*Note: All graduate courses are 4 credits unless notes otherwise
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-Part II, 3 credits (undergrad/grad)
This course will provide an opportunity for students to participate in the researching and selection of materials for a website and an illustrated history documenting the presence of people of African descent at UMass since the founding in 1867. The goals for the website are two-fold 1) to develop an as comprehensive as possible database of students, staff, faculty and administrators. From that larger list we will begin the process of conducting 45 minute to one hour interviews/conversations to be presented as part of the active ongoing content of the website. Those interviews will be supplemented with audio and visual content to form standalone segments. 2) to select transcripts from the interviews, along with photos and other documentation to shape the narrative of the printed history. There also will be opportunities for online archival research until the Library reopens. Your efforts as students will be acknowledged on the website and in the book.
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 shall 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: for example, the construction of the concept of "race" and the debate over the origins of slavery, the nature of slave communities and culture, gender and slavery, slavery in a comparative perspective, the significance of 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 and 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 attempted to address 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 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 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.