|
|
Catalogue 2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
|
|
|
|
| |
Africana Studies: I. Introductory |
| |
-
AFRS 100 - Introduction to Africana Studies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
What is Africana Studies? This course proposes an overview of the field of Africana Studies, emphasizing the historical and cultural connections between Africa and its global diasporas. It covers subjects and themes drawing from disciplinary traditions within the humanities and the social sciences. Articulated on distinct geographical spaces and historical time periods, it focuses on the activities of African peoples and their descendants around the world. Topics include: colonialism, slavery, nationalism and transnationalism, civil and human rights, conflict, and culture. The particular subjects and themes explored vary with each faculty teaching the course. Tyrone Simpson.
Prerequisite(s): The course is required for all majors and correlates.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 101 - Martin Luther King Jr. Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 101 ) This course examines the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. We immediately rethink the image of King who liberals and conservatives construct as a dreamer of better race relations. We engage the complexities of an individual, who articulated a moral compass of the nation, to explore racial justice in post-World War II America. This course gives special attention to King’s post-1965 radicalism when he called for a reordering of American society, an end to the war in Vietnam, and supported sanitation workers striking for better wages and working conditions. Topics include King’s notion of the “beloved community”, the Social Gospel, liberalism, “socially conscious democracy”, militancy, the politics of martyrdom, poverty and racial justice, and compensatory treatment. Primary sources form the core of our readings. Quincy Mills.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Would you like to see a more just and humane world? The SJQ courses engage you from the very start of your Vassar studies in thinking about the relationship between power and social change. A set of public lectures that address the nature of social justice accompany SJQ courses.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 104 - Religion, Prisons, and the Civil Rights Movement Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as RELI 104 ) African American citizenship has long been a contested and bloody battlefield. This course uses the modern Civil Rights Movement to examine the roles the religion and prisons have played in theses battles over African American rights and liberties. In what ways have religious beliefs motivated Americans to uphold narrow definitions of citizenship that exclude people on the basis of race or moved them to boldly challenge those definitions? In a similar fashion, civil rights workers were incarcerated in jails and prisons as a result of their nonviolent protest activities. Their experiences in prisons, they exposed the inhumane conditions and practices existing in many prison settings. More recently, the growth of the mass incarceration of minorities has moved to the forefront of civil and human rights concerns. Is a new Civil Rights Movement needed to challenge the New Jim Crow? Jonathon Kahn, Quincy Mills.
|
| |
-
AFRS 105 - Issues In Africana Studies
1 unit(s)
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 106 - Elementary Arabic Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course is an elementary level course offered during fall semester only. The course builds basic skills in Modern Standard Arabic, the language spoken, read, and understood by educated Arabs throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and other parts of the world. No prior experience in Arabic is necessary. The course focuses on building students’ abilities to (1) communicate successfully basic biographical information: name, place of residence, family members, and daily life activities, using memorized material; (2) understand speech dealing with areas of practical need such as highly standardized messages, phrases, or instructions, such as memorized greetings, pleasantries, leave taking, very basic questions and answers related to immediate need or personal information; (3) derive meaning from short, non-complex texts that convey basic information for which there is contextual or extra-linguistic support; (4) manage successfully a number of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations, such as giving basic personal information, and describing basic objects, a limited number of activities, preferences, and immediate needs. Tagreed Al-Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri.
Students who did not complete AFRS 106 may enroll in AFRS 107 , if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test.
Yearlong course 106-AFRS 107 .
Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week.
|
| |
-
AFRS 107 - Elementary Arabic Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This is an elementary level course offered during spring semester only. The course focuses on building students’ abilities to (1) create statements and formulate questions based on familiar material in short and simple conversational-style sentences with basic word order; (2) understand basic information conveyed orally in simple, minimally connected discourse that contains high-frequency vocabulary; (3) understand fully and with ease short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with personal and social topics of immediate interest, featuring description and narration; (4) ask simple questions and handle a straightforward survival situation by producing sentence-level language, ranging from discrete sentences to strings of sentences, typically in present time. Tagreed Al-Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri.
Students who did not complete AFRS 106 may enroll in AFRS 107, if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test.
Yearlong course AFRS 106 -107.
Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week.
|
| |
-
AFRS 109 - Beyond the Veil and Islamic Terrorism: Modern Arabic Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course introduces students to modern and contemporary literature emanating from North Africa and the Middle East. The authors we read write in Arabic, French, and English. However, all the course readings are in English Translation.
The themes we examine range from the seemingly unresolved tension between tradition and modernity in postcolonial MENA (Middle East and North Africa) societies to the role orientalism and islamophobia play in obstructing productive and much-needed East-West dialogues in today’s—some would call it—neocolonial and globalized world. We also zero in on the interplay between gender, religion, and politics in the MENA region as we discuss the condition of women and sexual minorities caught between the seemingly irreconcilable discourses of Islamic law and international human rights legal frameworks. In the last part of the course, we read two recent first-person narratives. The first depicts the ongoing crisis of illegal immigration from Africa and the MENA region into “Fortress Europe” and attending human cost. The second narrative is an intimate portrayal of the sectarian strife and human rights abuses promulgated in the prisons of the dictatorial regime in Syria.
Students taking this course gain an understanding of some of the salient social, political, and broadly cultural complexities of MENA societies. They also begin to appreciate the complex historical and geopolitical roots of widespread yet, sometimes, little examined propositions, like the incompatibility of Islam and Western modernity and democratic rule, and the need to liberate Muslim women from their cultures.
The course is open to first-year students only; and it satisfies the college requirement for the Freshman Writing Seminar. As such, it is a writing- intensive course! Therefore, as we explore the themes and issues noted above orally in our class discussions, you also hone your skills in finding, using, and citing evidence; building persuasive arguments; using language effectively; organizing sentences and paragraphs clearly; and developing your own prose style. Writing workshops are an integral part of the course, and you work on commenting on and revising both your own and other people’s drafts. Mootacem Mhiri.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 112 - An Introduction to Islam
1 unit(s)
(Same as RELI 112 ) This course introduces students to Muslim cultures, beliefs, and practices through the lens of journey, migration and quest. Voyage and migration have characterized Muslim communities ever since Muhammad sent a group of his followers to seek refuge with the Christian king of Abyssinia. Over the centuries, Islamic legal, literary, and philosophical traditions have reflected deeply on migration and journeying, and Muslim communities have settled around the world. We explore Muhammad’s miraculous journey to Jerusalem, the event of migration to Medina, the role of travel in the expansion of the Islamic world, Muslims as religious minorities in the 20th century, and the place of Islam in the contemporary global refugee crisis. Sources include scripture, theology, history, poetry and literature, ethnography, autobiography, and film. Kirsten Wesselhoeft.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 141 - Tradition, History and the African Experience
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 141 ) From ancient stone tools and monuments to oral narratives and colonial documents, the course examines how the African past has been recorded, preserved, and transmitted over the generations. It looks at the challenges faced by the historian in Africa and the multi-disciplinary techniques used to reconstruct and interpret African history. Various texts, artifacts, and oral narratives from ancient times to the present are analyzed to see how conceptions and interpretations of African past have changed over time. Ismail Rashid.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 175 - Mandela: Race, Resistance and Renaissance in South Africa
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 175 ) This course critically explores the history and politics of South Africa in the twentieth century through the prism of the life, politics, and experiences of one of its most iconic figures, Nelson Mandela. After almost three decades of incarceration for resisting Apartheid, Mandela became the first democratically elected president of a free South Africa in 1994. It was an inspirational moment in the global movement and the internal struggle to dismantle Apartheid and to transform South Africa into a democratic, non-racial, and just society. Using Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, as our point of departure, the course discusses some of the complex ideas, people, and developments that shaped South Africa and Mandela’s life in the twentieth century, including: indigenous culture, religion, and institutions; colonialism, race, and ethnicity; nationalism, mass resistance, and freedom; and human rights, social justice, and post-conflict reconstruction. Ismail Rashid.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 189 - Religion, Community Organizing, and Movements for Civil Rights Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as RELI 189 ) In American life religion is often portrayed as a divisive force. Yet historically, religious actors, communities, spaces, and motivations have contributed to broad-based collective movements for civil and human rights. This course explores the ways in which religions have supplied resources that help communities organize and develop visions of collective life. Jonathon Kahn.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Would you like to see a more just and humane world? The SJQ courses engage you from the very start of your Vassar studies in thinking about the relationship between power and social change. A set of public lectures that address the nature of social justice accompany SJQ courses.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
Africana Studies: II. Intermediate |
| |
-
AFRS 202 - Black Music Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as MUSI 202 ) An analytical exploration of the music of certain African and European cultures and their adaptive influences in North America. The course examines the traditional African and European views of music performance practices while exploring their influences in shaping the music of African Americans from the spiritual to modern times. Justin Patch.
