AFRS GU

Prerequisites: NA The Russian Revolution of 1917 is widely acknowledged as a watershed moment in the global struggle for worker’s rights, but it also played a considerable role in the fights against racism and colonialism (Lenin considered both tools of capitalist exploitation). In Soviet Russia’s project to make racial equality a central feature of communism, two urban locales featured prominently: its capital city of Moscow and the burgeoning Black cultural center that was Harlem, New York. This course will explore cross-cultural encounters between Moscow and Harlem as a way to ask larger questions about race, class, and solidarity across difference. Students can expect to read novels, memoirs, and cultural reportage from Harlem Renaissance figures (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Dorothy West) who traveled to Moscow. Students will also learn about the role of race in early Soviet culture, particularly visual culture (films, children’s media, propaganda posters, etc.). This course includes a field trip to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

Subject

AFRS GU

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu

How have painters, filmmakers, novelists, and other artists portrayed the history of Africans and their descendants in Latin America? How do those portrayals – of the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, abolition, and contemporary social movements, to name a few examples – compare to scholarly approaches to those same subjects? To answer these and other questions, this class brings together a wide array of materials covering more than five hundred years of Afro-Latin American history. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a topic relevant to the history of Afro-Latin America in a given era, as viewed through both artistic and scholarly sources. Students will come to class prepared to consider what each has to offer to our understanding of the past. We will also debate the possibilities of using art to disseminate historical knowledge, and whether there any dangers to privileging artistic over scholarly approaches to history (or vice versa). In addition, because NYC is home to so many museums, archives, and cultural institutions relevant to our subject, it will serve as an experiential laboratory where we will spend several of our class meetings. Learning outcomes. By the end of the semester, students will be skilled at the following:  analyzing artistic and scholarly sources on their own terms  discussing them in relation to one another  evaluating the utility of these diverse materials to the process of understanding the past

Subject

AFRS GU

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026

Source

catalog.barnard.edu