This two-course sequence assumes no previous knowledge of Arabic and provides a thorough grounding in the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It starts with the alphabet and the number system and builds the four skills gradually and systematically through carefully selected and organized materials focusing on specific, concrete and familiar topics such as self identification, family, travel, food, renting an apartment, study, the weather, etc.). These topics are listed in the textbook's table of contents. The student who successfully completes the two-course sequence will have mastered about 1000 basic words and will be able to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations on a limited range of practical topics such as self-identification, family, school, work, the weather, travel, etc., 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, passages of up to 180 words written in Arabic script, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 50-word paragraph in Arabic. The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Novice to the Intermediate Mid level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 1201 - Elementary Arabic I

In this two-course sequence learners continue to develop the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing and grammar foundation through the extensive use of graded materials on a wide variety of topics. While more attention is given to developing native-like pronunciation and to grammatical accuracy than in ARAB 1201 and ARAB 1202, the main focus of the course will be on encouraging fluency and facility in understanding the language and communicating ideas in it. The student who successfully completes this two-course sequence will have mastered over 1500 new words and will be able to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations related to a wide variety of topics beyond those covered in ARAB 1201 and ARAB 1202, such as the history and geography of the Arab world, food and health, sports, economic matters, the environment, politics, the Palestine problem, etc. 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, passages of up to 300 words, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 150-word paragraph in Arabic with fewer grammatical errors than in ARAB 1202. The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Intermediate Mid to the Advanced Mid level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 1203 - Intermediate Arabic I

At the inception of this department at Cornell University in 1969, the Africana Studies and Research Center became the birthplace of the field Africana studies. Africana studies emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary studies of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. In this course, we will look at the diverse contours of the discipline. We will explore contexts ranging from modernity and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex in the New World to processes of decolonization and globalization in the contemporary digital age. This course offers an introduction to the study of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. This course will examine, through a range of disciplines, among them literature, history, politics, philosophy, the themes - including race/racism, the Middle Passage, sexuality, colonialism, and culture - that have dominated Africana Studies since its inception in the late-1960s. We will explore these issues in an attempt to understand how black lives have been shaped in a historical sense; and, of course, the effects of these issues in the contemporary moment. This course seeks to introduce these themes, investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.

Full details for ASRC 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

Focusing on political and social history, this course surveys African-American history from Emancipation to the present. The class examines the post-Reconstruction Nadir of black life; the mass black insurgency against structural racism before and after World War II; and the Post-Reform Age that arose in the wake of the dismantling of legal segregation. The course will familiarize students with the basic themes of African-American life and experience and equip them to grasp concepts of political economy; class formation; and the intersection of race, class and gender. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for ASRC 1595 - African American History from 1865

W.E.B Du Bois famously warned that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” In this class we ask what it means to think about the color line, that is, the problem of race and racial domination. Moving across disciplines, geographies, and national boundaries we explore how race and racism shape modern life. We will study how race and racism function and how they relate to politics, culture, and resistance. Students will read a range of influential thinkers — W.E.B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Saidiya Hartmann, and Denise Ferreira da Silva — whose work engages race and racial domination from various vantage points. By engaging these thinkers, we explore the global color line as something that is produced, lived, and contested. This Freshman Writing Seminar (FWS) is designed to sharpen students’ ability to critically think and reason. By the conclusion of this seminar, students should be confident to develop and express their ideas in a clear and persuasive manner.

Full details for ASRC 1833 - FWS: The Global Color Line: Culture, Politics, Resistance

According to the 2025 U.S Census, Latino/a/x communities are the fastest-growing population of residents. Yet how do we define Latino? Who is not included in such terminology? This course complicates the stability of race, ethnicity, and nationality by focusing on the lives of African descendants across the Americas. Through weekly discussion posts, short argumentative essays, and a final research paper, each class presents the possibilities and limitations of Afro-Latinidad. Drawing from Ileanna Rodriguez-Silva, Carole Boyce Davies, Paulette Ramsey, and Winston James, we will learn how factory workers, politicians, and artists use writing as a vehicle not simply to understand themselves but to contend with the injustices they face. The course's purpose is to consider what writing reveals to us about ourselves and others.