|
| |
-
AFRS 205 - Arab Women Writers Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 205 ) This course examines a selection of literary works by modern and contemporary Arab women writers in English translation. We will read fiction, poetry, autobiographies, short stories, and critical scholarship by and about Arab women, from North Africa and the Middle East, in order to develop a critical understanding of the social, political, and cultural context(s) of these writings, and to form an enlightened opinion about the issues and concerns raised by Arab women writers throughout the Twentieth Century, at different historical junctures, and in different locations. Our class discussions will focus—among other themes—on: (1) Arab women writers and feminism. (2) Arab Women and Islamism. (3) Arab women and the West. (4) Arab Nationalism(s), Arab Modernity(s), and Arab women. (5) Arab Women writing in the Diaspora: hyphenated identities and different routes of homecoming. The authors to be read include Assia Djebar (Algeria); Fatima Mernissi (Morocco); Nawal Sadaawi (Egypt); Hanan Al-Shaykh (Lebanon); and Sahar Khalifeh (Palestine); and many others. Mootacem Mhiri.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 207 - Intermediate Arabic Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This is an intermediate level course offered during fall semester only. The course focuses on enhancing students’ abilities to (1) create with the language and communicate personal meaning effectively; (2) satisfy personal needs and social demands to survive in an Arabic speaking environment; (3) understand information conveyed in simple, sentence-length speech on familiar or everyday topics. (4) understand short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with personal and social topics. (5) build intercultural competence through exposure to authentic Arabic expressions, proverbs, and similar linguistic and cultural idioms. Mootacem Mhiri.
This course is designed for students who have completed AFRS 107 or its equivalent successfully as demonstrated by a placement test.
Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week.
|
| |
-
AFRS 208 - Intermediate Arabic Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This is an intermediate level course offered during spring semester only. The course focuses on enhancing students’ abilities to (1) write short, simple communications, compositions, and requests for information in loosely connected texts about personal preferences, daily routines, common events, and other personal topics; (2) understand simple, sentence-length speech in a variety of basic personal and social contexts and accurately comprehend highly familiar and predictable topics; (3) understand short, non-complex texts, featuring description and narration, that convey basic information and deal with basic and familiar topics; (4) handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations such as exchanges related to self, family, home, daily activities, interests and personal preferences, as well as physical and social needs, such as food, shopping, travel, and lodging; (5) develop their intercultural competence through increased exposure to authentic Arabic literary and journalistic audiovisual material. Tagreed Al-Haddad.
Students who did not complete AFRS 207 may enroll if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test.
Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week.
|
| |
-
AFRS 211 - Islam in Europe and the Americas Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 211 and RELI 211 ) Various processes of migration and conversion have contributed to the development of Muslim minority communities in Europe and the Americas, dating back to the 17th century. From enslaved Muslims in the Americas, to the Nation of Islam, to colonial and post-colonial migrations, to the debates over whether and how to define “European,” “American,” and “Latin@” Islams, this course covers the history of these religious communities and movements, their relationships with European and American states, and how contemporary European and American Muslims have described and theorized the experience of being a religious minority or diaspora. Key themes include race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, transnational media, political resistance, ethics, and spirituality. Kirsten Wesselhoeft.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 212 - Arabic Literature and Culture
1 unit(s)
This reading, writing and conversation course is designed to familiarize students with various genres of classical and modern Arabic prose and poetry from the pre-Islamic period to the present. We read, discuss, and write about themes and topics which have been central to the cultural discourses in various periods of the region’s history. These topics include: religious diversity, Muslim and Arab scientists and their contribution to world culture, the arts and musical genres, among many others. Students taking this course form a more in-depth understanding of the texts examined and their significant contribution to the formation of an Arabic cultural ethos and an Arab system of values. The course also enhances students’ oral and writing skills through weekly presentations on the readings and writing assignments. Tagreed Haddad.
The course is open to any student who has taken AFRS 207 or AFRS 208 .
Three 50-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 217 - Prisons, Community Reentry, and Critical issues in the Criminal Justice System
1 unit(s)
This course examines the prison experience in the United States and critical issues in the criminal justice system in a prison setting with Vassar students and incarcerated men. The course provides historical overviews of the role of prisons in society and critical examinations of some relevant contemporary issues in criminal justice such as the death penalty, felon disenfranchisement, juveniles in adult prisons, children of incarcerated parents, and immigrants in prison.
The course meets on Thursday evenings for two hours. A number of field trips are scheduled to local and New York City agencies usually on Fridays. Special permission required.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century?
|
| |
-
AFRS 228 - African American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 228 ) Topic for 2018/19b: Black Modernism: On Ghosts, Mystics, And Prophets. Can writing be black? Is that a good or bad thing? What makes it so? Can it be both black and modern? Is blackness something artists need to leave behind en route to their arrival as modernists? Or instead, does blackness necessitate that artists be modern in a way different from other (non-black) artists? Beginning with the modernist innovations of African American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, this course ranges from the social protest fiction of the 1940s through the Black Arts Movement to the postmodernist experiments of contemporary African American writers. In giving our attention to the aforementioned questions, we cover the debates that have informed African American literary production, particularly the tension that has historically existed between the aesthetic and the political imperatives that inform the art. Be aware that being distinguished as “modern” is not the only temporal marker that these writers and their fictions share. Our readings this term also invoke the idea of the past (signaled by the presence of ghosts and mystics) as well as that of the future (signaled by the presence of mystics and prophets). We explore through these writers why time travel—both backward and forward—is a prominent narrative feature in black fiction. Tyrone Simpson.
Two 75-minute periods and one 2-hour lab.
|
| |
-
AFRS 229 - Black Intellectual History
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 229 ) This course provides an overview of black intellectual thought and an introduction to critical race theory. It offers approaches to the ways in which black thinkers from a variety of nations and periods from the nineteenth century up to black modernity engage their intellectual traditions. How have their perceptions been shaped by a variety of places? How have their traditions, histories and cultures theorized race? Critics may include Aimé Césaire, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ida B. Wells, and Patricia Williams. Diane Harriford.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 231 - Algeria/France:Race, Religion & Citizenship Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 231 ) Since the early modern era, slavery, colonialism, commerce, piracy, and migration have woven the Mediterranean together in both peace and in horrifying violence. This broad, multipolar web of conflict and communication has served as the context in which multiple French and Algerian identities have careened into modernity. Constant references to local and cross-Mediterranean “others” have shaped the very meanings of such key terms as “emancipation,” “republic,” “Islam,” “progress,” and “civilization.” Even today, debates on issues ranging from women’s clothing to secularism to immigration to anti-Semitism echo with this long and contested history. Joshua Schreier.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 232 - African American Cinema Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as FILM 232 ) This course provides a survey of the history and theory of African American representation in cinema. It begins with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and examines early Black cast westerns (Harlem Rides the Range, The Bronze Buckaroo, Harlem on the Prairie) and musicals (St. Louis Blues, Black and Tan, Hi De Ho, Sweethearts of Rhythm). Political debate circulating around cross over stars (Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, and Harry Belafonte) are central to the course. Special consideration is given to Blaxploitation cinema of the seventies (Shaft, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones) in an attempt to understand its impact on filmmakers and the historical contexts for contemporary filmmaking. The course covers “Los Angeles Rebellion” filmmakers such as Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Haile Gerima. Realist cinema of the 80’s and 90’s (Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, and Set it off),is examined before the transition to Black romantic comedies, family films, and genre pictures (Coming to America, Love and Basketball, Akeelah and the Bee, The Great Debaters). Mia Mask.
Prerequisite(s): FILM 210 and permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings.
|
| |
-
AFRS 234 - Creole Religions of the Caribbean
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 234 and RELI 234 ) The Africa-derived religions of the Caribbean region—Haitian Voodoo, Cuban Santeria, Jamaican Obeah, Rastafarianism, and others—are foundational elements in the cultural development of the islands of the region. This course examines their histories, systems of belief, liturgical practices, and pantheons of spirits, as well as their impact on the history, literature, and music of the region. Lisa Paravisini-Gebert.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 235 - The Civil Rights Movement in the United States
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 235 ) In this interdisciplinary course, we examine the origins, dynamics, and consequences of the modern Civil Rights movement. We explore how the southern based struggles for racial equality and full citizenship in the U.S. worked both to dismantle entrenched systems of discrimination—segregation, disfranchisement, and economic exploitation—and to challenge American society to live up to its professed democratic ideals. Lisa Collins.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 236 - Imprisonment and the Prisoner
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 236 ) What is the history of the prisoner? Who becomes a prisoner and what does the prisoner become once incarcerated? What is the relationship between crime and punishment? Focusing on the (global) prison industrial complex, this course critically interrogates the massive and increasing numbers of people imprisoned in the United States and around the world. The primary focus of this course is the prisoner and on the movement to abolish imprisonment as we know it. Topics covered in this course include: racial and gender inequality, the relationship between imprisonment and slavery, social death, the prisoner of war (POW), migrant incarceration, as well as prisoner resistance and rebellion. Students also come away from the course with a complex understanding of penal abolition and alternative models of justice. Carlos Alamo.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 242 - Brazil in Crisis: Continuity and Change in Portuguese America Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as GEOG 242 , INTL 242 and LALS 242 ) Brazil, a giant of Latin America and the Global South, has long been known as the “land of the future.” Yet frustrating political-economic crises have repeatedly followed periods of rapid growth and social progress. Taking current crises as a point of departure, this course examines Brazil’s contemporary evolution in light of the country’s historical geography, the distinctive cultural and environmental features of Portuguese America, and the political-economic linkages with the world system. Specific topics for study include: the legacies of colonial Brazil; race relations, Afro-Brazilian culture, and ethnic identities; issues of gender, youth, violence, and poverty; processes of urban-industrial growth; regionalism and national integration; environmental devastation and sustainability; controversies surrounding the occupation of Amazonia; and long-run prospects for democracy and equitable development in Brazil. Brian Godfrey.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 244 - Indian Ocean
1 unit(s)
(Same as ANTH 244 ) This course re/introduces alternative modalities of belonging through a focus on multiple cultures and peoples interacting across the Indian Ocean. Using historical works, ethnographies, travel accounts, manuscript fragments, and film, we explore the complex networks and historical processes that have shaped the contemporary economies, cultures, and social problems of the region. We also critically examine how knowledge about the peoples and pasts of this region has been produced. Although the course concentrates on northern Africa, eastern Africa, southwest India, the Arabian Peninsula, and islands are included in our consideration of the region as a cultural, economic, and political sphere whose coastal societies were especially interconnected. Topics include: imperialism, globalization, temporality, cosmopolitanism, labor and trade migrations, religious identification, and gender. Candice Lowe Swift.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 245 - Making Waves: Topics in Feminist Activism Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 245 ) Topic for 2019b: Queer and Trans of Color Interventions. How do queer and transgender of color theory, performance, and activism interface in our contemporary moment? This course explores the strategies by which queers of color use performance toward social, cultural, and political ends, with particular emphasis on transgender and gender nonconforming authors. Taking our cue from third world feminisms and Black feminist theory, the seminar centers intersectional approaches to sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, and nation, foregrounding works that center transgender as their focus topic and frame. We read major milestones of queer of color critique and transgender studies, and interweave these readings with listenings and viewings. Our texts are interdisciplinary; we listen to music, watch films and live performances, perform light ethnography, host guest speakers, and read memoir, history, ethnography, manifesto, and critical theory. We challenge ourselves to think queer and trans activism(s) alongside other historical and current social justice movements within and outside the U.S. Ultimately, the course invites students to think about how queer and transgender theory engage art and activism, and, conversely, how performance and activism speak back to written texts, all from a queer and trans of color centered approach. Elias Krell.
Prerequisite(s): WMST 130 or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 246 - French Speaking Cultures and Literatures of Africa and the Caribbean
1 unit(s)
(Same as FFS 246 )
Prerequisite(s): FFS 210 or FFS 212 or the equivalent.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 247 - The Politics of Difference Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 247 ) This course relates to the meanings of various group experiences in American politics. It explicitly explores, for example, issues of race, class, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. Among other things, this course addresses the contributions of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, the Feminist Jurisprudence Movement, the Critical Race Movement, and Queer Studies to the legal academy. Luke Harris.
|
| |
|
| |
-
AFRS 249 - Latino/a Formations
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 249 and SOCI 249 ) This course focuses on the concepts, methodologies and theoretical approaches for understanding the lives of those people who (im)migrated from or who share real or imagined links with Latin America and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean. As such this course considers the following questions: Who is a Latino/a? What is the impact of U.S. political and economic policy on immigration? What is assimilation? What does U.S. citizenship actually mean and entail? How are ideas about Blackness, or race more generally, organized and understood among Latino/as? What role do heterogeneous identities play in the construction of space and place among Latino/a and Chicano/a communities? This course introduces students to the multiple ways in which space, race, ethnicity, class and gendered identities are imagined/formed in Latin America and conversely affirmed and/or redefined in the United States. Conversely, this course examines the ways in which U.S. Latina/o populations provide both economic and cultural remittances to their countries of origin that also help to challenge and rearticulate Latin American social and economic relationships. Carlos Alamo.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 250 - Across Religious Boundaries: Understanding Differences Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2018/19b: African American Religions and the Practice of Social Criticism. RELI 250 ) This class introduces students to the study of African American religions. Our focus is not only the historical variety of religious practices, but equally on the way the study of African American religious practices, serve to influence, wrestle with, protest, and critique constructions of race and racial identities. By considering topics such as the religious culture of the enslaved in the antebellum South, the development of independent black churches in the late 18th and 19th centuries, expressive culture in music, sermon, and song, and the intersections of religion and black political movements, we explore the ways the category of religion functions as a contested site to think through notions of black liberation, agency, and struggle. Jonathon Kahn.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 251 - Topics in Black Literatures Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 251 ) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.
Topic for 2019b: Afrofuturism and the Speculative in African American Literature. While many believe African American literature is bound by the generic and political expectations of American literary realism, Black Americans have lived and imagined the “un-real” from the moment of their enslavement in the Americas. This course considers how Black creatives have used and continue to use the genres of speculative fiction/afrofuturism/sci-fi to critique forms of racial difference and imagine alternatives to the here-and-now of the American experience. Over the semester, we explore narratives that feature time travel, texts that craft racial utopias only to plot their deterioration, and tales of monsters and zombies to explore key themes associated with Black speculative fiction and Black literary production. Questions of genre, its limits and expectations, are also central to this course. This course may include writings by Octavia Butler, Kiese Laymon, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and others. Eve Dunbar.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 252 - Writing the Diaspora: Verses/Versus
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 252 ) Black American Culture expression is anchored in rhetorical battles and verbal jousts that place one character against another. From the sorrow songs to blues, black music has always been a primary means of cultural expression for Afirican Americans, particularly during difficult social periods and transition. Black Americans have used music and particularly rythmic verse to resist, express, and signify. Nowhere is this more evident than in hip-hop culture generally and hip-hop music specifically. This semester’s Writing the Diaspora class concerns itself with close textual analysis of hip-hop texts. Is Imani Perry right in claiming that Hip-Hop is Black American music, or diasporic music? In addition to close textual reading of lyrics, students are asked to create their own hip-hop texts that speak to particular artists/texts and/or issues and styles raised.
Prerequisite(s): One course in literature or Africana Studies.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 253 - Topics in American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).
Topic for 2018/19b: Narratives of Passing. ENGL 253 ) The phrase “passing for white,” peculiar to American English, first appears in advertisements for the return of runaway slaves. Abolitionist fiction later adopts the phenomenon of racial passing (together with the figure of the “white slave”) as a major literary theme. African American writers such as William Wells Brown and William Craft incorporated stories of passing in their antislavery writing and the theme continued to enjoy great currency in African American literature in the postbellum era as well as during the Harlem Renaissance. In this class, we examine the prevalence of this theme in African American literature of these periods, the possible reasons for the waning interest in this theme following the Harlem Renaissance, and its reemergence in recent years. In order to begin to understand the role of passing in the American imagination, we look to examples of passing and the treatment of miscegenation in literature, film, and the law. We consider the qualities that characterize what Valerie Smith identifies as the “classic passing narrative” and determine how each of the texts we examine conforms to, reinvents, and/or writes against that classic narrative. Some of the themes considered include betrayal, secrecy, lying, masquerade, visibility/invisibility, and memory. We also examine how the literature of passing challenges or redefines notions of family, American mobility and success, and the convention of the “self-made man.” Although much of the syllabus is devoted to African American literary heritage, we also consider Asian American and Native American literature on miscegenation. Native American writing in particular provides a radically different perspective on American racialism and what we might term an American “blood symbolic.” Hiram Perez.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 254 - The Arts of Eastern, Southern, Central and Western Africa
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 254 ) This course is organized thematically and examines the ways in which sculpture, painting, photography, textiles, and film and video function both historically and currently in relationship to broader cultural issues. Within this context, this course explores performance and masquerade in relationship to gender, social, and political power. We also consider the connections between the visual arts and cosmology, identity, ideas of diaspora, colonialism and post-colonialism, as well as the representation of the “Self,” and the “Other.”
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 , one course in Africana Studies, or permission of the instructor.
The Non-Recorded Option is available to non-majors.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 255 - Race, Representation, and Resistance in U.S. Schools Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as EDUC 255 and URBS 255 ) This course interrogates the intersections of race, racism and schooling in the US context. In this course, we examine this intersection at the site of educational policy, media and public attitudes towards schools and schooling- critically examining how representations in each shape the experiences of youth in school. Expectations, beliefs, attitudes and opportunities reflect societal investments in these representations, thus becoming both reflections and driving forces of these identities. Central to these representations is how theorists, educators and youth take them on, own them and resist them in ways that constrain possibility or create spaces for hope. Kimberly Williams Brown.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 256 - Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 256 and POLI 256 ) Conflicts over racial, ethnic and/or national identity continue to dominate headlines in diverse corners of the world. Whether referring to ethnic violence in Bosnia or Sri Lanka, racialized political tensions in Sudan and Fiji, the treatment of Roma (Gypsies) and Muslims in Europe, or the charged debates about immigration policy in the United States, cultural identities remain at the center of politics globally. Drawing upon multiple theoretical approaches, this course explores the related concepts of race, ethnicity and nationalism from a comparative perspective using case studies drawn from around the world and across different time periods. Zachariah Mampilly.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 257 - Genre and the Postcolonial City
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 257 and URBS 257 ) This course explores the physical and imaginative dimensions of selected postcolonial cities. The theoretical texts, genres of expression and cultural contexts that the course engages address the dynamics of urban governance as well as aesthetic strategies and everyday practices that continue to reframe existing senses of reality in the postcolonial city. Through an engagement with literary, cinematic, architectural among other forms of urban mediation and production, the course examines the politics of migrancy, colonialism, gender, class and race as they come to bear on political identities, urban rhythms and the built environment. Case studies include: Johannesburg , Nairobi, Algiers and migrant enclaves in London and Paris. Samson Opondo.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 258 - Environment and Culture in the Caribbean
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENST 258 ) The ecology of the islands of the Caribbean has undergone profound change since the arrival of Europeans to the region in 1492. The course traces the history of the relationship between ecology and culture from pre-Columbian civilizations to the economies of tourism. Among the specific topics of discussion are: Arawak and Carib notions of nature and conservation of natural resources; the impact of deforestation and changes in climate; the plantation economy as an ecological revolution; the political implications of the tensions between the economy of the plot and that of the plantation; the development of environmental conservation and its impact on notions of nationhood; the ecological impact of resort tourism; the development of eco-tourism. These topics are examined through a variety of materials: historical documents, essays, art, literature, music, and film. Lisa Paravisini.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 259 - Settler Colonialism in a Comparative Perspective
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 259 ) This course examines the phenomenon of settler colonialism through a comparative study of the interactions between settler and ‘native’ / indigenous populations in different societies. It explores the patterns of settler migration and settlement and the dynamics of violence and local displacement in the colony through the tropes of racialization of space, colonial law, production/labor, racialized knowledge, aesthetics, health, gender, domesticity and sexuality. Attentive to historical injustices and the transformation of violence in ‘postcolonial’ and settler societies, the course interrogates the forms of belonging, memory, desire and nostalgia that arise from the unresolved status of settler and indigenous communities and the competing claims to, or unequal access to resources like land. Case studies are drawn primarily from Africa but also include examples from other regions. Samson Opondo.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 260 - International Relations of the Third World: Bandung to 9/11 Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 260 and POLI 260 ) Whether referred to as the “Third World,” or other variants such as the “Global South,” the “Developing World,” the “G-77,” the “Non-Aligned Movement,” or the “Post-Colonial World,” a certain unity has long been assumed for the multitude of countries ranging from Central and South America, across Africa to much of Asia. Is it valid to speak of a Third World? What were/are the connections between countries of the Third World? What were/are the high and low points of Third World solidarity? And what is the relationship between the First and Third Worlds? Drawing on academic and journalistic writings, personal narratives, music, and film, this course explores the concept of the Third World from economic, political and cultural perspectives. Beginning at the dawn of the 20th century with the rise of anti-colonial movements, we examine the trajectory of the Third World in global political debates through the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. Zachariah Mampilly.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 264 - African American Women’s History
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 264 ) In this interdisciplinary course, we explore the roles of black women in the U.S. as thinkers, activists, and creators during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the intellectual work, social activism, and cultural expression of a diverse group of African American women, we examine how they have understood their lives, resisted oppression, constructed emancipatory visions, and struggled to change society. Lisa Collins.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 265 - Slavery and Freedom in the U.S.
