed will include West African cultural patterns and the Black past; the transition-slavery; the culture of survival; cultural patterns evident in literature; and Black perceptions versus white perceptions.
AFROAM 155. Revolutionary Concepts in Afro-American Music I
Introduction to history of Black music from its African origins to the end of the 19th century. (Planned for Fall)
AFROAM 156. Revolutionary Concepts in Afro-American Music II, 4 credits (AT,DU)
This course will examine the development of African-American music during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century with a particular focus on links to the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, the Post Civil Rights era, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. In particular, the class will survey the varied styles, productions, and receptions of artists including Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Booker T. & the MGs, Sun Ra, The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Blackstar, The Roots, Lauryn Hill, India Arie, Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monae, Chance the Rapper, J Cole, among others. (Planned for Spring)
AFROAM 161. Introduction to Afro-American Political Science, 4 credits (SB,DU)
Survey of the politics of the Black community in the U.S. The history of Black political development, major theories which explain Black political life, social, economic, psychological and institutional environment from which Black politics flows. Attention paid to 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and its relevance to the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
AFROAM 170. The Grassroots Experience in American Life and Culture I, 4 credits (HS,DU)
This course combines instruction in research techniques in a variety of Humanistic and Social Science disciplines, and hands-on experience with those techniques, with substantive materials focusing on the long struggle of minority populations for full participation in American cultural and public life.
AFROAM 171. The Grassroots Experience in American Life and Culture II
This course investigates the life and struggles of African and African American peoples. Students will be introduced to Humanistic and Social Science research methods and are required to undertake a substantial piece of individual research.
AFROAM 190G. Racism: the American Experience
Some present-day examples of racism in the workplace and criminal justice system. The roots of racism in North America. Examination of the various uses and purposes of racism as they developed over the course of the nation's history. The World War II incarceration of Japanese-Americans and the FBI's suborning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The investigation and analysis of contemporary racism as expressed in, and revealed by, the print media of today.
AFROAM 192F. Freshman Survival Techniques, 1 credit
This course helps first-year students transition from high school to college. Students will be matched with peer mentors and academic advisors; learn effective study and time management skills; explore various topics that deal with academics and social issues; and receive assistance with securing internships, co-ops, and summer employment.
AFROAM 196D/ 196E. Drum Circle Part I and II
Although recreational drum circles are a means for having fun and reducing stress, traditional drum circles have been around for centuries and almost always occur for specific reasons (e.g. annual celebrations, festivals, ceremonies, etc.). Often times society may ignore the spirit of the drumming tradition and its various cultural origins and this has recently produced a growing void between traditional playing, recreational drumming and even ballet style performances across the world. But the fact is that West African and various other world percussion rhythms are being adopted by various people, including western countries such as the U.S. Respecting the context and background of these rhythms ensures that we are acknowledging the long, rich history of the drum. The significance of this will be explored to the best of our ability in this 1-credit course.
AFROAM 197A/197B. Taste of Honey: Black Film in the 1950s
This course is a part of the Afro-American Studies department partnership with the Center for Multicultural Advancement and Student Success (CMASS) and the Malcolm X Cultural Center (MXCC) enrichment programming initiative. The purpose of this class is to raise awareness of and exposure to different cultural backgrounds that will enhance student personal development while promoting a better understanding of our diverse community. This course will take you on an historical journey exploring the roles of African American men and women highlighting their contributions and struggles in the American movie industry. Students will learn about the ground breaking movies, roles and actors who helped pave the way for a future generation while breaking down racial barriers to tell the story of the African American experience. A selection of movies will explore a variety of topics such as, race, gender and stereotypes while reflecting on how these characteristics have been portrayed. We will introduce you to a sampling of movies made during the decades from the 1960s to the early 2000s.
AFROAM 222. Black Church in America
Survey of West African religions. The development of the Black Christian Church in its visible and "invisible" institutional forms during the colonial period, and the merging of these two branches, free and slave, following the Civil War. Also the emergence of Holiness and Pentecostal sects, the impact of urban migrations on black spiritual expression, the Black Church and civil rights, gender issues, and the recent challenge of Islam.
AFROAM 232. History of Black Nationalism
Black nationalism in the United States, beginning with voluntary associations developed by free blacks in the late 19th century up to the Afrocentric "hip-hop" expressions of the 1990s. The interrelationships between the economic, political, and cultural forms of African American nationalism analyzed along with its secular and religious expressions. The intimate connections between nationalist and assimilationist tendencies in African American life.
AFROAM 234. The Harlem Renaissance, 4 credits (AL,DU)
Exploration of the cultural explosion also termed the New Negro movement, from W.E.B. Du Bois through the early work of Richard Wright. Essays, poetry, and fiction, and the blues, jazz, and folklore of the time examined in terms of how Harlem Renaissance artists explored their spiritual and cultural roots, dealt with gender issues, sought artistic aesthetic and style adequate to reflect such concerns. Readings supplemented by contemporary recordings, visual art, and videos.
AFROAM 235. Black Sociological Thought
Assessment of current sociological views of the African-American experience.
AFROAM 236. History of the Civil Rights Movement, 4 credits (HS,DU)
This course examines the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954 and through the rise and decline of Black Power. We will investigate the lives and influence of major movement leaders, as well as major organizations of the period including SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP; and the collective efforts of ordinary citizens who did extraordinary things. We also will pay attention to the Civil Rights Movement in the South, as well as the North and West; the work of gender and sexuality; and different philosophical and tactical strands of the movement, including nonviolent demonstrations and black nationalism.
AFROAM 238. Arts and Cultural Identity
Explores the arts as they are used to express cultural identity. It will examine various genres of art by artists of color and their application of cultural and social issues to their work. Using the exhibits and performances presented in the Augusta Savage Art Gallery, the curator will draw on those presentations for discussions and critiques of the arts as reflective of culture and as historical record. The course will include readings by and about artists, video viewings, the creation of arts projects, and discussions about the relationship of creativity to cultural expression.
AFROAM 243 Afro-American Folklore
A close look at the origins, variety, nature, and functions of Afro-American folklore, including contexts for collecting and understanding it and its manifestations in literature and popular music.
AFROAM 244. Afro-Am Poetry: Beginning to 1900, 4 credits (AL,DU)
This is a discussion-based course that will read black poetry as a response to both historical and contemporary contexts. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Frances E. W. Harper, and Paul Laurence Dunbar alongside some lesser-known African American poets from the pre-1900 period. We will also read some recently published poems and collections that take up historical questions and their traces in the present (including the transatlantic slave trade, regimes of enslavement, anti-blackness, racist science and medicine, state and police violence, and sexual violence). Students will also be introduced to poetry criticism and other relevant secondary literature. The work for the class will include two shorter response papers (rooted in close reading); one creative project; and a final research paper that will incorporate secondary sources.
AFROAM 245. The Slave Narrative
An examination of the African American genre of slave narratives, from the shortest paragraph-long examinations to book-length manifestations that captured the imaginations of 19th century America and the world. The course will encompass issues of race, gender, sexuality, and historical and literacy contexts of important narratives, which may include those of Olaudah Equiano, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as modern and contemporary narratives influenced by the genre.
AFROAM 250. African American Short Stories, 4 credits (AL,DU)
Students in this course will receive an introduction to the African American short story and to the major themes, issues, concepts, as well as the literary techniques and forms prevalent in African American literature.
AFROAM 252. Afro-American Image in American Writing
Examination of a representative sampling of poetry, prose and/or drama by American writers -- black and white, male and female -- depicting African-American characters and issues related directly to the lives of African Americans. Texts chosen from the works of such authors as Jefferson, Poe, Stowe, Melville, Douglass, Delany, Dunbar, Eliot, Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Styron, Baraka, and Morrison. We will analyze and interpret material in light of issues of race, gender, class, politics, historical time frame, and artistic aesthetic, in order to characterize the depictions of African-Americans in the works, and to understand what those depictions reflect about individual writers, about segments of American society, and about American society as a whole.
AFROAM 253: Pre-Civil War Black Writers
A survey of African American and Black Atlantic writings in the Age of Revolution, from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the Civil War, with particular emphasis on how writers negotiated the promises and ideals of the revolutionary period. Course considers a variety of genres (autobiography, speeches, fiction, drama, poetry, etc.) and explores how different forms of writing were mobilized in the struggle for emancipation. Other topics may include the beginnings of the African American novel; the drama of slavery; relationship between written and expressive culture; speeches and Abolitionism; the rise of black periodical and pamphlet culture; black narratives in the Atlantic World, including slave narratives, travelogues, natural histories, and other fictional and non-fictional accounts.
AFROAM 254. Introduction to African Studies, 4 credits (HS,DU)
Introduction to Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective. The chronological sequence from pre-history to contemporary times. Political development and processes, the arts, ethnography, social structures, and economies.
AFROAM 257. Contemporary African-American Novel
Survey of the Black novel from 1940 to the present; major Black novelists of the contemporary period. Emphasis on what these novelists have to say about the black experience in the latter half of the 20th-century. Themes include alienation and identity, revolution, and existentialism. Attention to the styles of various writers and their use of the language.
AFROAM 262. Radical Traditions in American History
The rise and fall of various radical movements in the United States from the American Revolution to the 1960s. The success and limitations of ideologies and strategies adopted by American radicals to address the problems of political inequality and social injustice. Topics include abolitionism, labor movements, populism, socialism, feminism, and the civil rights movement.
AFROAM 264. Foundations of Black Education in the U.S., 4 credits (HS,DU)
The education of blacks from Reconstruction to 1954. Includes public schools, colleges, and non-school education. The involvement of religious associations, philanthropic organizations, the Freedman’s Bureau, the Black church, and the Federal Government will also be discussed.
AFROAM 265. The Blues Came Down Like Dark Night Showers of Rain
A comprehensive exploration of the African American musical genre known as the blues, including definitions; African and African American roots; social, psychological, and spiritual uses; common and uncommon themes and images; music and lyric structures; regional and chronological stylistic variations; and employment in African American literature. Includes live performances and a wide variety of recordings, films, and videos. No prior knowledge of the blues or reading knowledge of music required.
AFROAM 290G. Introduction to Black Global Studies
This course uses the critical methodologies of the humanities and social sciences to consider some of the questions provoked by African and African diasporan experiences. Course materials will allow students to survey the lasting contributions of Africans and their descendants to the development of various world civilizations and examine historical relationships between the individual actors and larger social forces. The five major themes that we will use to comprehend the experiences of African-descended peoples are Beauty, Identity, Power, Visions of the Past, and Visions of the Future.