Full details for ASRC 1834 - FWS: Writing AfroLatinidad: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism

How do we talk about the dress culture of the Caribbean in the face of major historical events, such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade? What is the relationship between text and textiles/clothing? This seminar explores how we think, talk, and write about fashion through a historical lens. Engaging with scholars from History and Black Studies and Caribbean novelists, such as Danielle C. Skeehan, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, and Robert S. Duplessis, we will investigate different interpretations of history through an exploration of non-traditional archives (i.e., textiles) that challenge the written word as the sole authoritative source of the historical narrative of the Caribbean. Writing assignments will include discussion posts, descriptive essays, analytical essays, and research papers as we explore the intersection of Caribbean fashion and history.

Full details for ASRC 1835 - FWS: Fashioning the Caribbean: Dress, Textile, and History

Full details for ASRC 1844 - FWS: Whites Are Here to Stay

(Intro) To Black Music will introduce students to a multitude of Black musical artists across a range of styles and genres - from the blues of Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson to the contemporary stylistic experimentation of Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyonc? as well as to writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Ralph Ellison who help us better understand the sound and significance of their performances. Students will be expected to engage the dynamic innovation, cultural development, and deep attunements ever-active in the rhythms and melodies of Black social life through critical listening and analysis. In doing so this class will broaden students? musical and cultural horizons and help students situate Black diasporic music making in the 20th and 21st centuries within a broader context of racial capitalism, commodification, global networks of exchange, and the artistic pathways forged from legacies of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and resistance. (MUSIC-HC)

Full details for ASRC 1932 - (Intro) To Black Music: Listening, Sounding, and Studying Black Radical Possibility

Waves of voluntary and forced migrants and their imposition on indigenous communities led to radically new societies in the Caribbean. Though popularized as tropical paradises, the Caribbean has one of the highest rates of emigration in the world. Revolutions, wars of independence and socio-economic and political marginalization has led to the formation of Caribbean diasporic communities in Central America, North America, Europe and Africa. These diasporic communities are also transnational spaces because emigrants retain important social, economic and political connections to their countries of origin. Drawing on specific case studies this course considers three interconnecting questions - What factors led to sustained emigration? Why did migrants' settle in specific countries? How have Caribbean diasporic communities reshaped their natal communities and their new homes? (HIST-HGS)

Full details for ASRC 1976 - Recreating the Caribbean: Migration and Identity in Contemporary Caribbean History

On the eve of the American Revolution Britain administered 26 colonies-not just the 13 that would become the United States. British North America's dramatic struggle for independence has led many history textbooks to read the revolution back into colonial history, focusing on those 13 North American colonies that would become the United States, often at the expense of global connections that defined the colonial and revolutionary periods. As this class will explore, key elements of early American history can only be understood through a broader perspective, from the economic growth of New England as a result of the African slave trade and exchange in the Caribbean, to the use of citizenship as a category of exclusion in response to the myriad inhabitants-European, Indigenous, and African-who neighbored or lived within the original 13 colonies. In this course, we will explore the history of early America from the 1490s through the 1800s from a global perspective. Voices usually peripheral to the narrative of American development, from enslaved African mariners to Spanish American nuns, will become central to processes of cultural encounter, labor exploitation, revolutionary upheavals, and state formation that shaped the making and unmaking early America. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for ASRC 1985 - American History from 1500 to 1800

Full details for ASRC 2020 - Introduction to African Philosophy

This course centers Black women who have often described their reproductive health experiences as fighting for our lives. While grounded in an exploration of Black women 's experiences in the US, this course also looks across the diaspora to issues of access, rights, and equity in reproductive health. Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare and its importance for Black women's overall health and well-being, this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect to inform how reproductive health is conceptualized, practiced, and experienced. Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice. We will read across a range of texts and genres from the historical and theoretical, to memoir and documentary. With what we learn together, we will craft contributions to public debates around healthcare issues impacting Black women. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for ASRC 2023 - Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women's Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective

This course explores the history of religions among people of African descent from the period of the development of the transatlantic slave trade (1440s) to the present. Its aim is to introduce students to the complex ways religion has shaped their lifeworlds. Such study involves, among other things, encounters with the religious cultures of slaves and slaveholders in the antebellum South; the development of independent Black churches, the effects of emancipation, migration, and urbanization upon Black religious life; new black religious movements (e.g., Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, Black Hebrews); the emergence of Black secularism/humanism; the impact of Black religious expressive culture (e.g., music, sermon, song, and film); the religious dimensions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; as well as contemporary developments and transformations in Black religious life. All of which requires attentiveness to how we tell the story of Africana religions, and how scholars have developed and pursued the modern study of Africana religion.