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 265 ) This course explores the history of American slavery and freedom from the Atlantic slave trade through Reconstruction. We examine the history of African-descended people to understand key developments and regional differences in the making of race and slavery as a commodity form and foundation of an emerging nation-state in North America, resistance movements among enslaved and free Blacks (such as rebellions and the abolitionist movement), black institutional and economic development, and the multiple ways gender, race, and slavery informed the meanings of freedom. In addition to reading secondary sources, we analyze such primary sources as slave voyage records, legal records, slave narratives, and speeches and essays from free Blacks. Quincy Mills.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 266 - Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 266 and ART 266 ) An interdisciplinary exploration of how a range of U.S. based creators–through their artistic practices, aesthetic choices, and expressive interventions–are grappling with urgent issues of our time. Lisa Collins.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 or coursework in Africana Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 270 - The Black Power Movement Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 270 ) This course examines the Black Power Movement as a burgeoning social movement in the post World War II period, while also placing it in the long traditions of black political thought and radicalism within American democracy. In addition to studying black radicalism in the early twentieth century, the course explores the philosophies and tactics of civil rights activism; questions of feminism and masculinity; radicalism and conservatism; violence, nonviolence, and self-defense; and community control, nationalism, and internationalism. Major sites of inquiry include education, arts and media, police brutality, welfare rights, electoral politics, and economic empowerment. By engaging the ideologies, politics, and culture of the Black Power Movement, we gain a deeper understanding of how people claim their rights and personhood against seemingly insurmountable odds. Quincy Mills.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 271 - Perspectives on the African Past: Africa Before 1800
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 271 ) A thematic survey of African civilizations and societies to 1800. The course examines how demographic and technological changes, warfare, religion, trade, and external relations shaped the evolution of the Nile Valley civilizations, the East African city-states, the empires of the western Sudan, and the forest kingdoms of West Africa. Some attention is devoted to the consequences of the Atlantic slave trade, which developed from Europe’s contact with Africa from the fifteenth century onwards. Ismail Rashid.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 272 - Modern African History Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 272 ) Africa has experienced profound transformations over the past two centuries. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans lost and regained their independence from different European colonial powers. This course explores the changing African experiences before, during, and after European colonization of their continent. Drawing on primary sources, film, memoirs, and popular novels, we look at the creative responses of African groups and individuals to the contradictory processes and legacies of colonialism. Particular attention will be paid to understanding how these responses shape the trajectories of African as well as global developments. Amongst the major themes covered by the course are: colonial ideologies, African resistance, colonial economies, gender and cultural change, African participation in the two world wars, urbanization, decolonization and African nationalism. We also reflect on some of the contemporary developmental dilemmas as well as opportunities confronting post-colonial Africa. Ismail Rashid.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 275 - Caribbean Discourse
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 275 and LALS 275 ) Study of the work of artists and intellectuals from the Caribbean. Analysis of fiction, non-fiction, and popular cultural forms such as calypso and reggae within their historical contexts. Attention to cultural strategies of resistance to colonial domination and to questions of community formation in the post-colonial era. May include some discussion of post-colonial literary theory and cultural studies.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 277 - Crossings: Literature without Borders
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 277 ) This course explores themes, concepts, and genres that span literary periods and/or national boundaries. The focus varies from year to year. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 279 - Spaces of Exception Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 279 , PHIL 279 and POLI 279 ) This course charts and critically examines a series of exceptional spaces in which inclusion in the political community is possible only by mechanisms of exclusion and intensified precarity that place vulnerable subjects at the outskirts of political legibility. We map the mechanisms of identification, exclusion, dispossession, penalization, and abandonment through a number of theoretical sources as well as the history of sovereign claims, territoriality, resistance, community, and transformations in bio and necropolitics.
Practices of capture as well as regimes of death and penalization are analyzed in their entanglements with the history of the Colony, citizenship, manhunting, jurisprudence, and the humanitarian logic of care. We engage these thematics through literary and cinematic texts in conversation with theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Etienne Balibar, Grégoire Chamayou, Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida, Franz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, and Suvendrini Perera among others.
By confronting the psychological, physical, moral, and political ways in which violence inscribes itself on the body, both individual and collective, this course discloses the pivotal role played by the biologization of subjectivity, achieved through biometrics, therapeutics, the power of extra-territorial formations, immunization, and technologies of capture, enclosure, penalization, and encampment. Ultimately, our immanent critique of spaces of exception brings us to examine the ethical dimensions of practices that draw new maps, create new archives, and foster everyday enactments of hospitality, life, and co-habitation. Giovanna Borradori and Samson Opondo.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 283 - Gender, Sexuality and Abolitionist Activism Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 283 and WMST 283 ) This course arrives at the study of Abolition by way of questions of gender and sexuality often disappeared by both mainstream antislavery and anti-prison movements. We engage firsthand accounts of resistance to slavery, human trafficking, convict leasing, lynching, prisons, solitary confinement, and torture as movements out of racial injustice, labor exploitation, and gender violence and towards new imaginations of collective identity, class, ability, nationality and sexuality – movements that begin with captivity but do not end with emancipation. Readings train students in interdisciplinary methods of research and grassroots analysis scholars and activists have amassed to theorize the complex intersections of public safety and social justice that converge on the lives of racially profiled and gender non-conforming bodies. Jasmine Syedullah.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 286 - Black Geographies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as GEOG 286 ) Over the last two decades, Black geographies has developed as a vibrant field of study, one that considers the roles of racial capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism in the modern world’s making, historically and contemporarily. The subfield raises urgent questions about how racial violences-segregation, inequality, police brutality, dispossession, and organized abandonment-are produced, inscribed, naturalized, and contested through spatial relations. The course introduces key themes and debates in Black geographies, by utilizing a historical, transnational, interdisciplinary perspective. It also explores the shifting and dynamic configurations of race, racism, and power in relation to the interlocking historical geographies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, especially North America and the Carribean. A Black geographic approach understands Black and other marginalized people as subjects who actively make places and produce geographical knowledge. Toward this end, the course examines the intellectual histories, geographies, and political cultures of the Black radical tradition, including practices of slave revolt and fugitivity, the activism of the Black Panther Party and Third World Women’s Alliance and contemporary global movements for prison abolition. Recent case studies include the Flint, Michigan water crisis; hurricanes Katrina and Maria; and London’s Grenfell Tower destruction. Maegan Miller.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 290 - Field Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Individual or group field projects or internships. The department.