AFROAM 291A. Student Activism in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements
Throughout the era of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, young people were often in the vanguard impacting and affecting change, as leaders and as major participants in the struggles for social justice. Young people, including elementary, high school, college, and university students throughout the country, willingly put their lives and academic futures at risk for the purposes of a greater good. This course will cover student activism during the major turning points from the 1950s through the 70s. Topics to be covered will include: the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision, the Montgomery Movement, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Rides, the Sit-In Movement, and the Black Studies Movement. The course will look at student activism of such Civil Rights and Black Power Movement groups as the NAACP, SCLC, NAG, SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panther Party. Attention also will be given to the groups formed by the Black Feminists during the 1970s.
AFROAM 291E. The Black Seventies Through Film
This course focuses on the cinematic representations of African Americans in the 1970s, a crucial transitional era marked by the demise of racial segregation and the fulfillment of formal political and civil rights for Black Americans on the one hand, and the decline of the quality of life in urban centers and unprecedented rates of incarceration on the other. How did 1970s filmmakers engage with and refute dominant cultural and Hollywood images of African Americans while crating a cinematic language specific to African American experiences? Discussion topics include: “The Ghetto Aesthetic;” “Beyond Hollywood: African American Art Cinema;” “Interrogating Blaxploitation;” “Uses of Music;” “Gender Portrayals;” “The Black Hero.”
AFROAM 291F. Black Caribbean Literature
A variety of literary genres as well as critical essays authored by Black Caribbean writers from the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean will be analyzed during the course of the semester. While attention will be given to historical and cultural context, emphasis will be placed on literary analysis of texts. The readings selected will cover slavery, colonialism, anti-colonialism, race/colorism, gender, Creolization, language, orality, and diaspora.
AFROAM 291L. Losing Gender (meets with WGSS 291L)
This course will take seriously the claim that gender is anti-Black, that slavery marked an epochal rupture and that slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human. Following the work of Hortense Spillers' Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, this course is interested in thinking through how the politics gender differentiation was and still is central to black subject making in the New World. One of the objectives for this course, is to develop a way to advocate for a politics vested in the abolition of gender in the long run and in the short-run, doing the work in thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality has been vital to subject making.
AFROAM 290AA. Slavery and Diaspora in the Atlantic World
This survey of slavery's history in the Atlantic World between the late 15th and late 19th centuries examines the world created by the transatlantic slave trade, a world in which coerced black labor was at the center of European colonization projects and the rise of Western capitalism. This course employs a comparative and transnational framework; throughout the semester, students will encounter slave societies throughout the Atlantic World, ranging from West Africa to the Caribbean to North America. Subjects covered include the slave trade, the creation of diasporic cultures and communities, the labor of slavery, strategies of slave resistance, and the transatlantic struggle for slavery's abolition. Special attention is given to the lives and experiences of enslaved people themselves.
AFROAM 293B. The African Diaspora & the War on Drugs
This course explores the decades-long drug prohibition campaign popularly known as the “War on Drugs.” With the U.S. federal government regularly appropriating more than $50 million to this campaign, African Americans continue to find themselves disproportionately impacted by this regime of drug prohibition. Rather than remaining confined to the borders of the United States, this campaign, and its increasingly militarized operations, has over the past several decades spread throughout the Western hemisphere and, in doing so, directly impacted people of African descent throughout the Americas. By drawing on historical, biographical, and journalistic accounts of Black peoples' lived experiences, this course examines the elaboration of this campaign’s military, institutional, legal and policy frameworks. It will consider various activities – including, but not limited to drug production, trafficking and consumption, as well as community organizing, human rights advocacy, and social movement building – by Black people not only in the U.S., but across North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean basin. The Reagan era Drug Wars and the ongoing opioid epidemic will be critical to this course, as they best highlight divergent strategies of law enforcement and public health responses to issues of drug use and addiction, as well as the roles of race, class, and gender in shaping these divergent responses. From here, this course will also explore various approaches to bringing about an end to the Drug Wars and remedying their impacts.
AFROAM 293C. Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
What is race? What is sexuality? And how did early American history shape the legal structures that would come to define racial and sexual identities and possibilities? In this course, students will examine how African, European, and Native American ideas about race and sexuality influenced the development of colonial, early Republican, and antebellum America, with a special focus on the evolution of American legal frameworks undergirding racial and sexual hierarchies. Topics covered include initial encounters between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; the birth and evolution of racial slavery; interracial sex and marriage; citizenship and belonging; and legal and extra-legal violence.
AFROAM 293E. The Afro-American Press
The black press is a critical—but often ignored—aspect of African American history and culture. The black press has been central to community formation, protest and advocacy, education and literacy, and economic self-sufficiency. The black press has always been a source of black American political power and social change. Since the earliest known black-owned and published newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was founded in 1827, the black press has provided a public sphere for an aggrieved community barred from mainstream channels of discourse. This course will examine the history and the role of the press, in abolition and civil rights spanning two centuries.
AFROAM 293G. From Environmental Racism to Climate Justice
This course explores the emergence of the modern environmental justice movement in the United States during the 1980s and 90s, with a key focus on its impact on the more recent emergence of a worldwide struggle for climate justice. It will note how the EJ movement coined the term “environmental racism” and made calls for unique approaches to knowledge production, participatory democracy, and environmental sustainability. More specifically, this course focuses on the emergence of a broad network of grassroots organizations – “a movement of movements” – that reoriented what the environment and what justice are understood to mean amongst Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities over the past four decades.
This course will also pay particular attention to the ways in which these ideas around the environment and justice continue to shape the development of climate activism, both in the United States and around the world, with a key focus on how those involved in this activism have also come to understand themselves as part of a broad network of grassroots struggles highlighting the local impacts of climate change. From here, this course will examine key facets of today’s climate movement, including the fight pipelines, the struggle against disaster capitalism, the conceptualization of the Anthropocene, and how growing debates around militarism, decolonization, ecosocialism, and industrial sabotage.
AFROAM 293J. Black Women, Representation, and Power in Africa and the African Diaspora
This course explores histories, cultures, and contemporary socio-political issues of relevance to women of African descent across the geographical spectrum of the Pan-African world: Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and North America. What representations and stereotypes do others have of Black women? And how do Black women challenge misrepresentations and define themselves? The course begins by exploring ideas of feminism, black feminism, and womanism/Africana womanism as relevant ideologies for women of African descent. The course then uses novels, ethnographies, journal articles, and videos from Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the United States and other countries to examine issues of identity, cultural representation, and self-definition for Black women. Topics covered include colonialism, sex tourism, skin-bleaching and colorism, intersectionality and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, stereotypes of Black women, reproductive justice and Black maternal mortality, Black girl’s games, and women in Hip-Hop, etc.
AFROAM 293N / 293P. Voices of New Africa House, Part I and II
A mixed-voice choral music class celebrating two methods of teaching: by ear to perform a cappella and by sheet music containing arrangements for 4-part harmony with piano accompaniment. Learn to sing material from the African-American song-style canon. We will study and perform music created in the 17, 18 and 19th centuries beginning with creations by slaves in the United States through the 20 and 21st century’s contemporary sounds. Other genres we will explore come under the umbrella of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul, funk and folk music. Additionally, we will explore compositions from many European masters. In other words, we will learn to perform songs from around the world.
AFROAM 295P. Policing, Protesting and Politics: Queers, Feminists and BlackLivesMatter#
(meets w/WGSS 295P)
Over the past year few years, a powerful social movement has emerged to affirm to the country and world that Black Lives Matter. Sparked by the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Stanford, Florida, and Zimmerman's acquittal as well as the police killings of other black men and women, including Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, and Freddie Gray, this movement challenges police violence and other policing that makes black communities unsafe as well as social constructions of black people as inherently dangerous and criminal. Police violence against black people and the interrelated criminalization of black communities have a long history, older than the US itself. There is a similarly long and important history of activism and social movements against police violence and criminalization. Today, black people are disproportionately subject to police surveillance and violence, arrest, and incarceration. So, too, are other people of color (both men and women) and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people of all races but especially those of color. This course will examine the history of policing and criminalization of black, queer, and trans people and communities and related anti-racist, feminist, and queer/trans activism. In doing so, we will interrogate how policing and understandings of criminality - or the view that certain people or groups are inherently dangerous or criminal - in the US have long been deeply shaped by race, gender, and sexuality.
AFROAM 297A. Black Springfield: Revisited
African American urban studies is a vibrant area of intellectual inquiry. This course will acquaint you with a variety of disciplinary tools for studying African American life in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, our urban neighbor just 25 miles away. We will start with a broad survey of the city's history that began when William Pynchon and a company of Puritan men from Roxbury, founded Springfield in 1636 at the confluence of three rivers. Pynchon established a trading and fur-collecting post and enslaved Africans became a vital part of its labor force. Springfield officially became a city in May of 1852, but by then slavery had ended and the city had developed a reputation as a Underground Railroad depot thanks to antislavery freedom fighters like Thomas Thomas, Eli Baptist, and John Brown. Springfield's location at the crossroads of New England is the most significant reason for its economic progress as an industrial city. In 2010, Springfield was a city of 156,060 that was 22.3% Black or African American, and 4.7% from Two or More Races (1.5% White and Black or African American). Latin@s of any race made up 38.8% of the population (33.2% Puerto Rican). It is a multicultural community, and is the regional center for banking, finance, and courts. Field trips to important sites, interviews with Ms. LaJuana Hood, founder of Springfield's Pan African Historical Museum USA, as well as other important culture bearers, will be special facets of the course. Community engaged research will be emphasized.
AFROAM 297B. Black Workers in the U.S.
This course will attempt to accomplish two goals; to examine some of the significant issues in the history of African American workers since Emancipation and to introduce you to some of the most recent scholarship addressing those issues. We will begin with general studies of the history of capitalism in the U.S. and Black workers then proceed to a study of 1) The role of Black labor in several industries, 2) Black woman as workers, 3) Black labor and the Black power movement and 4) Herbert Hill’s critiques of organized labor and the labor history establishment.
AFROAM 297D. The African American Image in Film
This course focuses on the cinematic representations of African Americans in film from the 1890s to the present day. What were the dominant racial and gender images of African Americans that emerged during the slavery era? Why did such images achieve such popularity in film? How did black filmmakers engage with and refute dominant cultural and Hollywood images of African Americans while creating a cinematic language specific to African American experiences? What transformations have occurred in the images of African Americans in film since World War II, and especially since the 1960s?
AFROAM 297F. Black Women in the Americas and the Caribbean
This course will survey the historical, political, economic and socio-cultural realities that Black women in the Americas and the Caribbean have faced and continue to face. A variety of readings by and about Black women will highlight the ways in which race, class, and gender combine to operate in the lives of Black women. Special attention will be paid to Black women as laborers, Black women as political activists, and the various ways in which Black women in the Americas and the Caribbean experience race and gender.
AFROAM 297G. Contemporary Issues in Afro-American Education
This course will build upon a historical perspective in order to examine current issues affecting African-Americans in the US education system. Topics covered will include the causes and consequences of the black-white academic achievement gap, continued racial segregation across and within schools, and affirmative action among others. Designed as the second part of a two-part education sequence. (AFROAM 264 is the first part but is not required to take the course).
