8 courses with the subject AFEN BC, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
AFEN BC3009TONI MORRISON: AN ETHICAL POETICS4.00
Toni Morrison set herself a challenge: to engage language in complex literary ways in order to reveal the ‘fact’ of race in the lived experiences of Americans—those made to bear the burden of being ‘raced,’ those exercising the prerogative of ‘racing,’ and those who imagine that none of this applies to them. We travel with her artistic path from The Bluest Eye to her later novels to learn how her choice to create figurative, logical narratives seek their own understanding of the ethics of what she called the “manageable, doable, modern human activity” of living in ‘the house of race.’
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Fall 2026: AFEN BC3134 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment AFEN 3134 001/01016 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 214 Milbank Hall Yvette Christianse 4.00 8/15
On her “Record of Freshman Interest” form, Zora Neale Hurston, Barnard class of 1928, wrote in response to the question of what vocation or profession she had in mind after graduation, “I have had some small success as a writer and wish above all to succeed at it. Either teaching or social work would be interesting, but consolation prizes.” No consolation prize was necessary as Hurston became one of American and African American literature’s finest writers, America’s first Black anthropologist, and a Black feminist ancestor and icon. A deep dive into Hurston’s work and writing life, this course reads Hurston as a narrative stylist and theorist in multiple genres: as poet, essayist, writer of short stories, novelist, playright, folklorist, and autobiographer. The goal of this class is to read Hurston closely and widely and to identify and examine her aesthetic philosophy and stylistic choices as one of the first African American women able to have a writing “career.” In Spring of 2026, this class will center the cultural context in which Hurston wrote, using the New York Historical’s exhibition Gay Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was an active part of a coterie of artists and intellectuals who made up the “queer mentorship and gay-inclusive salons and friendship circles that helped sustain the Harlem Renaissance.” We will also partner with the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard, as well as Barnard Archives, in the preparation of final digital projects that can be shared with the college community
Home to Harlem focuses on the relationship between art, activism and social justice during the Harlem/ New Negro Renaissance. Exploring the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated Harlem in 1920s to 1930s, the course discusses the politics of literary and theatrical production, while exploring the fashioning and performance of New Negro identity through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork. Topics considered include: role of Africa/slavery/the south in New Negro expression, patronage, passing, primitivism/popular culture, black dialect as literary language, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin
Black Lives Matter is an American phenomenon. This course situates BLM in relation to other and earlier movements in the Global South and elsewhere. Through textual analysis and critical reading, we take up the discursive, rhetorical, and poetical strategies of opposition to marginalization, criminalization, and racial othering
AFEN BC3516WATER WORLDS IN LITERARY IMAGINATION4.00
This interdisciplinary course surveys literary, cinematic, historical and other archival text representations of time and change in and around waterways in the Global South—oceanic, riverine, at the littoral and in hinterlands. It is animated by questions of how people live with water as horizon, resource, life-giving source, as ancestral boundaries and threat. We do so now in a time when climate change refocuses our dependencies upon, and vulnerabilities to, water. Our themes are shaped by water’s influence on the rhythms of lives, and how these rhythms have been changed and are changing—deliberately, as in dam building and its aftermaths in lives, and through climate change
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: https://bit.ly/AFEN3815. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Shange’s stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in feminist history. We will examine Shange’s works through the dual lenses of “embodied knowledge” and historical context. In conjunction with our multidisciplinary analysis of primary texts, students will be introduced to archival research in Ntozake Shange’s personal archive at Barnard College. Thus the seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shange's work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. You can find more information and apply for the course at https://bit.ly/AFEN3815
This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s Othello will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor
