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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for ASRC 1202 - Elementary Arabic II

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.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

Blues and jazz music are central to American culture and will be a major focus of our writing in this course. We will explore the work of iconic artists such as Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Janelle Monae, whose transmission of the Black experience collapses the distinctions between art, philosophy, the erotic, and the struggle for liberation. We will also read key philosophers and intellectuals such as Angela Davis and Fred Moten, combining the pleasure of appreciating music with rigorous intellectual exploration in our seminar discussion that presents higher-order thinking and university level writing. Writing projects will include critical essays, research-based papers, and a video essay as we develop our understanding of Black experience and performance in our capacities as writers.

Full details for ASRC 1821 - FWS: Listen to Understand: Writing Black Performance & Black Lives

What are your "dreams" and how do you articulate and communicate them to others, especially in writing? This course primarily serves as your writing laboratory with the objective of helping students think critically and write clearly as they seek to understand the ethical framework underpinning MLK's nonviolent active resistance and its applicability to our contemporary quest for justice. The primary text for this course is A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. which encompasses MLK's writings including his historic public addresses, letters, sermons, interviews, books, and essays that will serve as templates for learning various types of writings. This course challenges students to "dream" freely, think critically, and write clearly using the informal and formal writing assignments. 

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for ASRC 1860 - FWS: A Dream, not a Nightmare: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Quest for Justice

This seminar explores how we (re)present our deepest commitments, religious or otherwise, to one another and especially in various (digital) publics. The textual examples will be taken from Black religious writings in the 20th and 21st centuries. Among other important questions, the seminar will ask: Why and how does faith matter to certain people of African descent? How have they expressed their (secular) faith or religious commitments in public? How might these religious writers model what it means for us to write with conviction? This writing seminar will explore these questions and how religious writings have mattered in the context of struggle and resistance.

Full details for ASRC 1862 - FWS: Black Faith Writing Matters

The digital revolution has made an enormous amount of information available to research scholars, but discovering resources and using them effectively can be challenging. This course introduces students with research interests in Latino and Africana Studies to search strategies and methods for finding materials in various formats (e.g., digital, film, and print) using information databases such as the library catalog, print and electronic indexes, and the World Wide Web. Instructors provide equal time for lecture and hands-on learning. Topics include government documents, statistics, subject-specific online databases, social sciences, the humanities, and electronic citation management.

Full details for ASRC 1900 - Research Strategies in Africana and Latino Studies

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?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)

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

This course provides an overview of disastrous attempts at colonization in the Americas from ca. 1500 through ca. 1760. Over thirteen weeks, we will engage with the question of why some attempts at colonization failed and why some succeeded. We will also explore other early modern failures, from bankrupt monopoly trade companies to ill-fated buccaneer communities and entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes. Exploring failures, rather than successes, will help students understand the contingent process of colonial expansion as well as the roles of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and inter-imperial trade networks to the success or failure of early modern colonies. Over the course of the semester, my lectures will cover broad themes in failed enterprises, while students will read several monographs and primary-source collections on specific disasters. Some central questions include: Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ASRC 1986 - Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450-1750

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2200 - Intermediate Arabic II

This course is designed for students who are interested in reading the language of the Qur'an with accuracy and understanding. The first week (4 classes) will be devoted to an introduction of the history of the Qur'an: the revelation, collection, variant readings, and establishment of an authoritative edition. The last week will be devoted to a general overview of "revisionist" literature on the Qur'an. In the remaining 12 weeks, we will cover all of Part 30 (Juz' 'Amma, suuras 78-114) and three suuras of varying length (36, 19, and 12).