AFROAM 297R. Race at Work: African Americans in the Labor Movement
This course explores African American labor, reaching from slave emancipation through the late twentieth century. Engaging historical and filmic texts, this course examines various themes in African American Labor history and class formation. Beginning with an interrogation of African American labor history as a field of historical study, this course moves along chronological and thematic axes to investigate changes in wage and labor structure, agricultural and industrial production, domestic work, and service work. It will consider African American migration, community building and organizing, labor unions, policy, and legal culture. The Civil Rights Movement and the Fair Employment Movement will be critical to this course as they best highlight the strategies and patterns of black labor organizations, protests, and negotiation since emancipation. This course also will explore affirmative action and the reconsolidation of racial discrimination in the workplace in the late twentieth century.
AFROAM 297T. Strange Career of the New Jim Crow
Drawing on the legacy of C. Vann Woodward’s landmark study, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, this discussion-based class will historicize the political, economic, and social circumstances that have given rise to “the New Jim Crow.” Rather than taking this concept as a given, we will use the writings of historians, sociologists, philosophers, prisoners, and legal scholars from the Reconstruction era to the present moment to problematize contemporary accounts of mass incarceration. We will also be viewing several films and documentaries, and hosting in-class visitors from local organizations as well as taking a tour of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center to properly engage a variety of issues concerning the current state of the prison system. In drawing on these various sources, we will examine how the criminalization of particular populations has helped naturalize their hyper-incarceration. And in tracing these developments historically, from racial slavery and Jim Crow segregation, through the Prison Rebellion Years and the ongoing War on Drugs, we will critically engage with these sources, particularly in terms in which they account for the ways that individuals and organizations have contested these practices, and in doings so, relied on isolated appeals or collective action, and drawn on constitutional guarantees, collective subjectivities, and/or human rights discourses.
AFROAM 297V. African American Television Studies
Media has played an important role in our society’s ever-evolving constructions of race, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. For African Americans, media representations typically involved exaggerated and negative depictions of black femininity and masculinity. This course will analyze and critique representations of African Americans in television genres—comedy, reality shows, dramas, and documentary / news–and explore the juxtaposition of external and internal representations of race and gender. Because African Americans created and attempted to sustain an advocacy television to project positive representations and to affirm and validate the existence and collective experiences of their race, African American counter-media production will be examined in this course. Guiding questions include: What are televisual representations of African Americans and what are the political and social implications of those representations? How do black and non-black audiences internalize these representations? What is African American media and who produces it? Finally, we will analyze recent studies on Inclusion or Invisibility? Diversity in Entertainment that found just one-third of speaking characters were female (33.5%), despite the fact that women represent just over half the U.S. population. Just 28.3% of characters with dialogue were from non-white racial/ethnic groups, though such groups are nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population.
AFROAM 326. Black Women in U.S. History, 4 credits (HS,DU)
Using historical texts, film, television, and music, this course examines the history of African American women from slavery to the present. It will pay special attention to the convergence of race, gender, and class in shaping the black female experience; African American women’s activism against racial, gender, and economic injustices; and sex and sexuality.
AFROAM 330. Songbirds, Blueswomen, Soulwomen (AL,DU)
The focus for this course is the cultural, political, and social issues found in the music and history of African American women performers. The primary emphasis in the course will be on African American women in Jazz, Blues, and Soul/R&B, but students also will study African American women composers as well as Spiritual-Gospel and Opera performers.
AFROAM 331. Life of W.E.B. Du Bois
An examination of the life and thought of arguably America’s greatest intellectual activist and one of Massachusetts’ native sons is the focus of this course. Students will conduct microfilm research in the W.E.B. Du Bois Special Collections and University Archives.
AFROAM 332. Blacks and Jews
Our aim in this course is to share with students an understanding of the scope and diversity of the relations of African Americans and Jewish Americans in the U.S., during the past 300 years. One of our purposes is to minimize the tendency toward comparing degrees of suffering, or posing an “Us versus Them” framework that ignores the more complex interactions that have characterized Black-Jewish relations over time and in different geographical parts of the U.S.
AFROAM 344. Black Speculative Fiction
Examination of the development of black speculative fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including science fiction, fantasy, gothic literature, magical realism, the detective novel, and/or related genres. Topics of discussion may include slavery and colonialism; diaspora; science, technology, and the environment; race and the paraliterary; utopianism and dystopianism; blackness and metaphysics; Afrofuturism.
AFROAM 345. Southern Literature, 4 credits (AL,DU)
This course offers an introduction to Southern Black Literature through a sampling of classic texts and more recent prose and poetry. In addition to surveying a rich canon of literature that has its origins in the antebellum slave narrative tradition, we will also study: (1) networks, alliances, and patterns of migration connecting the U.S. South and the Global South (especially the Caribbean); (2) black queer and trans life in the South; (3) recent film and television set in the Deep South; (4) structures and experiences of dispossession and poverty. We will also look at media coverage and scholarship to explore struggles happening in the South right now, especially movements around armed self-defense/community policing; cooperative farming and economic self-determination; disaster capitalism and environmental dispossession in places like the Gulf Coast and in Puerto Rico; the toppling/removal of Confederate statues and fight against white supremacist organizations and activities.
AFROAM 350. African American Islam
A history of Islamic influences among peoples of African descent in North America: Muslim beliefs of enslaved Africans, the spread of Ahmadi and Sunni Islam in the 20th-century, and the Nation of Islam and its offshoots.
AFROAM 354. Contemporary African Novel
This course offers an introduction to Southern Black Literature through a sampling of classic texts and more recent prose and poetry. In addition to surveying a rich canon of literature that has its origins in the antebellum slave narrative tradition, we will also study: (1) networks, alliances, and patterns of migration connecting the U.S. South and the Global South (especially the Caribbean); (2) black queer and trans life in the South; (3) recent film and television set in the Deep South; (4) structures and experiences of dispossession and poverty. We will also look at media coverage and scholarship to explore struggles happening in the South right now, especially movements around armed self-defense/community policing; cooperative farming and economic self-determination; disaster capitalism and environmental dispossession in places like the Gulf Coast and in Puerto Rico; the toppling/removal of Confederate statues and fight against white supremacist organizations and activities.
AFROAM 361. Revolution in the Third World
Changing nature of revolution in the Third World, from the "classical" revolutions in Cuba, China, Algeria and Vietnam to the popular insurgencies of Grenada, Iran, the Philippines and Haiti. Internal and external factors which have contributed to the fall from grace of many of these once popularly supported struggles.
AFROAM 362. Writings of Frantz Fanon
This course will examine the life and writings of Dr. Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquean psychiatrist who cast his lot with the FLN, the National Liberation Front of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and his theories of anti-colonial struggle in America. Thus Fanon’s significance lies in his contribution to the evolution of revolutionary political thought from Marx’s day to the present. Particular attention will be paid to Fanon’s search for personal and political identity through writing and struggle, as well as his views on race, his class analysis of national liberation struggle, and his prescriptions for the creation of a new, more just, world social order.
AFROAM 365. Composition: Style & Organization
Expository writing focusing primarily on argumentative and narrative essays. Discussion and practice of logic—inductive and deductive reasoning—as it relates to the argumentative essay form. Topics as thesis on main idea, organization, style, unity, supporting evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, and basic writing mechanics, including constructing sentences, paragraphing, transitions, and correct grammar. Junior year writing is required for all majors in AfroAm; secondary majors have the option to complete this requirement in their primary major.
AFROAM 390A. Jazz and Blues Literature
A representative sampling of poetry, novels, short stories, and plays by black and white, male and female writers who draw upon jazz and blues music and lyrics either formally, stylistically, thematically, or spiritually.
AFROAM 390B. Life & Work of Richard Wright
An intensive look at the life and work of Richard Wright, encompassing his poetry and fiction. We will examine the development of Wright's work from the 1930s to the 1950s, paying attention to historical and cultural developments that contributed to his vision, with particular emphasis on reflections of Afro-American culture in his work.
AFROAM 390C. Afro-Am Literature of 1930s
An intensive look at the literature of African Americans between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of Richard Wright and his naturalistic vision. The historical context, the continuing influence of the Harlem Renaissance, other art of the period, the influence of the political climate on the poetry and prose of representative African American writers of the 1930s, and the directions for African American literature of the 1940s mapped out in the 1930s.
AFROAM 390D. Langston Hughes
An intensive look at the life and work of Langston Hughes, encompassing his poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama. We will examine the development of Hughes’s work from the 1920s to the 1960s, paying attention to historical and cultural developments that contributed to his vision, with particular emphasis on Hughes’s use of African American music in his works.
AFROAM 390E. Race, Ethnicity & Gender in U.S. History
Examination of situations which illuminate intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender in antebellum U.S.: contact and interaction between American Indians, African-Americans and European-Americans in colonial New England; relationship between white and black women, both slave and free, in the South; and the development of racist ideologies and behavior in the white working classes.
AFROAM 390G. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Novel
The course will focus on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, locating its roots in earlier publications such as slave narratives; discussing the novel in the context of the literary aesthetics of its era and its social and political impact in its times; and exploring how other writers, and Stowe herself, responded to the issues it raised and the criticism it provoked.
AFROAM 390J. Cross-Disciplinary Contemporary Issues: War and Patriotism in African American Literature and History
The course will provide students an introduction—through the context of war and patriotism—to the complex social and political literature and history of African Americans. This course also will afford students an opportunity to read and think critically about the various meanings and purposes of war and patriotism. By focusing on war and patriotism, we are able to condense over two hundred years of literature and history into specific flashpoints where definitions of nation, patriotism, war, and citizenship are questioned, defended and sometimes redefined by African Americans.
AFROAM 390K. The Life and Art of Sterling Brown
A discussion of the life and major poetry and prose works of Sterling A. Brown, placing his works in the context of American literature and culture (especially music and folklore) of his times.
AFROAM 390L. Buying and Selling Blackness, 4 credits (HS,DU)
This course examines the deeply intertwined relationship between race and American consumer culture—the economy of buying and selling—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Race was central to the emergence of American consumer culture and, conversely, consumer culture significantly impacted race and the experiences of diverse groups including African Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and white ethnic groups. This course engages historical and literary texts, film, advertisements, music, and even Twitter to investigate the buying and selling of blackness and whiteness, the racialized commodification of groups and cultures, efforts to create a classless, racially-exclusive consumer culture, the segmentation of the mass market, consumer activism, the process of Americanization, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter. This course will also pay special attention to the ways consumer culture shaped interracial encounters, and racial, ethnic, and gender, and class identities.