Unscheduled. May be selected during the academic year or during the summer.
|
| |
-
AFRS 298 - Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Individual or group project of reading or research. The department.
Unscheduled. May be selected during the academic year or during the summer.
|
| |
-
AFRS 299 - Research Methods Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
An introduction to the research methods used in the disciplines represented by Africana Studies. Through a variety of individual projects, students learn the approaches necessary to design projects, collect data, analyze results, and write research reports. The course includes some field trips to sites relevant to student projects. The emphasis is on technology and archival research, using the Library’s new facilities in these areas. The course explores different ideas, theories and interdisciplinary approaches within Africana Studies that shape research and interpretation of the African and African diasporic experience. Students learn to engage and critically utilize these ideas, theories and approaches in a coherent fashion in their own research projects. They also learn how to design research projects, collect and analyze different types of data, and write major research papers. Emphasis is placed on collection of data through interviews and surveys as well as archival and new information technologies, using the facilities of Vassar libraries.
The course includes some field trips to sites relevant to student projects. Required of majors and correlates, but open to students in all disciplines.
|
Africana Studies: III. Advanced |
| |
-
AFRS 300 - Senior Thesis or Project Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
1 unit(s)
|
| |
-
AFRS 301 - Seminar in Classical Civilization Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 301 and GRST 301 ) Topic for 2018/19a: Athenian Drama on an African Stage. In this class we read adaptations of Greek drama from Africa and the African diaspora alongside their Greek intertexts. Among the questions we consider are: the affinity between Greek and African theatrical forms related to their origins in ritual; the use of Greek tragedy to describe the African experience in the New World, and the larger question of the role of the classical in a postcolonial context. Readings include such works as Ola Rotimi’s The Gods are not to Blame, Fugard, Kani and Ntshona’s The Island, Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth; and Sylvain Bemba’s Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone. Rachel Friedman.
Prerequisite(s): Previous course work in Greek and Roman Studies or permission of the instructor.
All readings are in English.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AFRS 307 - Upper-Intermediate Arabic Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Upper-intermediate language and culture course in Modern Standard Arabic. Designed to consolidate students’ reading and listening comprehension, and their oral skills at the intermediate-mid level of proficiency; and to help them reach intermediated- high level proficiency by the end of the course. Tagreed Al-Haddad.
|
| |
-
AFRS 308 - Upper-Intermediate Arabic Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Upper-intermediate language and culture course in Modern Standard Arabic. Designed to consolidate students’ reading and listening comprehension, and their oral skills at the intermediate-mid level of proficiency; and to help them reach intermediated- high level proficiency by the end of the course. Tagreed Al-Haddad.
|
| |
-
AFRS 311 - Advanced Arabic
1 unit(s)
This is an advanced level course offered during fall semester only. The course focuses on enhancing students’ abilities to (1) Read and understand various types of discourses, such as newspaper articles (descriptive, narrative, argumentative, etc.), essays and short stories on various topics; (2) Listen to and understand the main ideas of a speech, lecture or news broadcast; (3) Present personal opinion and construct a nuanced argument about a range of topics about literature, history, politics, culture and society in various parts of the Arab World; (4) Write cohesive and articulate summaries and critical reports about the same topics. Students will continue to develop their communicative skills (speaking, listening, writing and reading) in Modern Standard Arabic through different types of course assignments aimed at helping them reach advanced levels of proficiency. Tagreed Al-Haddad.
This course is designed for students who have successfully completed two courses in upper intermediate Arabic or its equivalent as demonstrated by a placement test.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 319 - Race and its Metaphors Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 319 ) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year.
Topic for 2018/19a: “Blacks and Blues: Blues as Metaphor in African American Literature” Ralph Ellison wrote of the blues that it is “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” This course takes the blues as a metaphor and follows it through canonical African American writing to consider multiple themes: black sonics, black vernacular traditions, sexuality and freedom, social critique, joy, pain, and futurities of blackness. Students interested in this course need not have a musical background, but interest in the links between sound and black literature is expected. Eve Dunbar.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 326 - Challenging Ethnicity Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
An exploration of literary and artistic engagements with ethnicity. Contents and approaches vary from year to year.
Topic for 2018/19b: Racial Melodrama. ENGL 326 ) Often dismissed as escapist, predictable, lowbrow or exploitative, melodrama has also been recuperated by several contemporary critics as a key site for the rupture and transformation of mainstream values. Film scholar Linda Williams argues that melodrama constitutes “a major force of moral reasoning in American mass culture,” shaping the nation’s racial imaginary. The conventions of melodrama originate from popular theater, but its success has relied largely on its remarkable adaptability across various media, including print, motion pictures, radio, and television. This course investigates the lasting impact of such fictions as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life, the romanticized legend of John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas, and John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly. What precisely is melodrama? If not a genre, is it (as critics diversely argue) a mode, symbolic structure, or a sensibility? What do we make of the international success of melodramatic forms and texts such as the telenovela and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain? How do we understand melodrama’s special resonance historically among disfranchised classes? How and to what ends do the pleasures of suffering authenticate particular collective identities (women, the working-class, queers, blacks, and group formations yet to be named)? What relationships between identity, affect and consumption does melodrama reveal? Hiram Perez.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 346 - Race and Gender in Judicial Politics Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 346 ) This seminar explores the centrality of race/ethnicity and gender in the American judicial process and system. The course is designed to promote and facilitate healthy discussions and debates about the level, nature, and importance of judicial diversity in the American justice system. After examining the diversity levels on the state and federal bench and how those levels have changed over the last century, students consider factors that improve and/or limit judicial diversity such as the selection process and evaluations of judicial performance. Afterwards, students explore the value of judicial diversity. Special attention is given to judicial decision-making behavior, and the extent to which the courts protect minority rights and provide redress for historical injustices. The course concludes with students considering the issues presently facing our legal system such as mass incarceration, the proliferation of for-profit prisons, racial and gender bias in the criminal justice system, and demands for criminal justice reform. Taneisha Means.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 351 - Africana Studies Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 351 ) This seminar explores both historical and contemporary debates within the field of Africana Studies. Students examine a variety of subjects and themes encompassing different disciplinary and interdisciplinary works drawn from the humanities and social sciences. The critical perspectives that the seminar engages draw attention to the political, representational and explanatory value of a variety of genres of expression and knowledge practices. By delving into philosophical, historical, aesthetic and political analyses of Africa and African Diaspora societies, subjects and practices, students acquire a deep understanding of Africana research methods culminating in a substantive research project. The particular subject and themes explored vary with the faculty teaching the course. Samson Opondo.