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (FL-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2204 - Introduction to Quranic Arabic

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2317 - Histories of the African Diaspora

This course uses art and popular culture to provide a dynamic view of Black religion in the United States and the Diaspora throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussion topics include: religiosity in the visual art of Kara Walker, P-Valley's Hoodoo representation, and James Baldwin's Black Sanctified aesthetics. By engaging broadly with visual art, film, music, and television, students will gain a sense of the various religious and spiritual traditions that pervade contemporary popular culture and gain the ability to think critically about how religious themes show up on television, in music, and in the world around them.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ASRC 2322 - Black Religion and Pop Culture

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2380 - Performing Hip Hop

This course will examine southern African definitions of freedom and methods and tactics used in the fight for freedom. It will investigate how different thinkers defined political and personal freedom and how they pursued it, paying careful attention to changing definitions and practices over time, and to the specificity of the southern African region, long a site of global and regional exchange. The course will consider major figures like Nelson Mandela but will also explore lesser-known histories of women's freedom struggles and grassroots and community movements to define a free society. It will emphasize the plurality and diversity of southern African theorizations of freedom. The course will engage with historiographical debates in the field of 'liberation histories', and will use diverse primary source materials, including trial documents, memoirs, political speeches and tracts, and novels.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2515 - Freedom Struggles in Southern Africa

Following the conquests of Alexander, the ancient civilization of Egypt came under Greek rule. This period is best known for its famous queen Cleopatra, the last independent ruler of ancient Egypt. But even before Cleopatra's life and death, the Egypt that she governed was a fascinating place – and a rich case study in cultural interactions under ancient imperialism. This course explores life in Egypt under Greek rule, during the three centuries known as the Ptolemaic period (named after Cleopatra's family, the Ptolemaic dynasty). We will examine the history and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, an empire at the crossroads of Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. We will explore the experiences of Egyptians, Greeks, and others living in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic society. Finally, we will investigate the ways that Ptolemaic Egypt can shed light on modern experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 2688 - Cleopatra's Egypt: Tradition and Transformation

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3101 - Advanced Arabic II

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

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

This course explores the waves of rebellion, and reaction, that swept the globe in the 1960s. From Dakar to Havana, from Beijing to Paris, we will examine the events, social movements, actors, places and legacies of the 1960s. Each week will focus on a specific case study and a specific theme: we will be looking at the role of film in liberation, changing ideas of sex and the body, the role of drugs in global revolutionary movements, and what being a student meant in the 1960s. In many ways the 1960s set the tone for today's political and social debates. Over the next few months, we will try to understand how. This should help us get a better grasp of what has been happening on our campus and across the world this past year.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for ASRC 3345 - Global 1960s: Revolution from the College Campus to the Battle Grounds

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that "young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise." This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The second semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Maureen Mahon, Marla Frederick, Lynée Denise, and Deesha Philyaw and artists like the Clark Sisters, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, and Beyoncé. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ASRC 3422 - Gospel and The Blues: A Black Women’s History II, 1973-2023

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3440 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: Early American Sea-faring Literature

Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping "clean" at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments—race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience "Nature." In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and "Nature" itself.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

During her time in Germany, the U.S. poet Audre Lorde (who described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet") sought out community and encouraged Black Germans to speak up and make themselves visible as Afro-Germans in a country that often ignored or invalidated their existences. This is one of many crucial moments in Black German history and Black German Studies. In this course will explore the histories, activism, literature, and scholarship that arise from Afro-German communities and have shaped the field of Black German Studies. We will engage with films, novels, poetry, short stories, graphic narratives, music videos, and scholarly essays. Considering the great variety of media and genres, we will spend class time not only developing a shared vocabulary to talk about each text, but we will also learn to apply differing methods of analysis in our class discussions and individual assignments.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3575 - Introduction to Black German Studies

This course provides a critical historical interrogation of what Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson called "the Black Radical Tradition." It will introduce students to some of the major currents in the history of black radical thought, action, and organizing, with an emphasis on the United States after World War I. It relies on social, political, and intellectual history to examine the efforts of black people who have sought not merely social reform, but a fundamental restructuring of political, economic, and social relations. We will define and evaluate radicalism in the shifting contexts of liberation struggles. We will explore dissenting visions of social organization and alternative definitions of citizenship, progress, and freedom. We will confront the meaning of the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in social movements.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3590 - The Black Radical Tradition in the U.S.

