This interdisciplinary course introduces students to the discipline and examines the literature, history, arts, material culture, as well as sociological, political, economic, and philosophical perspectives of the experiences of people of African descent in the Americas. The course sheds light on the relationship between the past and the present in shaping Black world making, especially in the Americas. Four themes guide the direction of the course: fragmentation, exclusion, resistance, and community.

For many observers, the history of Africa begins with European colonization. What about the period prior to colonization? This introductory survey of African history from 1500 to 1900 covers the social, political, cultural, and economic life of sub-Saharan peoples. Topics include African kingdoms, the transatlantic and the Indian ocean slave trades, the expansion of European power after the abolition of the slave trade, Islamic reforms, and the spread of Christianity. The course not only introduces students to a range of historical events in the continent, but also highlights how some of these events shaped other parts of the world.

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from the Atlantic Slave Trade to 1910. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, slave narratives, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition?

This introductory course traces the development of a distinct African American literary tradition from 1910 to the present. Students examine music, orations, letters, poems, essays, autobiographies, fiction, and plays by Americans of African descent. The essential questions that shape this course include: What is the role of African American literature in the cultural identity and collective struggle of Black people? What themes, tropes, and forms connect these texts, authors, and movements into a coherent living tradition? This course is a continuation of African American Literature I, which considers literary production before 1910.

This course examines the relationship of culture to politics. It introduces the study of struggles to acquire, maintain, or resist power and gives particular attention to the role culture plays in reproducing and contesting social divisions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Lectures and discussion incorporate film, music, and fiction in order to evaluate the connection between cultural practices and politics.

In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, American poets who explicitly wrote of the political and social anxieties of their country's moment, this course analyzes the work of contemporary poets responding to the current social and political moment in the United States. Students closely examine poetry that speaks from small-town America, environmental wreckage, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, the Standing Rock Dakota Pipeline movement as well as poetry that addresses our current political leadership. Readings include Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Layli Long Soldier. Students engage these discussions through the production of critical examinations of the texts and through their own creative writing.

Since its origins in the early twentieth century, film has debated how to represent black suffering. This course examines one aspect of that debate: the persistent themes of white goodness, innocence, and blamelessness in films that are allegedly about black history and culture. Historical and cultural topics examined in film include the enslavement of Africans, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement.

This course focuses on race, ethnicity, and national power at their intersections with gender. Acknowledging the realities of white supremacy and patriarchy, students develop their understanding of these systemic and interlocking oppressions, while exploring the resistance to such oppressions that continues to give rise to critical feminist theory. Using a range of transdisciplinary perspectives, students examine the work of BIPOC feminist scholars and activists and encounter modes of critical and liberatory theorizing that productively challenge notions of what constitutes theory. Additionally, students practice ongoing self-reflection, or awareness of their own positionality and the ways it affects their journey through the course.

This course proceeds from the premise that coming of age while Black is fraught with the dangers created by a system of anti-black surveillance. Students examine "coming-of-age" memoirs and films that began during the era of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s. Typically, the films and memoirs in this sub-genre feature a young Black protagonist, often a teen, navigating, sometimes successfully but not always, a world defined by intersecting oppressions created by race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or colonial identity.

African women have been instrumental in “making history,” as female scribes in ancient Egypt recording and generating exegetical thought to producing legislation and leading movements as modern day leaders of state in Liberia and Rwanda. Yet, the lives of African women have, until only recently, been flattened with the historiography largely focusing on their roles in the domestic space rather than their contributions in preserving the cultural past as well as change makers and leaders. This class examines the roles of women in pre-colonial African society into the 21st century by considering how African women confronted, challenged, and shifted societal expectations, both locally and imported.

Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Amendments of 1965, the United States has received millions of immigrants from virtually every part of the world. The magnitude of these recent immigrant flows has reshaped the demography of the nation. But the magnitude of the flows is only part of the story. Today’s immigrants are extremely diverse, ethnically, culturally, and racially. Students explore sociological approaches to immigration as they discuss, debate, analyze, and critique academic, political, and mainstream articulations of immigration processes in the United States.