Prerequisite(s): AFRS 100 or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 352 - Redemption and Diplomatic Imagination in Postcolonial Africa Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as POLI 352 ) This seminar explores the shifts and transformations in the discourse and practice of redemptive diplomacy in Africa. It introduces students to the cultural, philosophical and political dimensions of estrangement and the mediation practices that accompany the quest for recognition, meaning and material well-being in selected colonial and postcolonial societies. Through a critical treatment of the redemptive vision and diplomatic imaginaries summoned by missionaries, anti-colonial resistance movements and colonial era Pan-Africanists, the seminar interrogates the ‘idea of Africa’ produced by these discourses of redemption and their implications for diplomatic thought in Africa. The insights derived from the interrogation of foundational discourses on African redemption will be used to map the transformation of identities, institutional forms, and the minute texture of everyday life in postcolonial Africa. The seminar also engages modern humanitarianism, diasporic religious movements, Non-Governmental Organizations and neoliberal or millennial capitalist networks that seek to save Africans from foreign forces of oppression or ‘themselves.’ Samson Opondo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 362 - Text and Image
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 362 )
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
|
| |
-
AFRS 366 - Art and Activism in the United States Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 366 , ART 366 , and WMST) 366 Topic for 2018/19b: Exquisite Intimacy. An interdisciplinary exploration of the work and role of quilts within the US. Closely considering quilts–as well as their creators, users, keepers, and interpreters–we study these integral coverings and the practices of their making and use with keen attention to their recurrence as core symbols in American history, literature, and life. Lisa Collins.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 370 - Transnational Literature
1 unit(s)
This course focuses on literary works and cultural networks that cross the borders of the nation-state. Such border-crossings raise questions concerning vexed phenomena such as globalization, exile, diaspora, and migration—forced and voluntary. Collectively, these phenomena deeply influence the development of transnational cultural identities and practices. Specific topics studied in the course vary from year to year and may include global cities and cosmopolitanisms; the black Atlantic; border theory; the discourses of travel and tourism; global economy and trade; or international terrorism and war.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 373 - Slavery and Abolition in Africa
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 373 ) The Trans-Saharan and the Atlantic slave trade transformed African communities, social structures, and cultures. The seminar explores the development, abolition, and impact of slavery in Africa from the earliest times to the twentieth century. The major conceptual and historiographical themes include indigenous servitude, female enslavement, family strategies, slave resistance, abolition, and culture. The seminar uses specific case studies as well as a comparative framework to understand slavery in Africa. Ismail Rashid.
Prerequisite(s): Standard department prerequisites or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 374 - The African Diaspora Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 374 ) This seminar investigates the social origins, philosophical and cultural ideas, and the political forms of Pan-Africanism from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. It explores how disaffection and resistance against slavery, racism and colonial domination in the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and Africa led to the development of a global movement for the emancipation of peoples of African descent from 1900 onwards. The seminar examines the different ideological, cultural, and organizational manifestations of Pan-Africanism as well as the scholarly debates on development of the movement. Readings include the ideas and works of Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, C.L.R. James, and Kwame Nkmmah. Ismail Rashid.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
|
| |
-
AFRS 378 - Black Paris
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 378 and FFS 378 ) This multidisciplinary course examines black cultural productions in Paris from the first Conference of Negro-African writers and artists in 1956 to the present. While considered a haven by African American artists, Paris, the metropolitan center of the French empire, was a more complex location for African and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and artists. Yet, the city provided a key space for the development and negotiation of a black diasporic consciousness. This course examines the tensions born from expatriation and exile, and the ways they complicate understandings of racial, national and transnational identities. Using literature, film, music, and new media, we explore topics ranging from modernism, jazz, Négritude, Pan-Africanism, and the Présence Africaine group, to assess the meanings of blackness and race in contemporary Paris. Works by James Baldwin, Aime Césaire, Chester Himes, Claude McKay, the Nardal sisters, Richard Wright. Ousmane Sembène, Mongo Beti, among others, are studied.
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AFRS 384 - Prophetic Praxis of Liberation Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 384 ) In the West, teachings of liberation have transcended their geographic, religious, and cultural origins. Liberation theology, nonviolence, sustainability, yoga and mindfulness emerge out of intersections between American and African indigenous traditions, Eastern and Western religious traditions, and secular visions of liberation. In the face of strident demagogues, desperate fundamentalist takeovers, massive cultural disruption, human displacement, faceless wars, and planetary crisis prophetic traditions give voice to new imaginations of power and justice. This course draws on literatures from across several prophetic traditions, from the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter, from struggles for tribal sovereignty to national decolonization to trace the prophetic tradition from the roots of its contemplative social imagination of power through its many movements for justice and liberation. Jasmine Syedullah.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
AFRS 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Senior independent study program to be worked out in consultation with an instructor. The department.
|
American Sign Language: I. Introductory |
| |
-
ASL 105 - Beginning American Sign Language Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Special permission.
Yearlong course ASL 105-106 .
|
| |
-
ASL 106 - Beginning American Sign Language Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Special permission.
Yearlong course ASL 105 -106.
|
American Sign Language: II. Intermediate |
| |
-
ASL 210 - Intermediate American Sign Language Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): ASL 105 -106 or equivalent.
Yearlong course 210-ASL 211 .
Two 60-minute periods.
|
| |
-
ASL 211 - Intermediate American Sign Language Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): ASL 210 .
Yearlong course ASL 210 -211.
Two 60-minute periods.
|
American Sign Language: III. Advanced |
| |
|
| |
-
ASL 311 - Advanced American Sign Language Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Courses offered through SILP do not have individual course descriptions. ASL is listed under the languages offered in the existing description of the Self-Instructional Language Program.
Two 60-minute periods.
|
American Studies: Required Courses |
| |
-
AMST 100 - Introduction to American Studies Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
This course reveals and challenges the histories of the categories that contribute to the definition of “America.” The course explores ideas such as nationhood and the nation-state, democracy and citizenship, ethnic and racial identity, myths of frontier and facts of empire, borders and expansion, normativity and representation, sovereignty and religion, regionalism and transnationalism as these inform our understanding of the United States and American national identity. One goal of the course is to introduce students to important concepts and works in American Studies. Either AMST 100 or AMST 105 will satisfy the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Topics vary with expertise of the faculty teaching the course.
Topic for 2018/19a: The American Secular: Religion and the Nation-State. Is there a distinct realm in American politics and culture called the secular, a space or a mode of public discourse that is crucially free of and from the category of religion? This class considers the sorts of theoretical and historical moments in American life, letters, and practice that have, on the one hand, insisted the importance and necessity of such a realm, and on the other hand, resisted the very notion that religion should be kept out of the American public square. We ask whether it is possible or even desirable—in our politics, in our public institutions, in ourselves—to conceive of the secular and the religious as radically opposed. We ask if there are better ways to conceive of the secular and the religious in American life, ways that acknowledge their mutual interdependence rather than their exclusivity. Jonathon Kahn.
Topic for 2018/19b: People, Culture, and Place. A dynamic introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies by focusing on the key concerns of people, culture, and place. Lisa Collins.
Open to first-year students and sophomores only.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AMST 105 - Introduction to Native American Studies Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course is a multi-and interdisciplinary introduction to the basic philosophies, ideologies, and methodologies of the discipline of Native American Studies. It acquaints students with the history, art, literature, sociology, linguistics, politics, and epistemology according to an indigenous perspective while utilizing principles stemming from vast and various Native North American belief systems and cultural frameworks. Through reading assignments, films, and discussions, we learn to objectively examine topics such as orality, sovereignty, stereotypes, humor, language, resistance, spirituality, activism, identity, tribal politics, and environment among others. Overall, we work to problematize historical, ethnographical, and literary representations of Native people as a means to assess and evaluate western discourses of domination; at the same time, we focus on the various ways Native people and nations, both in their traditional homelands and urban areas, have been and are triumphing over 500+ years of colonization through acts of survival and continuance. Either AMST 100 or 105 will satisfy the 100-level core requirement of the American Studies major. Molly McGlennen.