AFROAM 390M. Race and the American Story (HS,DU)
This course is a collaboration between the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts and the Center for Political Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Building upon the evolving discussions of race and racism in our society, this course aims to serve as a model for improving diversity education on campuses across the country and contribute to a more informed and thoughtful national culture. This course consists of readings that tell the story of the confrontation between American political principles and the practice of racial injustice throughout our history. We will trace the ways that discourse on race has morphed in the United States and we will consider the ramifications of these ideas on the endurance of racism in our society. Students will read and discuss the Declaration of Independence, the slavery clauses in the Constitution, the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. They will achieve a greater understanding of how diversity relates to humanity, and will learn to dialogue productively and civilly with others who may not share their background or opinions. The course will be taught on both campuses and students on both campuses will have an opportunity to interact and engage with each other virtually throughout the course of the semester.
AFROAM 391A. Political Thought of Martin & Malcolm
The contrasting philosophies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. on race and racism, non-violence and self-defense, integration and separatism, Christianity and Islam; their interaction and involvement with the Civil Rights Movement; the northern and southern political and social culture that shaped their thoughts and world-views; and their changing conceptions of the appropriate tactics and strategy for the black freedom struggle in America.
AFROAM 391B. Modern Afro-American Women Novelists
Examine novels written by African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. The course will engage a simple, but fundamental issue: is there such a thing as modern African American women’s literature? If so, how might we define it? Some of the ways that we come at this issue will be from the point of genre (e.g., the novel of manners, the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, the gothic romance, the historical novel, and so on.), audience reception, and the relation of the novels to popular culture. Historical contexts of the novels and the impact of various artistic, intellectual, and social movements (e.g., the Civil Rights, Black Power/Arts, First and Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation) on the formal and thematic choices of the authors studied will also be considered.
AFROAM 391C. Creative Writing-Fiction
A writing workshop on the techniques, strategies, and craft of writing short fiction. Format includes class analysis of student's work, exercises in specific techniques such as narrative, description, dialogue, etc.
AFROAM 391E. Afro-American Literature of the 1940s
In this course we will examine African American literature and culture from the beginning of World War II through the onset of the Cold War. We will focus primarily on literature and film, but will also consider the visual arts, music, and theater. We will investigate the relation of black cultural production to the political and social events of the era as well as to such artistic movements and popular and high culture genres as modernism, social realism, naturalism, pulp fiction, and horror films.
AFROAM 391F. Afro-American Literature of the 1950s
This course will examine African American literature and culture from beginning of the Cold War until the black student movement of the early 1960s. It will take up a range of cultural forms, including the visual arts, music, theater, and film as well as literature. It will look at the political and social context out which these cultural forms grew. It will also consider such generic questions as the relation of black cultural production to such artistic movements as modernism, the new American poetry (e.g., the Beats), social realism, and naturalism and to popular and high culture representations of African Americans and African American culture.
AFROAM 391G. Critique of the Concept of Racism
Most investigations of racism tend to equate it to race theory, persistent prejudice, institutionalized discrimination and/or consign it to the realms of biology, psychology or sociology. This seminar will focus on racism in North America with particular attention to the Native American, African, and African-American experiences with a special focus on the role of racism as both economic and political capital in the development of American society.
AFROAM 391K. Black Love, Sex, and Marriage in the U.S.
This course explores African American love, sexual encounters, and marriage from slavery to present. It pays special attention to interracial relationships among African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and beyond; but it also considers interracial relationships; sexual violence; reproduction and reproductive rights; childrearing and family; pleasure, happiness, and desire; pornography (or more broadly, the commodification and exploitation of black bodies); autonomy and property; and disease and medicine. As we interrogate these topics, we will investigate the political, economic, and social drivers of the aforementioned and their implications on black experiences.
AFROAM 391L. African American Literature, Music and Life
This course explores African American love, sexual encounters, and marriage from slavery to present. It pays special attention to intraracial relationships among African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and beyond; but it also considers interracial relationships; sexual violence; reproduction and reproductive rights; childrearing and family; pleasure, happiness, and desire; pornography (or more broadly, the commodification and exploitation of black bodies); autonomy and property; and disease and medicine. As we interrogate these topics, we will investigate the political, economic, and social drivers of the aforementioned and their implications on black experiences.
AFROAM 391N. Black Presence at UMass
This course will provide an opportunity for students to assist in researching and selecting materials
for a Black Presence at UMass website and for a short history, with photos, of the presence of Black folk at UMass since its founding in 1867. The goal for the website is to be as comprehensive as possible in identifying students, staff, administrators, faculty that made up the UMass Afro-descended community. We also will be preparing lists of key individuals and events to be included in the short history. Where feasible we will be doing short (5-10 minute) videos for the website throughout the semester and during Homecoming weekend. The large portion of the work will take place using the resources of the Du Bois Library. There will be visits to community sites in Amherst, Springfield, and other relevant towns and cities. The efforts of all students involved will receive appropriate acknowledgement on the website and in the book. The class also will serve as informal advisors on academic and artistic programming for the Malcolm X Center for the 2020-21 school year. These are projects of great and lasting significance. Student input is vital.
AFROAM 392C. Civil War, Reconstruction, Black Resistance, 3 credits (309)
The eras of the Civil War and Reconstruction studied from the perspective of Black Americans, highlighting Black protest and resistance. Key topics include: the Civil War are slave rebellion; the process and meaning of emancipation; family, community, and labor in the aftermath of slavery; interracial politics in the Reconstruction era; legal and extralegal violence and resistance.
AFROAM 393F. Hip Hop Feminisms: Performing Race/Gender/Sexuality on Page and Stage (Meets with WGSS 393F)
Hip-Hop Feminisms is a multidisciplinary course that investigates the theory, praxis, methodology, and impact of the multi-farious figures and genres that circulate under this umbrella. Holding critically the assumed contradictions in its title--hip-hop's assumed misogyny and feminism's assumed whiteness--Hip-Hop Feminisms intervenes fiercely in binary thinking, highlighting the ways in which examining figures like Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Cardi B, Missy Elliot, Queen Latifah and Roxanne Shante, and performance forms like twerking and voguing place us at the nexus of significant cultural debates around identity, desire, representation, the body, and liberation. Foregrounding the critiques of black and women of color feminisms, and incorporating insights of queer studies, performance studies, critical race theory, and hip-hop studies, this course lifts up these often under-explored cultural transcripts and empowers young scholars to engage critically with influential pop culture phenomena and independent-artists alike.
AFROAM 394A. African Art History
Reliable chronology for African art history of placing of the art forms of some of the ethnic cultural groups, associations, or countries in Africa in historical perspective. Allied disciplines of anthropology and archaeology used to recover early history of certain cultures. Related oral sources discussed.
AFROAM 395A. The Writings of Chinua Achebe
Review of Achebe's writings, concentrating on his five novels and his writings on culture, literature, and politics. Achebe's contribution to the literature of the modern world. Works read in the context of tradition of modern African literature, of which Achebe is a seminal figure.
AFROAM 395F. Peer Leadership Development (Spring semester)
This is the 1st part of a two-semester two-course sequence that is designed to prepare second and third-year students to mentor entering first year students. This course will help older students focus on developing leadership and outreach skills which will enable them to strengthen their own academic achievement as well as prepare them to help others. This two-semester course sequence begins with upper class students in the spring semester; the course will prepare them to work with incoming new students in the subsequent fall semester.
The spring semester course is divided into two segments. The first segment of this course will enable second and third year students to develop leadership skills for themselves which will enable them to have a better understanding of how to assist first year students in forming effective study groups, mediation, studying for exams, time management, and library skills. Students will also learn how to act as mentors, by working with middle and high school students.
AFROAM 395G. Peer Leadership and Facilitation (Fall semester)
This second part of a two-semester course is designed to help upper-class students (juniors and seniors) develop leadership and outreach skills. Students will serve as peer leaders, working directly with newly entering first-semester students and help them transition from high school to college. Students will assist first-year students form effective study habits and effectively manage their time.
AFROAM 397A. Abolition & Anti-Slavery
The rise of the abolition movement and political antislavery in the United States in the three decades before the Civil War. How abolitionists managed to make slavery an issue in national politics; the spread of political antislavery in the north after the rise of the controversy over slavery expansion. Older debates over the nature of moral reform movements, and some of the recent material on the role of African Americans and women in the efforts to abolish slavery. Evaluation of the success and limitations of the abolition movement as a radical movement against slavery and racial discrimination. Contact instructor for suggested background readings.
AFROAM 397B. Native Americans & African Americans, Part I
This course intends to: 1) introduce significant past and contemporary scholarly works regarding the historical colonial encounters and interactions of the Indigenous populations of the western hemisphere, Europeans and Africans, 2) engage critical thought, review of current scholarship and class discussion regarding the implication and imposition of historical race issues on present day Native American identity, and 3) examine various social methodologies for fostering distorted concepts of African American and Native American identities (i.e. census counts, news articles, popular music).
AFROAM 397C. Black Globalization and Imperialism
This introductory seminar explores the changing content, practice, and value of
"imperialism" and "globalization" as world historical forces. By focusing attention to their impact on Africans and African-descended peoples in the U.S., Latin American, and the Caribbean, the course emphasizes notions of race in the development and critical evaluation of these forces. Issues of historical agency, identity, and human rights will also be considered, as we reassess black experiences of victimization, collaboration, and resistance to European and American globalizing practices.
AFROAM 397D. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois
AFROAM 397F. Native Americans & African Americans, Part II
Explores numerous levels and terms of the encounter between Native Americans and Blacks, including native tribal identity, Black identity, famous people of mixed ancestry, contested identities, Native Americans in jazz and pop music. Native and Black cultural traditions in intermarriage, Native Americans as slaves, slavery and freedmen, "free colored" communities, decoding historical documents, tribal legacy assertions, "triracials," and the impact of mixed ancestry on both Black and native communities.
AFROAM 491C. Cuba: Social History of Race, Class & Gender
This course is an advance undergraduate reading seminar that explores the social relations and everyday experiences of Cubans under the various political states under which they have lived - Spanish colonialism, capitalist republicanism, and revolutionary socialism. As we consider issues of social identity, the quest for social justice, and national sovereignty, we will keep the concepts of race, class, and gender centered. Two questions frame the course. What were the social conditions in which the Cuban Revolution emerged, and how have these conditions been transformed since 1959?
AFROAM 494DI. Du Bois Senior Seminar
This course is the senior capstone course required for all majors in Afro-American Studies. It also fulfills the University's Integrative Learning Experience (IE) requirement. This course has two aims: (1) to reflect on your educational journey at UMass as well as to further explore your intellectual and professional goals; and (2) to prepare you to complete your senior project in Afro-American Studies. The course will provide ample space and time to brainstorm and plan your senior project in consultation with the instructor and your peers.