This course examines the literatures of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Some texts are drawn from Anglophone authors such as Lamming, Anthony, Walcott, Brodber, Danticat, Lovelace, Brathwaite, NourBese (Philip), Hopkinson, and Dionne Brand; others, from Francophone and Hispanophone writers, including Guillen, Carpentier, Condé, Chamoiseau, Depestre, Ferré, Santos-Febres, and Morejón. The course places each work in its historical, political, and anthropological contexts, and introduces students to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, including poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Recommended background: AFR 100 or one 100-level English course.

The Haitian Revolution is widely regarded as one of the most dramatic and significant events in history and is the only slave revolt in the Americas to successfully result in the abolition of slavery. It began with a massive slave insurrection in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and in 1804 it culminated in independence from France and the creation of the free, Black nation of Haiti. The revolution was shaped by people and ideas from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and in turn had a profound impact on people from enslaved laborers and rebels to politicians and merchants. This course examines the events of the Haitian Revolution and explores how it changed the history of the broader world in which it took place.

This course examines the history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. It examines invisibility and spectacle in black death, voyeurism, and the destruction of the black body in the new public square. Is it true that black lives are more easily taken and black bodies destroyed with less legal consequence than others? What are the ways in which black lives do not matter? This course analyzes media coverage and debates on social media about black death. Students place these discussions in conversation with the critique of race and racialized violence offered in literature, music, film and social theory.

During the 20th century, Jewish racial identity has increasingly moved towards notions of whiteness with the perceptions of “Black Jews” being fictional and farcical. By the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, Black communities and cultural icons were identifying as Jewish. Ethiopian Jews were admitted to Israel under the Law of Return and musicians such as Lenny Kravitz, Drake, as well as comedian Tiffany Haddish publicly asserted a Jewish identity. Global perceptions influenced by racial science criminalized Blackness, and Judaism participated in racial thinking and hierarchies as well while also being subjected to them. In this global history of Black Judaism (1800-present), students will learn about the historiographical and current debates regarding race and ethnicity in Judaism, discuss the increasing diversity of global Judaism, and push beyond the history of Blacks and Jews as an allied history to an intersected history.

Using the literatures of African and African-descended peoples, this course examines the religions-traditional/indigenous, Christian, Islamic, and so-called "syncretic"-from the continent and the diaspora. The selected works may represent the religious traditions, rituals, and practices of the Yoruba, Shona, Asante, Tswana, as well as African Independent Churches, Rastafari, and followers of Vodun, Santería, Candomblé, and related religions. Students approach texts-novels, short stories, dramas, films and poems-as literary productions and not just media to convey information about the religions they represent. This course is also attentive to contexts; students examine the sacred symbol systems represented as well as the historical era depicted and the literary traditions and cultures that produce them. Recommended background: course work in Africana or religious studies.

This course explores race and the history of tobacco in North America. With a primary focus on the intersection of tobacco capitalism and African American history and settler colonialism the course introduces students to the impact of tobacco on the formation of racial ideologies and lived experiences through a consideration of economic, cultural, political, and epidemiological history. Recommended background: at least one course on the study of race, settler colonialism, US history, capitalism, and/or gender and sexuality.

This course examines the rhetoric of containing black bodies in cinematic and literary narratives. In passing narratives light-skinned people move across racial lines supposedly fixed by biology, custom, and law. In trespassing narratives black persons enter spaces denoted as white by law or custom. This course calls attention to fear, fantasy, punishment, and resistance as ongoing dimensions of race and white supremacy. Recommended background: at least one course with race as a central topic.

The history of the twentieth century can be understood in terms of the increasing African-Americanization of music in the West. The rapid emergence and dissemination of African American music made possible through recording technologies has helped to bring about radical cultural change: it has subverted received wisdoms about race, gender, and sexuality, and has fundamentally altered our relationship to time, to our bodies, to our most basic cultural priorities. This course explores some crucial moments in the history of this African-Americanization of popular music and helps students develop an understanding of the relationship between musical sound and cultural practice.