In the buildup to and in the aftermath of the Civil War, there were US politicians -- especially the Whigs -- who were not only anti-slavery but committed to a policy of nonaccommodationism with the South. Charles Sumner (Senator, MA), Thaddeus Stevens (Congressman, PA), and Benjamin Wade (Senator, OH) were among those US politicians who were opposed to Abraham Lincoln's comprising attitude toward the defeated South. It is Wade who offers the most trenchant critique of Lincoln's non-punitive policy in the aftermath of the Civil War. In short, Wade, Stevens, and Sumner advocated for the full enfranchisement of the newly liberated slaves, insisting that it was the freedmen who should be the nation's priority, not appeasing the defeated South. It is Wade who gives us the concept of "liberation through terror." If the freedmen, Wade argues in the parliamentary annals, were to assert themselves through violence against their Southern tormentors, the white South would quickly recognize their rights and not abrogate it, as was the case. This course takes up Wade's injunction by reading a series of texts that deal with the question of terror.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ASRC 3894 - Liberation Through Terror: Three Republican Dissenters

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious yet empowering nature of the body. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ASRC 3977 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4102 - The Historical Geography of Black America

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4509 - Toni Morrison's Novels

The driving dialectic in post-colonial studies has been the colonizer/colonized, or the Third World vs. the West. But slowly the field is letting go of this "arrested dialectic" and in its place various triangulations are emerging: e.g. transnationalism, world literature, the global novel, and global south literary studies. Starting with a walk through the emerging theoretical concepts of world/global/transnational literature, we will primarily focus on a global south reading of African literature (itself a contested term), and perennial questions around language and translation. Specifically we will look at how writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, V.S. Naipul, NoViolet Bulawayo, and MG Vassanji challenge the post-colonial discourse and how a global south reading provides an uncomfortable conversation with transnational and world literature theories and concepts.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4512 - The Global South Novel and World Literature

How has history shaped our notion of Black girlhood? What is our collective understanding of Black girlhood? How do we see and understand Black girls? Black Girlhood Studies is a multidisciplinary field that draws on education, literature, psychological, and sociological perspectives as tools to see and honor Black girls' lived experiences. In this seminar course, we will use a mixture of lectures and facilitated discussions to provide an overview of Black girlhood as it relates to historical and current-day social, political, and cultural constructions of Black girlhood within and beyond the United States. We will also interrogate how Black girls deconstruct and interrupt these social constructions by engaging in scholarly works, popular press articles, poetry, music, film, and novels. Throughout the course, we will make space to imagine a world where Black girls' ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world are honored.   

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4561 - Black Girlhood Studies: Rememory, Representation, and Re-Imagination

There are two contrasting views of the status and role of women in Africa. One view portrays African women as controlled by men in all social institutions. Another view projects women as having a relatively favorable position in indigenous societies where they were active, with an identity independent of men's; in they were not clustered in a private sphere of the home while men controlled the public sphere. This course examines critical gender theories and African women in historical and contemporary periods. The topics covered include: women in non-westernized/pre-colonial societies; the impact and legacy of colonial policies; access to education and knowledge; political and economic participation in local and global contexts; women's organizations; armed conflicts and peace; same-gender love and evolving family values; the law and health challenges; the United Nations and World Conferences on Women: Mexico 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995, post-Beijing meetings, the 2010 superstructure of UN Women, and Beijing +20 in 2015 with the UN Women's slogan "Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!"

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4602 - Women and Gender Issues in Africa

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

Therapeutic knowledge and practice in Africa have changed dynamically over the past century. Yet, questions about healing continue to be questions about the intimate ways that power works on bodies. Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class will discuss the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science and law. Our readings with trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ASRC 4682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

This seminar investigates the emergent concept of the Black Pacific, an area that scholars across multiple disciplines in recent years have begun to shed new light on. This course is designed to encourage an exploration of various methods including autobiography, video, film and others. This seminar seeks to examine the histories of African descendants to Asia via the Pacific rim and consider the ways in the varying concepts of Blackness itself may look different if we center our gaze on the trans-Pacific world. The term "Mapping" in the course title is in response to the often-overlooked encounters between peoples of African and Asian descent and the presence of African descendants in this region.