Full details for ASRC 2060 - Introduction to Africana Religions

This course is designed for students who can speak and understand a spoken Arabic dialect (Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, etc.) but have little or no knowledge of written Arabic, known as Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, or Fusha. The focus of the course will be on developing the reading and writing skills through the use of graded, but challenging and interesting materials. As they develop their reading and writing skills, students will be learning about Arab history, society, and culture. Classroom activities will be conducted totally in Arabic. Students will not be expected or pressured to speak in Classical Arabic, but will use their own dialects for speaking purposes. However, one of the main goals of the course will be to help the development of the skills to communicate and understand Educated Spoken Arabic, a form of Arabic that is based on the spoken dialects but uses the educated vocabulary and structures of Fusha.

Full details for ASRC 2105 - Arabic for Heritage Speakers

This seminar will introduce students to the expanding and dynamic historiography of the African diaspora. The most astute scholars of the African diaspora argue that diaspora is not to be conflated with migration for diaspora includes the cultural and intellectual work that constructs and reinforces linkages across time and space. Much of the early historiography of the African diaspora disproportionately focused on Anglophone theorists whose intellectual output engaged thinkers and communities in Anglophone West Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States. Recent interventions in the historiography of the African diaspora has significantly broadened its geographical conceptualization by including a larger segment of Western Europe, Latin America and Asia. In addition, scholars of Africa are increasingly exploring topics in the African diaspora. Using a range of archival and secondary sources, students will explore the material, cultural and intellectual factors that are remaking the historiography of the African diaspora. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for ASRC 2317 - Histories of the African Diaspora

This course is a hybrid seminar/performance forum that combines scholarly exploration of hip hop musical aesthetics with applied performance. Students will engage in online and in-class discussions of hip hop musical aesthetics, contextualized historically, socially, and culturally through weekly reading and listening assignments. They will also devote significant time to creating and workshopping individual and collaborative musical projects. Formal musical training is not required, but students should have experience making music (instrumentalists, beat makers, lyricists, vocalists, beatboxers, etc.), and should have at least a basic familiarity with hip hop music. Students who wish to enroll in the course should contact the professor for more information. (MUSIC-MT)

Full details for ASRC 2380 - Performing Hip Hop

Each year this seven-week, one-credit course focuses on a different novel by Nobel Laureate and Cornell alumna Toni Morrison. We read and discuss each novel in the context of Morrison's life and career, her place in African American, US, and world literature, and her exploration of crucial questions regarding identity, race, gender, history, oppression, and autonomy. Please see the class roster for the current semester's featured novel. Students will read the novel closely, with attention to its place in Morrison's career and in literary and cultural history.

Full details for ASRC 2603 - The Novels of Toni Morrison

This lecture class will explore the socio-cultural history of modern Egypt from the late 18th century to the 21st century Arab Spring. We will explore Egyptian history under the Ottomans and the Mamluks, the unsuccessful French attempts to colonize Egypt, and the successful British occupation of the country. We will then examine the development of Egyptian nationalism from the end of the 19th century through Nasser's pan-Arabism to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. We will accomplish this with the aid of a variety of texts and media, including novels and films.

Full details for ASRC 2670 - The History and Politics of Modern Egypt

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ASRC 2680 - Introduction to African American Literature

This course surveys global and American black art and visuality from the 18th century to the present and introduces its major figures, movements, criticisms and social, political, and economic issues. We begin with an overview of African art and global structures of slavery and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries to ask how racial blackness structures the way the modern world has been imagined and visualized, as well as how black people created art that resisted and challenged a modern mode of visuality that excluded and negated them. We then focus primarily on black art made in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on painting, sculpture, crafts, performance, photography, film, and new media in order to understand how black artists respond to and shape their social and political realities. This course examines the role that art can play in politically turbulent times and centers black artists as important critics of an antiblack world and visionaries of new life possibilities. We will use an interdisciplinary lens to understand the diverse output of black artists including the fields of art history, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and technology and new media studies. Some classes will be held in the Johnson Museum and Olin Library to work directly with visual objects and artworks.