Interdisciplinarity involves more than a meeting of disciplines. Academic practitioners stretch methodological norms and reach across disciplinary boundaries. Through examination of a single topic, this course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Students examine what practitioners actually do and work to become contributing practitioners themselves. Prerequisite(s): AFR 100, AMST 200, or GSS 100, and one other course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.

This course focuses on contemporary dance performance and practices that center, celebrate, and problematize theories of race, gender, sexuality, art, and politics. Course readings, discussions, and creative assignments center Black performance theories and methodologies, including dance, theater, poetry, music, and visual art. Students will also encounter concepts of transnational feminisms and queer fabulation across a variety of dance styles and practices. Course assignments develop students’ abilities in understanding and demonstrating their own positionality, as well as writing and researching across lines of cultural difference. Open to first-year students.

Examining the tradition of African American novels, this course introduces students to the particular concerns of the novel form as it is shaped and as it shapes the depiction of Blackness in the United States. Depending on the year, the course may take an historical view or be focused on a specific topic. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

How does the African American poetic tradition specifically contribute to the literary canon of African American literature and larger conceptions of American and global literature? This course is both an introduction to Black poetics and a deep exploration. The course considers so-called basic questions (e.g., What are Black poetics?) and more sophisticated questions (e.g., How do Black poetics transform the literary and cultural landscape?). Students read a variety of authors who maneuver between intra- and inter-racial politics, including such canonical authors as Langston Hughes and Nikki Giovanni, and less well-known authors such as Jayne Cortez and LL Cool J.

From the 15th century onward, captive Africans and their descendants created new cultures, communities, intellectual traditions, and strategies of freedom-seeking in the face of enslavement and oppression. In turn, the formation of the African Diaspora fundamentally shaped the development of the modern world. This course introduces students to the key historical and conceptual themes in the study of this Black Atlantic, focusing in particular on relationships between the African Diaspora and the maritime world. Beginning with early African-European interactions and ending with the Black transnationalism of the early 20th century, this course engages with histories of the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement in the Americas to explore the emergence of the African Diaspora, resistance to enslavement, emancipation, Black transnationalism, and the development of new political and theoretical approaches to Black life in the Atlantic world.

This course introduces students to contemporary African American literature. They explore literature written after 1975, considering a range of patterns and literary techniques as well as consistent themes and motifs. Students read a mix of canonical and less well-known authors. This course requires a nuanced, complicated discussion about what encompasses the contemporary African American literary tradition. Prerequisites(s): one 100-level English course. Recommended background: course work in American studies, Africana, or English.

This course surveys the writing of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Texts are selected from her novels, essays, children's literature, and drama; they also include criticism written about her work. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

Places recent popular and scientific discussions of human heredity and genetics in broader social, political, and historical context, focusing on shifting definitions of personhood. Topics include the commodification of human bodies and body parts and the emergence of new forms of biological citizenship and belonging.

This course explores folklore, myths, and literary texts of the African continent. These include works written by Anglophone authors such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Vera, Njau, Aidoo, Nwapa, Head, Cole, Mda, Abani, Okorafor, and Atta; those drawn from oral traditions of indigenous languages transcribed into English, such as The Mwindo Epic and The Sundiata; and those written by Lusophone and Francophone authors including Bâ, Senghor, Liking, Neto, Mahfouz, Ben Jelloun, and Kafunkeno. The course contextualizes each work historically, politically, and anthropologically. Students are introduced to a number of critical theories and methodologies with which to analyze the works, such as poststructural, Marxist, Pan-African, postcolonial, and feminist. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level English course.

