This course interrogates representations of blackness in American popular culture. Using an interdisciplinary lens that considers the social, political, cultural, and historical realities that inform popular culture, students investigate how blackness is constructed and its implications.
The notion of freedom has been central to American democracy, yet what Americans mean by freedom has long been contested,restricted, expanded, and at times denied. This course examines the African American quest for universal freedom within the United States political system, with particular attention to how political institutions have shaped, expanded, and limited freedom and equality. Students will explore foundational institutions and concepts, including federalism, the courts, the presidency, and the legislative branch, and assess their roles in advancing and restricting universal freedom.
This comparative and interdisciplinary course investigates the social, economic, intellectual, cultural, and political achievements of people of African descent as well as the challenges faced by them. It considers the Black experience globally and analyzes the ways in which intersections of race, gender, class, and other markers of difference complicate that experience. The course examines concepts, theories, and themes central to the African Diaspora and engenders a critique of the ways in which knowledge is disseminated and produced. Through exploration of the seminal texts in the Black literary tradition, the course promotes a comprehensive knowledge of the discipline, its core concerns, and its methodologies.
A study of the major traditions of African-American writing from the nineteenth century to the present, including Frederick Douglass, Linda Brent, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove.
A survey of the history of African-Americans from their arrival in the English colonies to the end of the Civil War. African-Americans' struggle with slavery and oppression provide the central theme, but the course will address the various political, economic, social, and cultural conditions which contributed to the development of a unique African-American community. Particular attention will be given to the development of such institutions within this community as family, religion, and education.
A survey of the major topics and issues in African-American history from 1865 to the present: the era of emancipation, the turn-of-the-century nadir of race relations, black participation in both world wars, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and various dimensions of contemporary black life. The course will also explore some of the historiographical themes that have catalyzed current scholarship and will analyze diverse theories about the black experience in America.
This American History course covers the Black Power Movement’s history from its origins in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the current Black Lives Matter era. Together we review how the Black Power Movement empowered individuals and groups to protest police brutality, advance criminal justice reform, advocate for self-defense, promote Black collective interests, advance Black values, create Black institutions, and secure Black autonomy.
An exploration of the Southern past from the earliest English settlements to the establishment of the Confederate States of America. This course charts the development of distinctive Southern political, economic, and social structures, examines the role of chattel slavery in shaping the region, and analyzes the causes of the war for Southern independence.
This course examines the implications of West and Central Africa's relations with and influences on the wider Atlantic world from the late 15th century, focusing on political formation, trade and socioeconomic change, and cultural interactions in Atlantic Africa. The course also considers topics such as diaspora, colonialism, decolonization, transnational social movements, democratization, development, migration, popular culture, tourism, and the global ramifications of West and Central Africa's integration into the Atlantic world.
Jazz has been called "America's Classical Music" and the United States' greatest musical export. Jazz is at once an improvisatory yet timeless art. This course presents a chronological survey of its major styles and artists, from African acculturation in the New World to the present. Topics include the roots of jazz, the New Orleans masters, jazz in the 20's, Big Band, Bebop, Post-Bop styles, Avant-garde, Fusion, recent developments, and jazz vocalists. Through listening assignments and attendance at live performances, students learn to identify jazz styles and instrumentation.
This course examines the many ways in which race and ethnicity play a role in American politics, including how race and ethnicity affect personal identity, political preferences, political participation, candidates and campaigns, public officeholders, and policymaking. Topics considered include racial identity, descriptive and substantive representation, intersectionality (the interaction of race, gender, class and other social categories), and the effect of race and ethnicity on current public policy debates.
This course focuses on important African-American writers whose unique perspectives challenge us to think about questions of justice, equality and difference, morality, and rule. Readings begin in the nineteenth century (Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington) and proceed into the late twentieth century with selections from authors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Shelby Steele, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison.
This course exposes students to essential theories on American voting behavior developed by leading political scientists. At the end of the course, students will be equipped to contribute competently to academic discussions on the topic.
This course offers a psychological exploration of human diversity, with a primary focus on minority groups in the U.S. Students examine a wide range of psychological topics within a cultural context, including gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability, social class, personality, intelligence, health, intergroup relations, and intercultural communication. The course also introduces cross-cultural research methods that enable diverse perspectives to shape psychological theory and practice. Students develop a nuanced appreciation of how diversity impacts various aspects of life, including research, service delivery, workplace dynamics, and personal relationships.
This introductory course explores the interlocking forms of oppression circumscribing Black women’s lives in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which their lived experiences and social realities are influenced by constructions of race, gender, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference. It contextualizes Black women’s struggles for social justice historically within the broader narratives of Black freedom struggles and the Women’s Rights Movement. It underscores the ways in which despite their marginalized status, Black women have used their agency within both the private and public realms to interrogate, challenge, and resist their subordination and subvert the status quo, particularly as it is reinforced in negative constructions of Black female identity.
American Studies
This course interrogates representations of blackness in American popular culture. Using an interdisciplinary lens that considers the social, political, cultural, and historical realities that inform popular culture, students investigate how blackness is constructed and its implications.
Reading and discussion of significant texts from various disciplines including important theoretical analyses of American cultural and intellectual life.
This course focuses on literary representations--in fiction, nonfiction and poetry--of the experience and meaning of the imaginary line that divides the United States and Mexico. Among the themes to be discussed are the experience of border-crossing (in both directions), the possibility or impossibility of assimilating to life across the border, and especially the desire that draws migrants toward el otro lado (the other side). Writers to be discussed may include Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Katherine Ann Porter, Americo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, Cormac McCarthy, Oscar Casares, and Luis Alberto Urrea.
Like Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of “a new birth of freedom” in the Gettysburg Address, the American literature covered in English 378 struggles to articulate, then problematize, American freedom in the era surrounding the Civil War and emancipation. What is freedom? To whom does it extend? What are its blessings and its costs? Nobody has ever thought more profoundly about these issues than the American writers who emerged before, during, and after the war America fought with itself: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.
A paradox of American literary history is that the South--the poorest and least educated American region, the one beset by the most glaring injustices, the one that seemed to resist modernity most fiercely—produced the most innovative and important American writers of the twentieth century, writers like William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Ernest Gaines. This course focuses most intently on their era, “the Southern renascence,” but examines its origins in the nineteenth century and its echoes in the remarkable Southern writing of contemporaries like Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethewey, Janice Ray, and others.