Full details for ASRC 2700 - Introduction to Black Art

This course explores past and contemporary theories of emotions and different kinds of emotions like wonder, grief, anger, and fear, all with an eye toward the study and practice of religion, and its relationship to race, gender, class, and politics. We will also explore how the academic study of religion and different religious tradition impact our understanding of emotions. We will draw from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, political science, affect theory, gender studies, psychology, and neuroscience. We will examine several questions related to emotions and its rise. First and foremost, what is an emotion? How is it different from affect, feeling, or passion? How are emotions investigated across disciplines? Can we study emotion historically? How are certain emotions racialized or gendered? What is a religious experience? How identifying as religious or otherwise impact one's understanding and experience of emotions? How do emotions lend force to ideas and ideologies, to causes such as the recent surge of White (Christian) nationalist sentiment in the U.S. and other countries? Finally, what do emotions (and affect theory) bring to the study of religion?

Full details for ASRC 3060 - Emotions, Religion, and Race

In this two-semester sequence, learners will be introduced to authentic, unedited Arabic language materials ranging from short stories, and poems, to newspaper articles dealing with social, political, and cultural issues. Emphasis will be on developing fluency in oral expression through discussions of issues presented in the reading and listening selections. There will be more focus on the development of native-like pronunciation and accurate use of grammatical structures than in the previous four courses. A primary objective of the course is the development of the writing skill through free composition exercises in topics of interest to individual students. This course starts where ARAB 2202 leaves off and continues the development of the four language skills and grammar foundation using 18 themes, some new and some introduced in previous courses but are presented here at a more challenging level. The student who successfully completes this two-course sequence have mastered over 3000 new words and will be able, within context of the 18 new and recycled themes to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations, 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, authentic, unedited passages of up to 400 words, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 300-word paragraph in Arabic with fewer grammatical errors than in ARAB 2202. The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Advanced Mid to the Superior level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 3100 - Advanced Arabic I

The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.

Full details for ASRC 3334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy? (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ASRC 3625 - Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper

This course offers an opportunity to read in depth two major writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Friends and one-time collaborators in the New York City of the 1920s, each had important careers that extended long after the Harlem Renaissance period in which they achieved early renown. This class surveys the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical essays, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which their work was first read, as well as how that work was received, forgotten, recovered, contested, and emulated. The class concludes by examining reading subsequent major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly upon Hughes' and Hurston's legacies. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ASRC 3705 - Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

This course introduces students to questions and debates around the role and effects of race and racism in international politics. Scholars of international politics have long neglected such questions in world affairs, even though the origins of international relations - as an academic discipline - can be traced back to the early years of the 20th century, when questions of imperialism and governance over different races necessitated the development of new ways of thinking about inter-state and inter-racial relations. Over the past two decades, however, prompted by insights from post-colonial theory and cultural studies but also by continued Western military engagements in the Middle East and Africa, new scholarly publications have sought to bring back the analysis of the color line into our conversations about global politics. The major themes covered in this course include critical debates around the meanings and salience of race; colonialism; race and IR; decolonization and Third Worldism; race and war on/and terror; and race and international law and climate justice. (GOVT-IR)

Full details for ASRC 3947 - Race and World Politics

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of ?police brutality? and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for ASRC 4109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Full details for ASRC 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for ASRC 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

"Epibiosi:" to survive, to survive in the face of not only the everyday demands of life, but to command a strategy to be in the world in the face of considerable odds. A biopolitical project that takes as its object of thought the ways in which Booker T. contrived a mode of being in a world inordinately hostile not only to the Negro, but to the lived realities of Negroes being educated in their very midst. That is, in the South; that is, in Alabama, the very heart of Dixie. Biopolitics as the strategy for survival. To survive in the face of a hostile/inhospitable "host" community; to find ways to survive in the face not only of white antipathy but also Negro opposition — from DuBois to every other Northern inclining toward any mode of compromise with the Southern plantocracy — most memorably rendered as Booker T's famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. A biopolitics that thinks life-as-survival from the hostile ground up.

Full details for ASRC 4590 - Epibiosi: The Biopolitics of Booker T. Washington

This seminar examines the dynamics of modern collective identities which dominated the Egyptian public sphere in the long twentieth century. We will explore the underpinnings and formation of territorial Egyptian nationalism, pan-Arabism and Islamism through close readings and class discussions of important theoretical, historiographical and primary texts. (HIST-HGS)

Full details for ASRC 4650 - Contesting Identities in Modern Egypt

Full details for ASRC 4721 - Peace Building in Conflict Regions: Case Studies Sub-Saharan Africa Israel Palestinian Territories

For senior Africana Studies majors working on honors thesis, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the Africana Studies and Research Center faculty.