Graduate Course List
*All graduate courses are 4 credits unless noted otherwise
AFROAM 590B. Black Body Studies in Africa and its Diasporas (Undergrad/Grad)
Black Body Studies is an emerging subfield of Africana/Black studies that uses the lens of the body and embodiment to examine the initiative and creativity of people of African descent in Africa and its diasporas while also investigating how Black bodies are used by others to perpetuate white supremacy, global anti-Black racism, and other forms of harm and exclusion to Black individuals and communities (Covington-Ward, article in progress). This course will examine some of the most important texts to examine Black bodies from multiple perspectives and across different geographical regions including Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. Using a multidisciplinary approach bringing literature, ethnography, sociological and historical texts into conversation, the course takes a thematic approach focusing on topics such as the Black body as related to: the question of humanity, violence and anti-Black racism, religion and spirituality, reproductive rights and justice, biopolitics, disabled/abled bodies, and fat phobia. Students will be exposed to both classic texts and newer texts that provide myriad perspectives on Black Body Studies.
AFROAM 590D. The Poetry & Prophecies of Phillis Wheatley (Undergrad/Grad)
This course emerges from a recent renaissance of scholarship and creative work about the enslaved poet and freedom dreamer, Phillis Wheatley (Peters). Above all else, the course will take shape through deep and careful readings of the poet’s body of work. We will also place Wheatley within a rich tradition of black feminist poetics and read a number of poems that have been dedicated to or otherwise inspired by her across the centuries. We will read the best of recent scholarship on Wheatley, with particular attention to work that: deepens our understanding of her relationship not to her enslavers, but to her kin, community, and to other black artists; reads her in the context of West African and diasporic traditions; attends to the politics of power and pleasure in her poems; examines the circulation of her poetry within local, regional, and transatlantic networks of both print and manuscript cultures in the late eighteenth century; and traces the history of her memorialization by writers, readers, and other communities and groups. The course will include some poetry writing in and outside class, but no prior creative writing experience is required or expected. Poets, researchers, curious students, and Wheatley enthusiasts are all encouraged to enroll.
AFROAM 591A. Gender in Pan-African Studies, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course will focus on contributions to primarily Marxist African and African-descended thinkers. We will read and discuss such major figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ahmad. We also hope to introduce you to a selection of perhaps lesser-known figures such as George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood and James Boggs. The course will require extensive reading, informed participation in class discussion, and a final paper.
AFROAM 591B. Black Radical Thought, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course will focus on contributions to Marxist intellectual and political traditions by African and African-descended thinkers. We will read and discuss works by major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Angela Davis, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon. We also hope to introduce you to a selection of perhaps lesser-known figures such as Babu, Achille Mbembe, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, James Boggs, Muhammad Ahmad. The course will require extensive reading, informed participation in class discussion, and a final paper.
AFROAM 591C. Digital Video Production and Research in the Black Community, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course aims to increase the utility and impact of research produced at UMass by creating, adapting, implementing, supporting, and sustaining innovative digital tools and publishing platforms for content delivery, discovery, analysis, data curation, and preservation. It will also engage students in extensive outreach, education, and advocacy to ensure that scholarly work in the Du Bois Department has a global reach and accelerates the pace of research across disciplines. The course will teach visual methodological research methods and digital camera usage to explore social networks, the inclusion of community partners in research, and black neighborhood and community spaces. We draw on the substantive and methodological experiences of visual researchers using photography, film, and video and the evident challenges of representing such a diversely situated experience as that of African Americans. We will discuss and learn camera use and operation, data collection and analysis, ethical concerns, community partnerships, refinement of research questions, and theoretical use and development of imagery in research regarding the African American community.
AFROAM 591D. Comparative Black Politics in the Americas, 3 credits (Undergraduate/Grad)
The current global crisis that include not only economic malaise but also a rise in political authoritarianism and policing by states, had widened social and racial inequalities and hence racial and sexual violence. In this world-historical context there has been an emergence of Black movements across the Americas. This course will study Black movements in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the United States and Venezuela, looking at their particularities and differences as well as their similarities and relationships. The class will offer a historical perspective while focusing on contemporary Black movements.
AFROAM 591E. Black Feminist and Queer Insurgencies, 3 credits (Undergraduate/Grad)
This course traces black feminist and queer theories of militancy, insurgency, and revolutionary planning from Harriet Tubman to the present day. Untethering our perspective from the domain of normative masculinities, we will instead focus on forms of organization, revolt, and defensiveness (Nash) that are equally attuned to care, healing, and the transformative force of pleasure and desire (Hartman; Musser). We will study how people take care of each other in the face of state violence and the neoliberal state’s ongoing divestment from public infrastructure and services by exploring histories and experiments in mutual aid, community and armed defense, femme expertise and care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha), revolutionary mothering (Gumbs, Martens, Williams), radical separatism and communal living, critical solidarities, sex radicalism, and abolition as a form of both radical imagination and social transformation. We will seek to map an alternative genealogy of black revolutionary theory through the history of black feminist and queer militancy. Throughout, we will be invested in the long-term work of black study (Moten and Harney) and utopian planning at the same time as we investigate practical tactics and strategies that approach white supremacy as a racial and gendered act of war that requires immediate mobilization and response.
AFROAM 591G. Black Ecologies, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This seminar roots ecological catastrophe in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. We will read a number of works that illuminate the specific relationship between environmental degradation and the world that slavery made. We will be also interested in tracing how race, gender, and poverty are being mobilized as weapons of dispossession and extraction on the frontiers of capitalist exploitation today. Other topics will include: ecological thought in black critical theory; alternative models of sustainability and stewardship; black eco-poetics and climate fiction; environmental justice movements; new solidarities in climate activism. Readings will draw from a range of fields, including black critical theory; feminist, queer, and trans studies; disability studies; literary studies; and diaspora studies.
AFROAM 597A. Afro-Caribbean Studies, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
Afro-Caribbean Studies is an advanced introduction to the history, culture, and politics of people of African descent in the Caribbean basin suitable for both graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. After a broad synopsis of the region’s history, the course has a focus on the politics of select Caribbean states, from 1900 to the present; viz., Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. It will discuss major issues that affect the Caribbean region, namely, migration, poverty, regional economic cooperation and political integration, democratic institutions, and U. S. foreign policy towards the region. Also, the course will examine the history and role of the diverse religious components of the Caribbean basin from Indigenous practices to Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and the emergence and development of African belief systems and practices such as Santeria, Espiritismo, Vodou and Rastafarianism from the 18th century to the present. Music and other expressive arts is an additional focal area of the class.
AFROAM 597B. Black Springfield Matters: An Intro to New Afrikan Urban Studies, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course will acquaint you with a variety of disciplinary tools for studying African American life in the imaginary community of Urban America (aka The Inner-city). Springfield, Massachusetts, our urban neighbor just 25 miles away, will provide us with a landing point starting with a broad survey of the city’s history followed by an exploration of its existence today as a multicultural community, and a regional center for banking, finance, and courts. The course partners with Springfield’s Pan African Historical Museum USA, to create a community-engaged research, service learning opportunity (on the CESL list of approved courses related to the "Civic Engagement & Public Service" (CEPS) certificate).
AFROAM 597D. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course will focus on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois to the study of the sociology of African Americans and race relations in the U.S. We will be examining such works as The Philadelphia Negro, the Atlanta University Studies, reports for various government agencies and selected essays. The course also will address Du Bois' influence on the work of other sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, Oliver Cox and William Julius Wilson. The course is open to both graduate and upper-level undergraduate students.
AFROAM 597E. Dalits and African Americans, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
The purpose of this seminar is to begin to explore similarities, differences, connections and convergences between the Dalit population of India and African Americans in the United States. We will read short histories of both peoples, studies that focus on examples of historic interactions, and studies comparing leading figures of both groups. Most of the reading will center on the 20th century (i.e. India during the periods of colonization, anti-colonization, and independence) and on African Americans from emancipation to the end of legal segregation. There is a rich and rapidly growing scholarship on these topics so view this seminar as an opening to a complex and important subject. Good books to read, discussion format, class presentation on one of the books, and final paper.
AFROAM 597M. Third World Marxism, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This seminar has two goals first, to introduce students to the views of Karl Marx on non-European societies, and second to explore how Marx's general theories have been adopted and modified to address the circumstances of non-white peoples. The primary focus will be on writings produced in the western hemisphere by African Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis and Harold Cruse; West Indians such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Rodney. We also will include writings by influential Latin American marxists such as Jose Carlos Mariategui. For the sake of comparison, some attention will be given to the development of marxist traditions in China and in Africa. This will be a reading seminar with heavy emphasis on class participation, including the leading of at least one class discussion.
AFROAM 597P. Black Presence at UMass Amherst, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
This course will provide an opportunity for students to assist in researching and selecting materials
for a Black Presence at UMass website and for a short history, with photos, of the presence of Black folk at UMass since its founding in 1867. The goal for the website is to be as comprehensive as possible in identifying students, staff, administrators, faculty that made up the UMass Afro-descended community. We also will be preparing lists of key individuals and events to be included in the short history. Where feasible we will be doing short (5-10 minute) videos for the website throughout the semester and during Homecoming weekend. The large portion of the work will take place using the resources of the Du Bois Library. There will be visits to community sites in Amherst, Springfield, and other relevant towns and cities. The efforts of all students involved will receive appropriate acknowledgement on the website and in the book. The class also will serve as informal advisors on academic and artistic programming for the Malcolm X Center for the 2020-21 school year. These are projects of great and lasting significance. Student input is vital.
AFROAM 597R. Reparations for African Descendants: Theory & Practice, 3 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
The United Nations declared 2015 to 2024 the International Decade of People of African Descent. The International Decade is a follow up of the process from the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, where the international community designated the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a Crime against Humanity. In that spirit, this course will explore the issue of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. Reparations to the descendants of captive Africans has been debated in African-American political discourse for decades. This course will look at other cases for reparations internationally, engaging the history and the basis for the demand as well as proposals for reparations for African descendants.
AFROAM 601. Slavery
This seminar will focus on the rise of slavery in the United States until its destruction during the Civil War. We will study slavery as a political and economic institution as well as a day-to-day lived experience. Within this historical framework, the emphasis will be on broad themes and interpretations, such as the construction of race and racism, the debate origins of slavery, the nature of slave communities and culture, gender and slavery, slavery in a comparative perspective, slave resistance, and the politics of slavery.
AFROAM 604. Black Intellectual History & Ideology
Most of the principle currents of black intellectual history and ideology from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Themes of assimilation, nationalism, black feminism, civil and political rights, religion, and international perspectives explored in some depth. Particular focus on the structural and thematic patterns which emerge through study of various ideas of African Americans ranging over a century and a half.
AFROAM 605. African Americans and the Movement to Abolish Slavery
This seminar will trace the rise of the antislavery movement in the United States fro the American Revolution to the Civil War, with particular attention to the role of African Americans. We will look at the ideology of black abolitionism, its contributions to the antislavery movement as a whole, black emigrationism, individual African American abolitionists, and African American women activists among other topics. We will attempt to explore the nature and impact of black abolitionism on the broader movement. In short, what difference did black abolitionism make on the rise, growth and success of the antislavery movement? The format of the course is discussion. Recent historical literature on the above topics will comprise the readings for the course.