This course examines selected autobiographical writings of ex-slaves; biographical accounts of the lives of former slaves written by abolitionists, relatives, or friends; the oral histories of ex-slaves collected in the early to mid-twentieth century; and the fiction, poems, and dramas about slaves and slavery (neo-slave narratives) of the last hundred years. Students consider these works as interventions in the discourses of freedom-religious, political, legal, and psychological-and as examples of a genre foundational to many literary works by descendants of Africans in diaspora. The course surveys early works written by slaves themselves, such as broadsides and books by Jupiter Hammond, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs; dictated biographies such as those by Esteban Montejo, Mary Prince, and Sor Teresa Chicaba; and fictional works inspired by the narratives, such as texts by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Charles Johnson, Michelle Cliff, Sherley Ann Williams, and Colson Whitehead. Recommended background: one 100-level English course or AFR 100.

Of the millions of immigrants who arrived in North and South America during the colonial period, the majority came not from Europe but from Africa. They came as human property, but they insisted on their freedom. Because slavery shaped the American hemisphere, this seminar takes a broad look at the histories of Africans and African Americans in the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and parts of western Africa. Students will better understand the ways that Black struggles against slavery shaped and continue to shape the Americas. They will also develop their skills as historical researchers and writers, including how to address the challenges of reading records that often obscure Black humanity. We do this work through careful reading of contemporary scholarship as well as primary sources such as music, letters, autobiographies, and material artifacts.

This course examines the roots of American ideas about crime, punishment, and carceral culture from the colonial period to the late 19th century. In current discourses about policing and prison abolition, the roots of the modern carceral system are often traced back to the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 and the development of mass incarceration in the 1970s. By tracing the history of policing and prisons back to the 1740s, this course places these developments in a much longer history. In this seminar, we will examine how Americans defined crime, conceived of punishment, and resisted incarceration in the period before modern carceral culture. We will read texts that focus on themes of policing race and gender; the development of the prison; policing slavery and freedom; and the development of new ideas of crime and punishment in the early Republic.

This seminar examines the intersections of gender with Black racial and ethnic identities as they have been and are constructed, expressed, and lived throughout the anglophone and francophone African/Black diaspora. The course not only pays special attention to U.S. women and the movements where they lead or participate; but it also devotes substantial consideration to African, Caribbean, Canadian, European, and Australian women of African descent. The course combines approaches and methodologies employed in the humanities, social sciences, and arts to structure interdisciplinary analyses. Using Black feminist (womanist), critical-race, and queer theories, students examine Black women’s histories; activism; resistance; and cultural, intellectual, and theoretical productions, as well as digital literacy. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.

This course explores the complex and intense history of Black reproduction in the United States and abroad. Students examine the social value of Black life both during and after enslavement. They mine contentious topics such as welfare caps, compulsory sterilization, abortion access, and the disparate experiences of Black mothers in the U.S. healthcare system that have led to maternal death rates twice the national average. The course considers both the ordinary experiences of Black women birthing as well as the sensationalized experiences of mothers such as activist Erica Garner, athlete Serena Williams, and pop icon Beyoncé.

This course mines the topic of justice while explicitly focusing on the concept of decolonization. In doing so, it identifies various iterations of coloniality, such as colonialism, settler colonialism, and postcolonialism. It traces decolonial sentiment through previous anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements. It then examines the multiple conceptualizations of decoloniality that are determined to sever colonial ties. In doing so, the course allows students to envision decolonial futures.

This course examines the debates among authors, politicians, religious leaders, social scientists, and artists in Africa, the African Americas, and Afro-Europe about non-normative sexualities, throughout the diaspora. While the course analyzes histories of sexualities, legal documents, manifestos by dissident organizations, and anthropological and sociological treatises, it focuses primarily on textual and cinematic representations, and proposes methods of reading cultural productions at the intersection of sexualities, race, ethnicities, and gender. Recommended background: at least one course offered by the Program in Africana, the Program in gender and sexuality studies, or one course in literary analysis.

From antebellum slavery through twentieth-century struggles for civil rights, black Americans have resisted political violence, economic marginalization, and second-class citizenship using strategies ranging from respectability to radicalism. Engaging with both historical and modern scholarship, literary sources, and other primary documents, this course explores the diverse tactics and ideologies of these resistance movements. By considering the complexities and contradictions of black resistance in American history and conducting source-based research, students develop a deep understanding of the black freedom struggle and reflect on the ways that these legacies continue to shape present-day struggles for racial justice.