Full details for ASRC 4900 - Honors Thesis

For students working on special topics, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the Africana Studies and Research Center faculty.

Full details for ASRC 4902 - Independent Study

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of “police brutality” and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics.

Full details for ASRC 6109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

This class is devoted to the in-depth study of the works of W.E.B. DuBois. The aim is to locate DuBois in the general philosophical filaments while mining his works for specific philosophical insights that they embody and laying bare the contributions that he has made to our understanding of some of the great questions that occupy the energies wherever they happen to be located. Finally, we seek to elicit how his African American inheritance inspired him and is itself impacted by his philosophical exertions.

Full details for ASRC 6204 - Africana Philosophy: W.E.B Du Bois

"Epibiosi:" to survive, to survive in the face of not only the everyday demands of life, but to command a strategy to be in the world in the face of considerable odds. A biopolitical project that takes as its object of thought the ways in which Booker T. contrived a mode of being in a world inordinately hostile not only to the Negro, but to the lived realities of Negroes being educated in their very midst. That is, in the South; that is, in Alabama, the very heart of Dixie. Biopolitics as the strategy for survival. To survive in the face of a hostile/inhospitable "host" community; to find ways to survive in the face not only of white antipathy but also Negro opposition — from DuBois to every other Northern inclining toward any mode of compromise with the Southern plantocracy — most memorably rendered as Booker T's famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech. A biopolitics that thinks life-as-survival from the hostile ground up.

Full details for ASRC 6290 - Epibiosi: The Biopolitics of Booker T. Washington

This seminar explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Black Power Movement, broadly defined. Beginning with an examination of transnationalism in the early 20th century, it examines the thought and political activities of African-American intellectuals and activists who crossed national boundaries, figuratively and literally, in the quest for black freedom. We will focus on the postwar era, particularly the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring transnationalism in the context of black feminism, Marxism, black nationalism, Pan Africanism, and other political traditions. We will examine the meeting and mingling of transnational discourses, ideologies, and activists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Full details for ASRC 6321 - Black Power Movement and Transnationalism

The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.

Full details for ASRC 6334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Full details for ASRC 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

Independent study course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ASRC 6900 - Independent Study

This class is the second in a two-part course sequence offered in the fall and spring semesters annually. In this hybrid theory and methods course, students will read historiographic, ethnographic, and sociological engagements about African-descended people throughout the Diaspora.

Full details for ASRC 6903 - Africana Studies Graduate Seminar

Elementary Swahili provides a foundation in listening, speaking, reading, and writing the basic grammatical structures and vocabulary. Swahili (Kiswahili) is spoken in the East and Central parts of Africa. It is an official and national language in Tanzania, and in Kenya. During a first semester course, students engage in short conversation and communicative tasks, such as, greetings, introduction, daily routines, shopping, etc. Students learn to comprehend short and simple utterances about topics pertaining to basic personal information and immediate setting in day to day life. A Swahili second semester increases your oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, writing, reading, and listening skills. All listening exercises will aim at preparing students to speak. Be ready to actively participate in conversations, to express yourself orally, and write stories/compositions. Literature and Cultural materials are incorporated into the course, along with audio, video, and web-based materials.

Full details for SWAHL 1100 - Elementary Swahili I

Intermediate Swahili levels I and II in general impart speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills beyond Swahili elementary level to participate with ease and confidence in familiar topics and exchange information on unfamiliar topics. Students are assigned communicative tasks such as respond to a situation with a short text and take part in a discussion after viewing short video clips and prompts to elicit speaking and listening competence and cultural awareness responses beyond elementary level. The language and cultural scenarios practiced are designed to help students demonstrate language responses beyond familiar topics, and to feel comfortable conversing with Swahili native speakers, as well as to blend in and feel welcomed as part of the community while exploring different topics such as acquaintanceship, relationships, health, festivals, education, sports, housing, politics, commerce, travel, etc. Short stories are used to depict cultural aspects such as cultural expressions, proverbs, sayings, and riddles. Literature and cultural materials are incorporated into the course, along with audio-visual and web-based material. In this course, students have an opportunity to participate in language conversation outside the classroom and explore the opportunities for study abroad in East Africa. Swahili Elementary I and II are prerequisite for this course. By the end of this course, students should be able to reach proficiency level Intermediate High according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) www.actfl.org.