Full details for ASRC 4699 - Mapping the Black Pacific(s): Afro-Asian Encounters

Taking Roberto Esposito's "Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy" as its point of intervention, this course will think of South African apartheid as a biopolitical event. Using the philosophy of figures such as Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza and Jacques Derrida, as well as two South African literary texts, Ezekiel Mphahlele's "Down Second Avenue" and J.M. Coetzee's "The Life and Times of Michael K." this course grapples with the Esposito-derived difficulty: how, in an age when biopolitics is - viscerally, one could say - is understood as negative (that is, thanatopolitical), are we to think in the terms of an affirmative that Esposito proposes in "Bios?" Mphahlele and Coetzee write in very different historical moments, not to mention out of (racially) distinct literary registers. Mphahlele is widely recognized as the founding figure of urban black South African literature. "The Life and Times of Michael K.," on the other hand, is among the earlier work of the Nobel Laureate Coetzee. However, what they share is something on the order of an affirmative biopolitics. An affirmative biopolitics as understood in Esposito's terms. That is, both Mphahlele's "early" autobiography, detailing the coming-of-age of a disenfranchised young black man making his way in a segregated township, and Coetzee's title character, Michael K., another disenfranchised young man but in this case, one who abandons the apartheid city for an undisclosed rural environ, a place where undertakes to make a form of life that will untether him from all political dispositifs. Form of life is, in an insufficient word, how Esposito proposes "bios" - a politics of/for life that is not unaware of the negative but offers instead a mode of being in the world that pursues such a form as will enable it live.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ASRC 4894 - Biopolitics and Apartheid: In Texts Philosophical and Literary

For senior Africana Studies majors working on an 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 4901 - 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 4903 - Independent Study

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Full details for ASRC 6102 - The Historical Geography of Black America

This seminar grapples with the idea of Africa as symbol, metaphor, imaginary, and real; received, constructed, and self-enacting; a status, condition, and state of mind; performed, executed, or captured.

Full details for ASRC 6209 - The Idea of Africana Past and Present

This courses uses three songs by the Ivorian artist, Alpha Blondy, about the Middle East to demonstrate a simple point: that global politics has been a crucial dimension of political life in Africa since the time of decolonization — from the crises of the Suez, Congo, South West Africa (Namibia) to the most recent applications by The Gambia and South Africa to the International Court of Justice on the crises of Myanmar and Gaza. The three songs — Jerusalem (1986); Masada (1992); and Dieu (2000) — underscore the enduring presence of a certain humanist universalism in African political culture that cuts across regions and political affiliations. The course is not intended to litigate the conflict in the Middle East. It focuses on African sensibilities.

Full details for ASRC 6210 - African in the World I: Alpha

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

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that "young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise." This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The second semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Maureen Mahon, Marla Frederick, Lynée Denise, and Deesha Philyaw and artists like the Clark Sisters, Aretha Franklin, Toni Braxton, and Beyoncé. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between.

Full details for ASRC 6422 - Gospel and The Blues: A Black Women’s History II, 1973-2023