Black Africans affected the Atlantic culture immediately after 1492. Their words and deeds impacted the institutions of the time in Spain, Portugal, and their overseas empires in the early modern period. Black people transmitted the cultural practices of their African native lands through the Diaspora, but they also were protagonists of the European Renaissance wherever they lived. Palenques of cimarrones–settlements of self-liberated Blacks–dismantled slavery and helped Blacks build a new conception and practice of human freedom. Black men and women wrote and sang, and were represented in the literary works of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Inca Garcilaso, Guamán Poma de Ayala, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This course will be taught in English.

The racialization of immigrants is intimately tied to the construction of race for all groups in U.S. society. In this seminar students engage the intersecting literatures of race, ethnicity, and immigration to explore implicit and explicit discussions of racial hierarchies, and how immigrants fit into and challenge existing accounts of assimilation and incorporation. They deconstruct the racialization of citizenship status with particular attention to how blackness is integral to the immigrant racialization project. Recommended background: SOC 204. Prerequisite(s): AFR/AMST/GSS 250 or SOC 205.

This seminar examines literary theories that address the representation and construction of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly, but not exclusively, theories formulated and articulated by Afra-diasporic women such as Spillers, Ogunyemi, Carby, Christian, Cobham, Valerie Smith, Busia, Lubiano, and Davies. Students not only analyze theoretical essays but also use the theories as lenses through which to explore literary productions of women writers of Africa and the African diaspora in Europe and in the Americas, including Philip, Dangarembga, Morrison, Gayl Jones, Head, Condé, Brodber, Brand, Evariston, Zadie Smith and Harriet Wilson. Cross-listed in Africana, English, and gender and sexuality studies. Strongly recommended: at least one literature course.

This course introduces students to the historical contributions of Latina/o/xs in the emergence of Hip-Hop culture in New York City. To do so, students will be engaging with a contextual approach that depicts migration processes and settlements of Latinx communities within the five boroughs, particularly Uptown and the Bronx where Hip-Hop culture erupted during the 1970s. This course will show how Latina/o/xs have empowered themselves through artistic performances and expressions in the midst of social struggle and industrial decline. In addition, the course critically addresses how Latina/o/xs Hip-Hop artists constantly navigate the ethno-racial politics of Blackness and Latinidad that are crucial within discourses on Hip-Hop legitimacy and pioneerism. A wide variety of sources will be used to analyze Latina/o/xs’ involvements in the different elements of Hip-Hop culture (Mcing/Rap, Djing, Graffiti, Breaking, Beatboxing) in order to understand racial, ethnic and gender dynamics. Recommended background: prior coursework on race and ethnicity.

The Africana writer maintains a unique relationship to fiction. Despite its conceptually imposed distance from fact, fiction, the novel in particular, acts as an avenue for truth for the Africana writer. Buried beneath the fiction of global epistemologies that privilege the dominant narrative, the Africana novelist often employs fiction to address what the larger narrative obscures or precludes entirely. The Africana writer demonstrates a perceptive and insightful understanding of the world at large and emerges as a theorist of the human experience within the pages of their literary contribution. So, in addition to challenging the perception of Africana people and culture through the Africana author, this course details a nuanced portrait of the humanities. Recommended background: AFR 100; prior work in research, writing, and critical theory.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

This course takes a transnational approach to films about the four hundred years of the enterprise in trans-Atlantic slavery. A transnational approach emphasizes the creation of a global audience, and sometimes one that is specifically Black or Pan-African, for films about slavery and its aftermath. These films challenge and question the stereotypes about slavery and enslaved people that were the foundation for anti-Blackness in United States and other Western national cinemas. The filmmakers considered in this course are most often members of the African diaspora in the Americas, especially, from the United States, Cuba, Martinique, and Brazil. Prerequisite(s): AF/RF 162 or a course in Africana.