AFROAM 610. The Life and Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois
A critical examination of the life and thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, paramount black scholar and activist whose massive body of scholarly work spans the period from late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. Course covers the major works of Du Bois: The Philadelphia Negro; The Souls of Black Folk; Black Reconstruction; and, Dusk of Dawn. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, and The Education of Black People, as well as selected essays by Du Bois, are also addressed. Topics include Du Bois as a sociologist, historian, propagandist, and creative writer, taking into account his often shifting views on art and culture, politics, leadership, civil rights and the color line, trade unionism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, internationalism, and, of course, double consciousness, among other issues.
AFROAM 630. Critical Race Theories
Participants in this seminar, Critical Race Theories, will examine the general foundational ideas and concepts shaping today’s now proliferating scholarly enquiries that operate under the term critical race theories. While the basis for today’s critical race theories developed from Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory in legal scholarship, many scholars from a variety of disciplines have transformed for their own contexts the insights that have informed legal scholarship in this area. An understanding of the entrenched racial structures in the United States and their basis in the social contract informing much of Western culture is especially useful for reading and analyzing a substantial portion of African American literature. Seminar participants will read early documents (The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America The Constitution of the United States of America, The Bill of Rights, Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments) together with texts by historical figures, philosophers, and others who have shaped or have responded to systems of race in the United States (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others) texts on theories of race (Smedley, Frederickson, Eze and others), and legal as well as literary, political, and philosophical critical race theorists (Bell, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Austin, Mills, Baldwin, Neal, Fuller, Du Bois, among others).
AFROAM 652. Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
An intensive study of the literature and orature associated with the Harlem Renaissance, from the philosophical underpinnings supplied by Du Bois, Johnson, Locke, Garvey, and Randolph to the varied poetic visions of Hughes, Spencer, Brown, Cullen, and McKay to the fictional explorations of Toomer, Hurston, Fisher, Larsen, Fauset, and Thurman to the inspiration supplied by blues, jazz, and folklore of the African American tradition. Journals connected with the movement, the contributions of interested patrons, such as Van Vechten, Cunard, and the Spingarns, and the relations of the Harlem Renaissance to other contemporary American literary currents (realism, naturalism, and modernism.)
AFROAM 667. Afro-American Presence in American Literature
An intensive survey of the portrayals of Afro-Americans in American literature, examining how characters, themes, and ideas are portrayed when filtered through the race, gender, class, politics, historical time frame, and individual artistic aesthetic of a variety of writers.
AFROAM 690B. The Civil War and Reconstruction
This course examines the revolutionary significance of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era in United States history. While not ignoring military history, it will focus on the demise of slavery during the war and contests over the meaning of freedom, citizenship, and the powers of the state. It will also look at African American political mobilization, constitutional issues, and vigilante violence during Reconstruction. Other topics include the role of Lincoln, the Confederate experiment, gender and Reconstruction, the transition from slavery to free labor, and the fall and aftermath of Reconstruction. Recent historical literature will constitute the bulk of the reading. Students will have the option of writing a historiographical paper on a topic of their choice or a more substantial research paper based on primary sources.
AFROAM 690E. Blackness and Utopia
This seminar explores the vibrant history of utopian thought in Black Studies and African American literature and culture. It considers how the black radical tradition poses particular challenges to Western utopian thought as well as how the question of utopia might contribute to, or help to re-configure, the future(s) of Black Studies. Topics of discussion will include Afrofuturism, utopia and the black radical tradition, cultures of life and cultures of death in Black Atlantic, black science and speculative fiction, and blackness and metaphysics.
AFROAM 690F. Writing Gender & Sexuality: Reconstructions, Post-Reconstructions
This seminar will serve as an intensive introduction to African American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing on issues related to gender and sexuality during the period. In addition to reading major—and some minor—texts, including works by Julia Collins, Charles Chesnutt, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, we will survey recent critical turns in the field, including work on gender and sexuality in performance studies and queer studies.
AFROAM 690G. Fugitive Science, Fugitive Literature
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century famously witnessed the rise of forms of scientific racism, linked to the rise of comparative anatomy, that were used to reinforce regimes of enslavement and perpetuate racist ideas about African Americans, both enslaved and free. But the popularization of natural science in the period simultaneously opened the door to the construction of a distinctively anti-racist science by an unlikely set of actors. This course examines the ways that African American writers, performers, and other cultural producers of the nineteenth century both crafted artful critiques of racist science and mobilized sciences with no particular connection to the science of race--from geology to astronomy--in the struggle for emancipation and in the development of more speculative imaginaries of freedom. Across the semester, students will track and chronicle the intimate and animating relationship between black scientific and literary production in the nineteenth century. Using this literary-historical context as a backdrop, the course will finally examine the reanimation of racial science in contemporary science, especially in genomics, and the ways in which "fugitive science" continues to provide a means of resistance and redress in the twenty-first century.
AFROAM 690J. Passing
This course will focus on different manifestations of passing from the 19th to the 21st centuries, examining motivations, methods, and outcomes in the context of race, class, gender, sexuality, and literary aesthetic.
AFROAM 690K. Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance
This course will treat major writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s-1950s, setting them in the context of the White Chicago Renaissance, the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and other arts in Chicago in the era, and treating various aesthetics, goals, themes, symbols and images that express the zeitgeist of the movement.
AFROAM 690P. New Approaches to Early African American Literature
This course serves as an intensive introduction to early (pre-1900) African American literary studies. In addition to surveying works and authors in the period (Wheatley, Walker, Douglass, Delany, Wilson, Wells Brown, Jacobs, Harper, Chesnutt, and others), the course will focus on recent methodological turns and emerging scholarship in the field, including the (re)turn to the archive; performance; gender, sexuality, and queer studies; race and science; the New Southern Studies; hemispheric and global approaches to early African American literature; the black print sphere and material culture. The course will also include an introduction to archival research on literary and cultural topics.
AFROAM 691A. Black Religious Movements in America
Some of the major religious movements and religious institutions of African Americans before and after the American Revolutionary War. African religions in the New World; conversion experiences wrought by the Great Awakenings; the development of the "invisible institution" on slave plantations; the formation of the free black church; the institutional developments in black Christianity following Emancipation; the emergence of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements; the impact of urbanization on black urban and rural religious institutions, including the birth of the "store-front" church; the impact of charismatic religious leadership during the Great Depression; the growing influence of Islam, beginning in the 1920s; the role of the church in the modern Civil Rights movement; and trends in African American religion in the post-1960s era.
AFROAM 691B. Black Workers in the U.S. Since Emancipation
This seminar will attempt to accomplish two goals; to examine some of the significant issues in the history of African American workers since Emancipation and to introduce you to some of the most recent scholarship addressing those issues. We will begin with general studies of the history of capitalism in the U.S. and Black workers then proceed to a study of 1) The role of Black labor in several industries, 2) Black woman as workers, 3) Black labor and the Black power movement and 4) Herbert Hill’s critiques of organized labor and the labor history establishment.
AFROAM 691C. Historiographical Methods in Afro-American Studies
This course will introduce you to some of the basics of what it means to read, think, and write as an historian. We will explore what historians do and why as well as the "objectivity question," the development of African American history as an academic discipline, and one or two current controversies. We also will learn how to locate and use the resources of the Du Bois Library such as microforms, government documents, the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, on-line indices and collections, as well as those of such important national repositories such as the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Collection at Howard University and the Schomburg Center of the N.Y. Public Library.
AFROAM 691D. Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement
Women initiated, organized, and sustained the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did women activists far outnumber men, but they also emerged as leaders in working-class and poor neighborhoods more often than men. This course will investigate women¹s diverse visions of and involvement in social justice using historical texts, film, television, and music. Taking the long civil rights movement approach, it will consider middle-class and working-class activism towards racial, gender, and economic justice in the early twentieth century, the labor-oriented civil rights movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and the modern Civil Rights and Women¹s Liberation Movements. Special attention will be paid to the relationships between black and white women and the impact of the movement on women¹s status and identity. Notable activists like Mary Church Terrell, Ella Baker, Florynce Kennedy, Lena Horne, and Nina Simone, as well as those who remain unnamed in the historical record, will be critical to this investigation.
AFROAM 691E. Modern African American Women Novelists
This course will consider novels written by African American women since World War II. The principal issue the course will examine is the conception and representation of identity in these works. In other words, we will look at how these novelists pose (and sometimes answer) the basic question: is there such a thing as African American women's literature? Among the issues the we will take up in approaching this question are the manipulation of generic conventions (e.g., those of science fiction, gothic romance, historiography, and the slave narrative); the question of audience (both actual and implied); the relation of "high" culture and "popular" culture; and the impact of various political and intellectual movements (e.g., the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power/Black Arts, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation) on the formal and thematic choices of these authors. We will also use these novels to engage debates between major critical/theoretical positions (e.g., social realism, new criticism, Black aesthetic, structuralism, deconstructionism, feminism, and cultural studies) within African American literary studies since 1945.
AFROAM 691F. Black Political Struggle in America: 1776-Present
An historical examination of the black political struggle for equality and citizenship in America—the obstacles placed in the path of that struggle by the American political system in general and by the American state in particular—and the countless ways in which racial politics have shaped the system that is called American Democracy.
AFROAM 691G. African-American Poetry
An intensive survey of African American poetry from Lucy Terry to the present, focusing on how language, form, and content reflect the ways in which African Americans have perceived their positions in American society and their roles as reflectors and/or shapers of African American culture. Includes various works of African, American, and British literature as well as works of African American folklore, and secondary critical works dealing with African American poetic tradition.
AFROAM 691H. Race & Public Policy
An historical examination of the role of public policy in both advancing and obstructing the black struggle for civic equality in America, beginning with the first specifically institutional effort to aid black freedmen and women, the Freedmen's Bureau. The development of public policy occasioned by the Great Depression, the emergence of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty in the Sixties, and the contemporary racialization of social policy that has denigrated Liberalism, fragmented the Democratic Party's traditional constituency, and elevated the conservative economic and political agenda to mainstream legitimacy. Specific issues include: welfare, affirmative action, jobs, poverty, and the criminal justice system.
AFROAM 691K. The Politics of Slavery and the Coming of the Civil War
This seminar will explore the significance of slavery in the growth of sectional politics in antebellum America. It will cover the rise of a distinctive slave society in the south and of antislavery in the north. We will look at early sectional differences over slavery such as the Missouri crisis and the nullification controversy. Finally, we will discuss the role of the slavery expansion issue and the breakdown of the second party system in causing the Civil War and the origins of secession. Recent historical literature will comprise the bulk of the readings for the course.