Open to first-year students and sophomores only.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AMST 250 - America in the World Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course focuses on current debates in American Studies about resituating the question of “America” in global terms. We explore the theoretical and political problems involved in such a reorientation of the field as we examine topics such as American militarization and empire, American involvement in global monetary organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, the question of a distinctive national and international American culture, foreign perspectives on American and “Americanization,” and the global significance of American popular culture including film and music such as hip-hop. Carlos Alamo, William Hoynes.
Required of students concentrating in the program. Generally not open to senior majors. Open to other students by permission of the director and as space permits.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
AMST 302 - Senior Thesis or Project Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
Required of students concentrating in the program.
The senior project is graded Distinction, Satisfactory, or Unsatisfactory.
Yearlong course 302-AMST 303 .
|
| |
-
AMST 303 - Senior Thesis or Project Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
Required of students concentrating in the program.
The senior project is graded Distinction, Satisfactory, or Unsatisfactory.
Yearlong course AMST 302 -303.
|
| |
-
AMST 313 - Multidisciplinary Research Methods
1 unit(s)
This course explores the challenges of conducting multi- and interdisciplinary inquiry within the field of American Studies. Drawing on key texts and innovative projects within the field, the course examines the ways in which varying disciplines make meaning of the world and puts specific modes of inquiry into practice. Students learn how to seek, produce, and evaluate different forms of evidence and how to shape this evidence in the direction of a broader project. Specific forms of inquiry may include: interpreting archival documents, conducting interviews, making maps, crafting field notes, analyzing cultural texts, among others.
Prerequisite(s): or co-requisite: a discipline-specific methods course appropriate to the student.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 315 - Senior Project Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course is required for all senior American Studies majors. The seminar engages current debates in the field of American Studies, as it prepares students to undertake the Senior Project. The course is designed to help students to identify a compelling research problem, locate appropriate critical resources, deepen their engagement with the disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods appropriate to their focus within the major, and locate their projects within a broader field of inquiry. Texts include Bruce Burgett and Glen Hendler, Keywords for American Culture Studies; Wayne Booth et al., The Craft of Research. Taught by the Director, Hua Hsu.
Corequisite(s): Senior Project; offered in the fall semester in the senior year.
One 2-hour period.
|
American Studies: Core Courses |
| |
-
AMST 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
|
| |
-
AMST 160 - Art and Social Change in the United States
1 unit(s)
(Same as ART 160 ) In this first-year writing seminar, we explore relationships between art, visual culture, and social change in the United States. Focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century social movements, we study artists and communities who have sought to inspire social change–to cultivate awareness, nurture new ideas, offer fresh visions, promote dialogue, encourage understanding, build and strengthen community, and inspire civic engagement and direct action–through creative visual expression. Lisa Collins.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 177 - Special Topics
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 177 and URBS 177 )
First six-week course.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as ENGL 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the diverse complexity of contemporary American lives. In a plain sense, this course is an investigation into American society. But the main emphasis of the course is on acquiring a sense of the different models of writing, especially in longform writing, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. Students are encouraged to practice the basics of journalistic craft and to interrogate the role of journalists as intellectuals (or vice versa). Hua Hsu.
|
| |
-
AMST 207 - Commercialized Childhoods
1 unit(s)
(Same as SOCI 207 ) This course examines features of childhoods in the U.S. at different times and across different social contexts. The primary aims of the course are 1) to examine how we’ve come to the contemporary understanding of American childhood as a distinctive life phase and cultural construct, by reference to historical and cross-cultural examples, and 2) to recognize the diversity of childhoods that exist and the economic, geographical, political, and cultural factors that shape those experiences. Specific themes in the course examine the challenges of studying children; the social construction of childhood (how childhoods are constructed by a number of social forces, economic interests, technological determinants, cultural phenomena, discourses, etc.); processes of contemporary globalization and commodification of childhoods (children’s roles as consumers, as producers, and debates about children’s rights); as well as the intersecting dynamics of age, social class, race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in particular experiences of childhood. Eréndira Rueda.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 231 - Native American Literature
1 unit(s)
This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of writing and spoken stories, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the varied theoretical debates and frameworks that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Richard Van Camp, among other Native theorists, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and artists. Molly McGlennen.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 252 - The American Military at Home and Abroad
1 unit(s)
After 1945 the U.S. created the world’s largest and most far-reaching network of military bases. Today, more than 700 military bases in over 150 countries are hosts to American troops, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and private military contractors. Readings explore the development of this unprecedented global network of military bases, the differing Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) that govern the relationship between the U.S. military and the local populations, as well as the impact of the U.S. troops on these communities. By taking a transnational perspective, we explore the possibilities and limits for democratic change due to the U.S. presence, but also the way in which America’s military deployments abroad brought about change at home. Assigned readings draw on the writing of scholars of the U.S. military, texts produced by opponents of the U.S. military, as well as artistic responses (films, plays, novels, poems) to the U.S. global base structure. Maria Höhn.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 258 - Studies in Sound
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 258 ) This course familiarizes students with the emerging field of sound studies. We spend the first eight weeks exploring the different facets of sound culture: histories and ethnographies of listening; theories of sound capture and reproduction; the political economy of recording media (particularly the MP3); the experience of the modern American soundscape. We conclude with case studies of contemporary sonic experiences: “glitch”-based digital music and the aesthetics of failure; new developments in sonic weaponry; art and activism that “listens” to drones and the US-Mexico border. Hua Hsu.
Prerequisite(s): 100-level course work within the multidisciplinary programs, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 262 - Native American Women
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 262 ) In an effort to subjugate indigenous nations, colonizing and Christianizing enterprises in the Americas included the implicit understanding that subduing Native American women through rape and murder maintained imperial hierarchies of gender and power; this was necessary to eradicate Native people’s traditional egalitarian societies and uphold the colonial agenda. Needless to say, Native women’s stories and histories have been inaccurately portrayed, often tainted with nostalgia and delivered through a lens of western patriarchy and discourses of domination. Through class readings and writing assignments, discussions and films, this course examines Native women’s lives by considering the intersections of gender and race through indigenous frameworks. We expose Native women’s various cultural worldviews in order to reveal and assess the importance of indigenous women’s voices to national and global issues such as sexual violence, environmentalism, and health. The class also takes into consideration the shortcomings of western feminisms in relation to the realities of Native women and Native people’s sovereignty in general. Areas of particular importance to this course are indigenous women’s urban experience, Haudenosaunee influence on early U.S. suffragists, indigenous women in the creative arts, third-gender/two-spiritedness, and Native women’s traditional and contemporary roles as cultural carriers. Molly McGlennen.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2018/19.
|
| |
-
AMST 266 - Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 266 and ART 266 ) An interdisciplinary exploration of how a range of U.S. based creators–through their artistic practices, aesthetic choices, and expressive interventions–are grappling with urgent issues of our time. Lisa Collins.
Prerequisite(s): ART 105 or ART 106 or coursework in Africana Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
Page: 1
| 2
| 3
| 4
| 5
| 6
| 7
| 8
| 9
| 10
| 11
… Forward 10 -> 23 |
|
|
Print this Page