The racialization of immigrants is intimately tied to the construction of race for all groups in U.S. society. In this seminar students engage the intersecting literatures of race, ethnicity, and immigration to explore implicit and explicit discussions of racial hierarchies, and how immigrants fit into and challenge existing accounts of assimilation and incorporation. They deconstruct the racialization of citizenship status with particular attention to how blackness is integral to the immigrant racialization project. Recommended background: SOC 204. Prerequisite(s): AFR 250, AMST 250, GSS 250, or SOC 205.

This seminar takes as its premise that black literature engages with and reflects parts of the world in which it is produced. In this course, students sort through the various conversations authors and critics have with each other. They read canonical authors and less well-known figures in an effort to tease out the nuance present in this body of work. Each text is paired with another in a form of dialogue. These exchanges are not set, so it is up to students to understand how the texts speak to each other. Literary criticism requires us to think through privilege, citizenship, capitalism, intraracial dynamics, gender and sexual dynamics, and political movements. The course theme may vary from year to year (e.g., disability, literature of the left, black queer studies).

The research and writing of an extended essay or report, or the completion of a creative project, under the supervision of a faculty member. Students register for AAS 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both AAS 457 and 458.

The research and writing of an extended essay or report, or the completion of a creative project, under the supervision of a faculty member. Students register for AAS 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both AAS 457 and 458.

This course engages the conceptual framework of reproductive justice, as defined by Black feminists, and its principles: the right to parent, the right not to parent, the right to parent in healthy and safe communities, and the right to bodily sovereignty, which includes the right to sexual autonomy and gender self-determination. Students in this course investigate notable convergences between reproductive justice movements and a range of queer and trans rights movements to mark the makings of dynamic coalitions. Topics also include the origins and evolutions of reproductive justice, queer and transgender history in the United States, LGBTQ+ family formation, reproductive healthcare, and trans fertility. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, and/or trans studies. Recommended background: one course on the study of gender, sexuality, queer studies, and/or trans studies.

Federico García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba was the last play he wrote before his assassination in August 1936 at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, the play tells the story of the fatal effects of patriarchy on women even when men are dead or not physically present. This course studies stagings and film versions of La casa de Bernarda Alba to analyze the intersection of gender, class, and sexuality under an oppressive power that results in feminine rebellion. Loosely based on Lorca’s play, Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand (2014) is a comedy about free women of color in antebellum New Orleans, where the matriarch is the mistress of a powerful white man under the social custom of plaçage, a system of concubinage between free women of color and white men. Race, gender, power, wealth, class, and freedom in these two related plays become the object of a deconstructive analysis. The course will be taught in Spanish. Prerequisite(s): HISP 205 or above.

How do people remember their pasts when forced into exile? When do archives move with them and how so? This class historically foregrounds examples of African communities under duress due to climate change, political oppression, and religious persecution in Africa and its diaspora from the seventeenth century to present day. Students examine, observe, and engage with a variety of written, oral, and ritual sources, including landscape, music, ceremony, and food. Students also work with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and learn from the African Diasporic communities in Lewiston.

This course examines the art, science, and politics of people watching through a sociological lens. Taking a critical perspective, we explore how dynamics of race, class, gender, ableism, and power pattern social interactions in public space. Students will move beyond people watching as a casual pastime and develop qualitative literacy skills by systematically collecting and analyzing observational data. The course emphasizes theoretical engagement with the ethics of surveillance, the politics of interpretation, and the reproduction of inequality, while encouraging students to reflect on their positionality as observers. Students will produce a community ethnography. Recommended background: prior engagement with the Lewiston community.

This course introduces students to the issues, politics, and the methodologies of Black genealogy. It begins and centers exploration with Africana texts and films that represent lineages of people of the Black Atlantic. It augments these texts with cookery books and historical texts about diasporic arts and crafts. Recommended background: coursework in Africana, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, or American or African histories or literatures.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.