Full details for SWAHL 2101 - Intermediate Swahili I

This course is a basic introduction to the Wolof language. It aims to build students' basic understanding of the sentence structure of the language. It combines written and oral practice based on major cultural aspects of traditional and modern Wolof society. These exercises will include production, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and writing.

Full details for WOLOF 1117 - Elementary Wolof I

This course will further your awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as improve your mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

Full details for WOLOF 2118 - Intermediate Wolof I

This course will further your awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture and improve your mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral expression. Course materials will incorporate various text types, including tales, poetry, literature, and multimedia such as films, videos, television, and radio. The instructor will provide all course materials. At the end of the course, you will be able to understand basic Wolof and make yourself understood in everyday situations.

Full details for WOLOF 3113 - Advanced Wolof I

A two-semester beginner's course in Yoruba Language and Culture. Organized to offer Yoruba language skills and proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, writing, and translation. Focus is placed on familiar informal and formal contexts, e.g., home, school, work, family, social situations, politics, etc. Course uses Yoruba oral literature, proverbs, rhetoric, songs, popular videos, and theater, as learning tools for class comprehension. First semester focuses on conversation, speaking, and listening. Second semester focuses on writing, translation and grammatical formation. Through the language course students gain basic background for the study of an African culture, arts, and history both in the continent and in the diaspora. Yoruba language is widely spoken along the west coast of Africa and in some African communities in diaspora. Yoruba video culture, theater, music, and arts has a strong influence along the west coast and in the diaspora.A two-semester beginner's course in Yoruba Language and Culture. Organized to offer Yoruba language skills and proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, writing, and translation. Focus is placed on familiar informal and formal contexts, e.g., home, school, work, family, social situations, politics, etc. Course uses Yoruba oral literature, proverbs, rhetoric, songs, popular videos, and theater, as learning tools for class comprehension. First semester focuses on conversation, speaking, and listening. Second semester focuses on writing, translation and grammatical formation. Through the language course students gain basic background for the study of an African culture, arts, and history both in the continent and in the diaspora. Yoruba language is widely spoken along the west coast of Africa and in some African communities in diaspora. Yoruba video culture, theater, music, and arts has a strong influence along the west coast and in the diaspora.

Full details for YORUB 1108 - Introduction to Yoruba I

The intermediate course extends the development of the main language skills-reading, writing, listening, and conversation. The course deepens the development of correct native pronunciation, the accuracy of grammatical and syntactic structures; and the idiomatic nuances of the language. Students who take the course are able to (1) prepare, illustrate, and present Yoruba texts such as poems, folktales, advertisements, compositions, letters, (2) read Yoruba literature of average complexity, (3) interpret Yoruba visual texts of average difficulty, (4) comprehend Yoruba oral literature and philosophy-within the context of African oral literature and philosophy-of basic complexity. Through the Yoruba language students appreciate African oral literature and philosophy. The primary textual media are Yoruba short stories, poems, short plays, films, songs, and newspapers.

Full details for YORUB 2110 - Intermediate Yoruba I

A beginning course in conversational isiZulu, using Web-based materials filmed in South Africa. Emphasis on the sounds of the language, including clicks and tonal variation, and on the words and structures needed for initial social interaction. Brief dialogues concern everyday activities; aspects of contemporary Zulu culture are introduced through readings and documentaries in English.

Full details for ZULU 1113 - Elementary Zulu I

Development of fluency in speaking, listening, reading, and writing, using Web-based materials filmed in South Africa. Students describe and narrate spoken and written paragraphs. Review of morphology; concentration on tense and aspect. Materials are drawn from contemporary popular culture, folklore, and mass media.

Full details for ZULU 2116 - Intermediate Zulu I

Development of fluency in using idioms, speaking about abstract concepts, and voicing preferences and opinions. Excerpts from oral genres, short stories, and television dramas. Introduction to other South African languages and to issues of standardization, dialect, and language attitude.

Full details for ZULU 3113 - Advanced Zulu I