AFROAM 691L. The Black Arts Movement
This course will examine the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in its many manifestations, including literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. A particular focus of the course will be the ways in which domestic and international political movements (e.g., Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-colonial) intersected with Black Arts, deeply influencing the formal and thematic choices of African American artists. Much attention will be paid to the distinctive regional variations of the movement as well as to the ways in which Black Arts fundamentally changed how art is produced and received in the
United States.
AFROAM 691M. The Life and Thought of C.L.R. James
This seminar will entail the reading of several of James’ major works as well as a substantial selection from his political writings and correspondence. The purpose is to acquaint you with James’ own words on a variety of the political, social and cultural issues that he addressed during his lifetime. We also will do some reading in the secondary literature that attempts, with varying success, to situate James in various contexts.
AFROAM 691N. Critical Race Theories (See AFROAM 630)
AFROAM 691P. Critique of the Concept of Racism
Most investigations of racism tend to equate it to race theory, persistent prejudice, institutionalized discrimination and/or consign it to the realms of biology, psychology or sociology. This seminar will focus on racism as an historical system in the settlement of the North American continent and the organization and development of the American nation state. For comparative purposes a brief survey will also be made of apartheid in South Africa and anti-Semitism in the Third Reich.
AFROAM 691Q. Black Images in Antebellum Literature
The Southern Plantation, so largely dependent on “peculiar institution” of slavery for its existence, and so large a part of American history, is also largely the source of some of the most abiding literary characterizations (or images) of America Blacks. These literary characterizations and their validity or invalidity will be the main foci of the readings, class discussions and writings for this course.
AFROAM 691R. Topics in the Modern Civil Rights Movement
This seminar will explore the distinction between movements, organizations, and the activities of single individuals that has been obscured in recent discussions of the "long civil rights movement.” We will be examining the histories of organizations that were formed prior to the post-Brown Era and which have survived to this day. We will be exploring those groups and organizations that came into being post Brown and were defunct by the mid- 1970's. We will pay some brief attention to those groups and organizations that arose in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements, i.e. since the mid- 1970's. The readings will include a selection from the latest scholarly monographs, as well as from memoirs and other primary sources available in print, microform and digital formats. A lengthy (18-20 pages) reading paper analyzing the goals, activities, successes and failures of a group, organization or individual will be required. Regular class attendance and participation in discussions is assumed.
AFROAM 691S. Contemporary Afro-American Literature
Themes of love, war, assimilation, feminism, lesbianism, homosexuality, and more can be found in contemporary Afro-American Literature. The objective of this class will be to identify and analyze some of these themes (the focus changing from semester to semester) in the works of such writers as Baldwin, Ellison, Morrison, Wright, Williams, and Hines.
AFROAM 691T. Great Migrations: Migration, Urbanization and Modernity in the African American Novel Since 1900
This course considers the representation of migration, urbanization, and modernity (or post-modernity) in a range of African American novels published between 1900 and the present by such authors as Lloyd Brown, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Jean Toomer, John Edgar Wideman, and Richard Wright. Our focus is tracing the development of the city as a literary landscape for foundational African American narratives of freedom, empowerment, imprisonment, decay, and deracination. Particular attention will be paid to how gender and sexuality inflect these narratives. We will also examine how narratives and rhetoric of the academy (particularly the fields of history and sociology), politics, and popular culture (especially music, film, and journalism) interact formally and thematically with the literary narratives we uncover.
AFROAM 691U. Reimagining America
The conventional meta-narrative of American history has been the story of freedom. Yet that narrative has been contested by many historical voices and by the contrary experiences of many peoples of color. This seminar will seek to relate the histories of Blacks, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans to the hegemonic narrative to try and conceptualize a more multi-cultural perspective of American history. It will also look at the resistance of some elements of the academy and society to these alternative viewpoints.
AFROAM 691V. Black Brazil: Race, Politics and Culture
AFROAM 691W. 21st Century African American Literature
AFROAM 691X. Comparative Slavery in the Americas
This graduate seminar explores the centrality of slavery to the formation of the various societies of the Americas since the 1492, by considering the political, economic, and social outcomes of forced African labor in the region. The modern notion of race and the on-going self-liberation efforts of African-descendent women and men are some of these important outcomes.
AFROAM 692A. Literary Theory
This course will take up literary theory since 1965 and how it has influenced and has been influenced by the study of African American literature and culture. The idea here is not to be comprehensive, but rather, to use the term popular a few years back, to stage a series of interventions into the sometimes troubled relationship between “high” theory and its successors and African American Studies. Our task will not simply be to examine different “schools” of critical theory, but to consider how theory has informed and challenged African American literary studies and vice versa. We will also seek to historicize various critical moments or movements rather than simply view them as pieces of an intellectual toolbox.
AFROAM 692B. The Black Power Movement
The purpose of this course is to offer an appraisal of the Black Power movement which has not been generally available to students of 1960s upheavals in American life. In far too many academic and popular accounts today, Black Power is portrayed as the “evil twin” of the modern Civil Rights movement, as an intransigent force that brought the black freedom movement of the 1960s era to wrack and ruin. Our aim is neither to defend no pillory the excesses of Black Power, but rather to demonstrate how this movement arose from the massive resistance of white Americans to extending those basic rights (which they themselves enjoyed) to the black population of this country; and to the inability of established Civil Rights organizations to overcome the obstacles stemming from this massive resistance. In the end, it is our contention that the collapse and failure of the Black Power phase of the Afro-American freedom struggle represented the collapse and failure of the Civil Rights movement itself.
AFROAM 692C. Race and Ethnicity in American Life
The purpose of this course is to examine issues of race and ethnicity in American life from the colonial period to the present, with a particular focus on changes wrought to both by the transformation of U.S. immigration laws in 1965. We shall be concerned as much with the ways in which American identity has been defined by partisans of one particular view or another, as by the actual ways in which this identity has manifested itself. How have the social constructs of ethnicity and race been variously defined, and their interrelationship conceived? Once American racial identities were rigidly fixed, how did successive immigrant groups adapt their existing ethnic identities to socially and politically imposed racial categories? In what ways have concepts of ethnicity and race tended to promote/undermine the existence of working-class consciousness? What have been the gender manifestations of these concepts? In what ways have generational differences internal to ethnic or racial groups led to transformations of their group identities? What have been the mechanisms of solidarity/strife between "peoples of color" in their struggles against the dominant racism? And just how close are we to fulfilling (Rodney?) King's dream, anyway?
AFROAM 692D. The Life and Work of Chinua Achebe
AFROAM 692E. Du Bois and Booker T. Re-examined
There is perhaps no more contentious issue in black history than the debate over the respective visions of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Partisans wrangle over their ideologies and associations, their social and political philosophies, their chosen terrains of struggle, their prescriptions for racial uplift and, of course, their respective characters. While the lives of both men do cry for psychoanalytic interpretation, for example both grew up without fathers, both of their mothers died in their sons’ teenage years, and both are, in a real sense, self-invented—we shall resist that temptation to focus on their lives where they overlap, especially the period from 1895 to 1915. We want to locate Du Bois and Washington within the tradition of black leadership of which they were a part, situate them in the history of their times, track the development of their ideas, and reflect on the efficacy of their strategies and programs.
AFROAM 692F. From Reconstruction to Renaissance
This course examines African American literature and culture from the rise of Reconstruction through the onset of Jim Crow and the Great Migration to the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance. We will be particularly interested in the relationship between African American literature and culture during this period and the notions of modernity, modernism, and the artistic and social avant-garde in the United States.
AFROAM 692G. African American Women’s Narrative (622)
Gender, race, class, slavery, the woman as artist, domesticity, and the territory of love, all are concepts that are located in the narratives of the African American women writers that have been selected for this course. Participants in this course will interrogate these issues, among others, in the narratives of nineteenth and twentieth century African American women and will be encouraged to examine critically the challenges and the victories that these writers present in their texts. Course participants also will be encouraged to find connections as well as any disjunctures among these writers and to develop their facility for discussing these narratives as specific instances of a writer’s literary style and as an historically, as well as politically, marked literary texts in African American literature.
AFROAM 692H. Africa in the Americas
The effectiveness of cultural politics within the dynamics of the struggles for liberation, equality, and participation in the African diaspora. Seminar supplemented by visual cultures.
AFROAM 692I. Africa in Latin America
The error of slavery in the Americas was that it underestimated the resiliency of Africans over many generations of displacement, dislocation, dispossession, exploitation, and dehumanization in the New World. Although distorted history has often depicted enslaved subjects and cultures as “passive” and “content” in their new environments and conditions, this seminar contends that while enslaved Africans were questing for freedom, they equally devised strategies of survival and subversion even when it seemed that they were merely entertaining or adapting their pain and memories. In addition to establishing the African presence and contribution to the Americas, this seminar focuses on three main cultures as geographical case-studies: the USA, Brazil, and the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas. Through the perspectives of history, politics, sociology, anthropology, religion, literature, and culture, the course provides a balanced interrogation of the effectiveness of politics of culture and participation as opposed to cultural politics in the African Diaspora.
AFROAM 692J. African American Literary Movements
The New Negro Harlem Renaissance writers (1920s), the Chicago Writers (1930s and 1940s), the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movement writers (1960s and 1970s), and Black Womanist/Gender issues writers (1980s) mark four distinct periods of heightened literary production among African American writers. Participants in this course will investigate formative themes and concepts (protest/social literature, Pan-Africanism, uplift, Black aesthetic, among others) that have shaped these movements and will examine the cross-talk—shared concepts, ideas, and ideals—that gives these movements as well as twentieth-century African American literature certain recognizable features that have been shaped and reshaped over time.
AFROAM 692K. Class & Culture: 20th Century
AFROAM 692L. Black Studies: History, Theory & Practice
This seminar begins with a discussion of antecedents to institutionalized Black Studies departments and programs that emerged on college campuses starting in 1968; explores the historical development of the field up to and including today; and concludes with informed speculation concerning challenges to its future. Readings and reflections on the origins of Black Studies on the UMass Amherst campus will specifically be covered. Topics for exploration include the interrelationship of Black Studies to traditional fields and disciplines, the transition of Black Studies from political movement to professionalized institutionalization, the changing audience involved in that transition, and interpretations of American history and culture within the Black Studies matrix that challenge standard narratives regarding these issues.
AFROAM 692M. African American Women’s Literature
AFROAM 692N. Seminar on the NAACP
AFROAM 692Q. African Diaspora Studies: Introduction to Concepts and Historiography
*Required foundations course for Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies.
This course will offer an introduction to 1) key concepts and definitions e.g. diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Afro-centrism, etc. 2) the classic works in the field. 3) major trends in contemporary scholarship.
We will be reading a selection of works discussing the contours and history of the field as well as examples of recent scholarship. Two papers on major themes will be required.
This course is required for the Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies and is open both to students pursuing the certificate and to graduate students with a general interest in the subject.