Taking Roberto Esposito's "Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy" as its point of intervention, this course will think of South African apartheid as a biopolitical event. Using the philosophy of figures such as Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza and Jacques Derrida, as well as two South African literary texts, Ezekiel Mphahlele's "Down Second Avenue" and J.M. Coetzee's "The Life and Times of Michael K." this course grapples with the Esposito-derived difficulty: how, in an age when biopolitics is - viscerally, one could say - is understood as negative (that is, thanatopolitical), are we to think in the terms of an affirmative that Esposito proposes in "Bios?" Mphahlele and Coetzee write in very different historical moments, not to mention out of (racially) distinct literary registers. Mphahlele is widely recognized as the founding figure of urban black South African literature. "The Life and Times of Michael K.," on the other hand, is among the earlier work of the Nobel Laureate Coetzee. However, what they share is something on the order of an affirmative biopolitics. An affirmative biopolitics as understood in Esposito's terms. That is, both Mphahlele's "early" autobiography, detailing the coming-of-age of a disenfranchised young black man making his way in a segregated township, and Coetzee's title character, Michael K., another disenfranchised young man but in this case, one who abandons the apartheid city for an undisclosed rural environ, a place where undertakes to make a form of life that will untether him from all political dispositifs. Form of life is, in an insufficient word, how Esposito proposes "bios" - a politics of/for life that is not unaware of the negative but offers instead a mode of being in the world that pursues such a form as will enable it live.

Full details for ASRC 6448 - Biopolitics and Apartheid: In Texts Philosophical and Literary

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.

Full details for ASRC 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels

There are two contrasting views of the status and role of women in Africa. One view portrays African women as controlled by men in all social institutions. Another view projects women as having a relatively favorable position in indigenous societies where they were active, with an identity independent of men's; in they were not clustered in a private sphere of the home while men controlled the public sphere. This course examines critical gender theories and African women in historical and contemporary periods. The topics covered include: women in non-westernized/pre-colonial societies; the impact and legacy of colonial policies; access to education and knowledge; political and economic participation in local and global contexts; women's organizations; armed conflicts and peace; same-gender love and evolving family values; the law and health challenges; the United Nations and World Conferences on Women: Mexico 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995, post-Beijing meetings, the 2010 superstructure of UN Women, and Beijing +20 in 2015 with the UN Women's slogan "Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!"

Full details for ASRC 6602 - Women and Gender Issues in Africa

This course combines literature, film, and other artistic projects in order to explore African forms of collective justice and repair, following the numerous conflicts that have shaken the continent in the 20th and 21st centuries, from anti-colonial struggles to civil wars. We will look at aesthetic productions from post-independence Algeria and Ghana, post-apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda, among others, in order to reflect on multiple questions, including: How do aesthetic works and state institutions offer competing narratives of a traumatic past, and what ways of healing can they generate? How do they negotiate between the retributive and the restorative impulses of justice? Is justice sufficient for resolution to take place? And conversely, can repair ever be achieved in the absence of justice?

Full details for ASRC 6681 - Post-Conflict Justice and Resolution in Africa

This seminar investigates the emergent concept of the Black Pacific, an area that scholars across multiple disciplines in recent years have begun to shed new light on. This course is designed to encourage an exploration of various methods including autobiography, video, film and others. This seminar seeks to examine the histories of African descendants to Asia via the Pacific rim and consider the ways in the varying concepts of Blackness itself may look different if we center our gaze on the trans-Pacific world. The term "Mapping" in the course title is in response to the often-overlooked encounters between peoples of African and Asian descent and the presence of African descendants in this region.

Full details for ASRC 6699 - Mapping the Black Pacific(s): Afro-Asian Encounters

This seminar is an intensive study of the political thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Approaching texts in contexts, we will seek to recover King the political thinker from his mythologization in American political culture by carefully reading his books, speeches, sermons, interviews, notes, and correspondence as illocutionary interventions into the major crises and ideological disputes of twentieth century American politics. Topics we will explore include the politics of dignity, leadership and mass politics, rhetoric and democratic persuasion, law and direct action, nonviolence, loss and mourning, race and political economy, global justice, and the practices of prophetic critique. Along the way, we will study King in dialogue with both his contemporaries as well as more recent interventions in the study of civil disobedience, racial capitalism, and Afro-modern political thought.