AFROAM 692R. Afro-Latin American History
This seminar course explores the historical agency and varied social identities of African-descended women and men in Latin America and in their subsequent migration to the United States. The course reviews the political, cultural, and social activities of these groups over three important historical periods: during colonial slavery; immediately following slave emancipation and the founding of independent Latin American nations; and our contemporary transnational moment. The course offers broad coverage of black communities throughout Latin America, with some emphasis on Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba.
AFROAM 692S. Classic Figures of 20th Century Afro-American Literature
A comprehensive and intensive examination of the work of major figures in 20th century Afro-American literature, with an examination of the major relevant criticism.
AFROAM 692T. Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
This course examines the history of the Atlantic World through a gendered lens, exploring the ways in which European conquest and colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions of Africans and indigenous Americans gave rise to modern gender categories and hierarchies. In this course, students will engage with both foundational and more recent scholarly works on the subject, encountering a broad temporal and geographical range. Over the course of the semester, they will come to understand the ways in which the formation and reformation of gendered ideologies and identities lay at the center of Atlantic colonial and imperial projects, racial slavery, and nascent Western capitalism.
AFROAM 692U. Dynamics of Race and the Law
An intensive examination of the intersection of race with American law. The focus will be on the critique of established legal theories by a number of scholars in what has come to be known as the Critical Race Theory movement. Supreme Court cases and other legal materials will combine with theoretical, historical and critical works on the law and American society. Among the topics to be covered are the law of slavery, affirmative action, voting rights, and the nature of legal education. Weekly papers, class presentations, and final research paper will round out course grades.
AFROAM 692V. Topics in Black Women’s History
This graduate seminar will explore African American women’s lives from slavery to the present. It will pay special attention to the convergence of race, gender, class, and sexuality in shaping black female experiences. Topics we will consider include, but are not limited to, motherhood, work (and lack of work), leisure, activism, sex, and violence. We will be reading canonical texts and some of the latest scholarship on the lives and labors of African American women.
AFROAM 693A. Africana Music
This course explores contemporary life in Africa and the Diaspora through a study of African and African American music. Focusing on black music genres like Afrobeat, Soul, Makosa, Jazz, Kwaito, Highlife, Juju, R&B, Hiplife, Hip hop, among others, this course will adopt an ethnomusicological approach to a study of the peoples, their unique histories, and their cultures. The course will explore ethnic groups across the Africana world, including Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Congo, and the United States. Ultimately, the material covered in this course will provide both an overarching and nuanced understanding of the Black world through its varied soundscapes.
AFROAM 693B. The Rise of the Carceral State
This graduate seminar will introduce students to carceral studies, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that takes the late twentieth century expansion of the U.S. prison system as its primary object of analysis. Drawing on a variety of sources – influential older articles and books, a growing literature on the prison system's historical development, and recent examinations of mass incarceration’s “collateral consequences” – this course will provide a firm sense of the chronological, political, and institutional development of the U.S. carceral state. In doing so, this course will pay particular attention to the distinct relationship between domestic regimes of policing and incarceration and various black political struggles, from individuated acts of resistance to insurgent social movements. By placing this body of scholarship in conversation with the history of black politics, this graduate course seeks to both familiarize students with an emerging field of study and offer a unique perspective on the state of Black Studies.
AFROAM 693C. The History of Love, Sex, and Marriage in Black America
Why aren’t more African Americans married? Are African American women doomed to stay single? Is the two-parent black household a myth? These are some of the questions frequently asked about contemporary black relationships. This graduate course examines the history of African American love, sex, and marriage. Spanning slavery to present, this course investigates the political, economic, and social drivers that have shaped black love and family. It will pay special attention to the relationship between African American romantic and sexual encounters—heterosexual and queer—and mid-twentieth century social movements (e.g. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements). This course also will explore miscegenation; rape and sexual violence; free love and the sexual revolution; reproduction, childrearing, and family; pornography and sex work; marriage reform and welfare rights; and disease and medicine.
AFROAM 693D. Black Visual Culture
This course examines genealogies of black visual culture from the age of slavery to the present day. It also offers an introduction to black visual theory. We will consider multiple genealogies, including the visual rhetoric of the abolitionist movement; the role of visuality in regimes of enslavement and its afterlives; black women’s friendship albums and other visual ephemera; the data visualizations created by W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University; the use of ekphrastic techniques in black avant-garde prose and poetry; intermedia and radical black aesthetics; black portraiture and other trends and conversations in contemporary art. We will be particularly interested in black feminist, queer, and trans theorizations of the possibilities and pitfalls of visual representation.
AFROAM 693G. Gender in the Civil Rights Movement
In the 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists challenged Jim Crow, a system that was as much gendered as it was raced, they wrestled with historic assumptions about race and gender in American society. This course explores this and seeks to answer several major questions: What was the “gendered geography of Jim Crow”? How did race and gender shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement? What was the interplay between race, gender, and sexuality in this struggle? How did the mid-twentieth century Black Freedom Movement reinforce and challenge traditional notions of womanhood and manhood? While the Civil Rights Movement is the central focus of the course, we also will consider other mid-century liberatory movements (such as Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Liberation Movements and the Sexual Revolution) that were influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and grappled intensely with race, gender, and sexuality in ways that have had major and lasting implications for Black gender relations and politics.
AFROAM 693R. Race, Caste and Capital, 3 credits. (Meets with WGSS 693R)
The seminar will examine the co-constitutive historical formations of race and caste in relation to the expansion of capitalism and European high colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather than seeing this as a period for the 'origins' of race or caste, the course will examine the ways in which race and caste were discursively mediated in the period of high colonialism to shape the kind of racialized hierarchies that we are familiar with today. The course puts the urgent concerns of African American Studies, South Asian Studies and heterodox economics, with an emphasis on questions of political economy, together in a semester-long inquiry into how racialized hierarchies have been essential to producing and maintaining class stratification and geopolitical power. We will primarily draw from the American Black Radical and the South Asian Dalit Radical traditions for our readings in this course. These readings will focus on how European colonial and imperial regimes of power necessitated and furthered racialized hierarchies through regimes of chattel slavery, indentured servitude and bonded labor. We will also aim to understand how these regimes elicited some of the most radical and revolutionary struggles for liberation in the world. While our readings will be wide ranging in scope, our discussions will focus on the fairly specific question of what relation we can postulate, based on historical evidence and historiographical critiques, between contemporary instantiations of race and caste in different parts of the world? We will necessarily pay close attention to axes of gender and sexuality throughout the seminar, drawing on examples and critical work from authors working in the Caribbean, South Asia, North America, South Africa, East Africa, and the UK.
AFROAM 697A. Historical Sociology of the Black Atlantic: Afro-Latino Diasporas
This course will dig into the histories, politics, and cultures of Afro-Latinos in the Americas and the complex and shifting relationship between African-Americans and Latinas/os in the United States. It will begin with an historical analysis of the place of Afro-Latino diasporas within the Black Atlantic since the emergence of such diasporic formation in the long sixteenth century to quickly move into a discussion of the divide of the two Americas in the contexts of the 1846-8 Mexican-American War and the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War. We will then draw a general map of racial formations and black cultures in the Americas analyzing differences, patterns of similarity, and forms of interaction and exchange (e.g., political and cultural) of the African Diaspora throughout the Americas. After this the focus will turn into the United States and particularly on the relationship between Hispanic Caribbean Latinos and African-Americans (in the sense of U.S. Blacks) and on the specificity of Afro-Latinos in the U.S. as an historical identity. Among the topics to be covered are: Afro-Latinos and the Harlem Renaissance, Afro-diasporic musical expressions from Mambo to Hip-Hop, the relationship between the black freedom movement and the Latino power movement in the sixties, co-operation and conflict in urban political coalitions of Blacks and Latinos in New York and Chicago, how the relationship between race and class frames labor and community politics, and in which ways Afro-Latinos break the very distinction between African-Americans and Latinos.
AFROAM 697B. Radical Thought in the 3rd World
A comprehensive and intensive examination of the work of major figures in 20th century Afro-American literature, with an examination of the major relevant criticism.
AFROAM 697D. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois
The focus of the course this semester will be three fold: 1) W.E.B. Du Bois’ contributions to the development of sociology in the U.S. and especially that of African Americans and of race relations, 2) Du Bois’ interactions with such contemporaries as Franz Boas, Robert E. Park, and later E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson, St. Clair Drake and Oliver Cox, and 3) Du Bois’ views as contrasted to other scholars of the diaspora such as Melville Herskovits, Gilberto Freyre, Frank Tannenbaum, etc.
AFROAM 697E. Race, Sex, Science
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the intersections of race, sex, and science from the eighteenth century to our present moment. In addition to examining the centrality of scientific discourses and epistemes to the construction of modern racial, gender, and sexual identities, we will investigate the complicated historical relationship between racial science and sexual science, or sexology, with a focus on how attention to questions about slavery and colonialism transform that conversation. Throughout, we will understand science as an always political and potentially politicized domain, and will also trace aesthetic and political genealogies of resistance to scientific and medical exploitation. The course draws from science and technology studies, feminist and queer studies, slavery studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, among other fields, but above all else, it asks how Black Studies might transform our understanding of the history of science itself.
AFROAM 697J. Cross-Disciplinary Contemporary Issues: The Education of Africans from Roberts v. Boston to the AfroFuture
Education at its highest level and most majestic quality is "the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life…the secret of civilization.” In this course we study African Civilization in and of the world from the 1840s to the future. Our approach is grounded at the intersection of class (political economy, law, and property), gender, sexuality, body politics, science, and culture. From a materialist conception of history to recent work in brain and cognitive science the two centuries under focus in this course will emphasize an innovative and creative approach that simultaneously embraces disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary knowledge work.
AFROAM 701-702. Major Works in Afro-American Studies I and II
*Open to Afro-American Studies M.A. and Ph.D. Students Only.
AFROAM 753. Special Topics in Afro-American Literature & Culture
For graduate students only. An intensive study of the history of the blues. The nature of blues music and lyrics in an African and African American social, political, and musical context, and the use of the blues tradition in literature. No reading knowledge of music required or expected.
AFROAM 791C. Radical Perspectives
This is a proseminar which has as its purpose is to initiate you into the professional academic world of Africana Studies. The course is based upon and promotes an open, collegial atmosphere without intimidation or one-upmanship. It aims at helping you to develop your ability to produce radical, transformative scholarship about the African American experience in the very best of the Afro-American Studies scholarly tradition. The way we will do this involves three interrelated processes: (1) We will build on the scholarship you studied in the Major Works sequence and/or other previous course work; (2) We will study and discuss some key literature on black hermeneutics, epistemic formations, and knowledge revolutions; and (3) We will critique each other's scholarly work in development.
AFROAM 791Z. Toni Morrison (710)
Participants in this seminar will focus primarily on Toni Morrison's fiction and the scholarship on it. The seminar also will include readings from her essays, lectures, and criticism.