Full details for ASRC 6865 - Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the buildup to and in the aftermath of the Civil War, there were US politicians -- especially the Whigs -- who were not only anti-slavery but committed to a policy of nonaccommodationism with the South. Charles Sumner (Senator, MA), Thaddeus Stevens (Congressman, PA), and Benjamin Wade (Senator, OH) were among those US politicians who were opposed to Abraham Lincoln's comprising attitude toward the defeated South. It is Wade who offers the most trenchant critique of Lincoln's non-punitive policy in the aftermath of the Civil War. In short, Wade, Stevens, and Sumner advocated for the full enfranchisement of the newly liberated slaves, insisting that it was the freedmen who should be the nation's priority, not appeasing the defeated South. It is Wade who gives us the concept of "liberation through terror." If the freedmen, Wade argues in the parliamentary annals, were to assert themselves through violence against their Southern tormentors, the white South would quickly recognize their rights and not abrogate it, as was the case. This course takes up Wade's injunction by reading a series of texts that deal with the question of terror.

Full details for ASRC 6894 - Liberation through Terror: Three Republican Dissenters

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 6901 - 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

Healing and medicine are simultaneously individual and political, biological and cultural. In this class, we will study the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the relationship between medicine, science and law. We will explore the questions African therapeutics poses about the intimate ways that power works on and through bodies. Our readings will frame current debates around colonial and postcolonial forms of governance through medicine, the contradictions of humanitarianism and the health crisis in Africa, and the rise of new forms of therapeutic citizenship. We will examine the ways in which Africa is central to the biopolitics of the contemporary global order.

Full details for ASRC 7682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SWAHL 1100 - Elementary Swahili I

This course introduces the Swahili language, predominantly spoken in East Africa, and its culture. The course provides basic Swahili oral communicative skills on routine social demand topics, orients students to the Swahili culture, and navigates East Africa. The course is intended for those who want to gain insight into East African cultures and /or travel to the countries. 

Full details for SWAHL 1109 - Strategies for Swahili Abroad

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

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for SWAHL 2102 - Intermediate Swahili II

This course is a continuation of the basic introductory Wolof course. 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.

Full details for WOLOF 1118 - Elementary Wolof II

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 2119 - Intermediate Wolof II

As a continuation of WOLOF 3113, this course will continue to expand your knowledge of the Wolof language and culture. It will enhance your command of complex grammar, written forms, and oral expression. Course materials will incorporate various text types, including tales, poetry, literature, and multimedia, such as television and radio. At the end of the course, you will present an analysis of an authentic oral or written text to an audience, formulate a position surrounding the text, and respond spontaneously to questions.

Full details for WOLOF 3114 - Advanced Wolof II

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. 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 on 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 have strong influence along the west coast and in the diaspora.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for YORUB 1109 - Introduction to Yoruba II

Intermediate Yoruba II is a follow-up to Intermediate Yoruba I. It is a fourth-semester Yoruba language course. The course assists students to acquire advanced level proficiency in reading, speaking, writing, and listening in Yoruba language. Students are introduced to grammatical and syntactic structures in the language that will assist them in describing, presenting, and narrating information in the basic tenses. At the end of the course, students will be able to listen to, process, and understand programs produced for native speakers in media such as television, radio, and films. They will be able to read and understand short stories, novels, and plays written for native speakers of the language.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

Full details for YORUB 2111 - Intermediate Yoruba II

Development of communication skills through dialogues and role play. Texts and songs are drawn from traditional and popular literature. Students research daily life in selected areas of South Africa.

Full details for ZULU 1116 - Elementary Zulu II

Students read longer texts from popular media as well as myths and folktales. Prepares students for initial research involving interaction with speakers of isiZulu in South Africa and for the study of oral and literary genres.

Full details for ZULU 2117 - Intermediate Zulu II

Readings may include short stories, a novel, praise poetry, historical texts, or contemporary political speeches, depending on student interests. Study of issues of language policy and use in contemporary South Africa; introduction to the Soweto dialect of isiZulu. Students are prepared for extended research in South Africa involving interviews with isiZulu speakers.

Full details for ZULU 3114 - Advanced Zulu II