62 courses with the subject AFR, 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.
AFR 101Introduction to Africana Studies
Instructor Garcia-Rojas, Gill-Sadler, Green This course will introduce students to the value and real-world applicability of Africana Studies by examining global Black history and contemporary Black people’s experiences. It will examine the fundamental role of race in structuring the modern world by foregrounding African Diasporic people’s history, politics, and cultural productions with a particular emphasis on the Americas and the Caribbean. This course will offer an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational study of Black people. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement
Instructor Castaneda From Mexico to Brazil and beyond, Africans and people of African descent have fought in wars of independence, forged mixed race national identities, and contributed politically and culturally to the making of the Americas. Even though Latin America imported ten times as many slaves as the United States, only recently have scholars begun to highlight the role blacks and other people of African descent played in Latin American history. This course will explore the experiences of Afro-Latin Americans from slavery to the present, with a particular focus on Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. In doing so, the course seeks to answer questions such as: What does it mean to be black in Latin America? Why has racism persisted in Latin America despite political revolutions claiming to eliminate discrimination? What are the links between blacks in Latin America and the United States? How have differing conceptions of “race” and “nation” caused the rise and decline of transnational black alliances between U.S. blacks and Afro-Latin Americans? All course readings will be in English and will include memoirs, films, and first-hand historical documents in additional to scholarly books and articles. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean). Satisfies a requirement in the Latin American Studies major or minor. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
AFR 130African American Literature and the Environment
Instructor Gill-Sadler How might we relate to the natural environment beyond domination and privatization? How are our understandings of race, gender, and class informed by what we think of the natural environment and vice versa? This course explores how African American writers engage these questions by analyzing the environmental themes, tropes, and politics of African American literature. Texts in this course will consider Afro-descended spiritual practices and the natural environment, African American communities’ responses and analyses of “natural disasters,” and African American communities’ engagement with environmental justice. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Enrvironmental Studies major requirement.-Humanities track Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Instructor Villaroel Lamoza This course offers an introduction to the visual languages with which the people from West and Central Africa have contributed to the politics, culture, and thought of the Americas, with a particular focus on urban hubs as Port Au Prince, Havana, New Orleans, and New York. We will study the graphic writing systems, ideograms, and symbolic practices of Afro inspired spiritual traditions like Vodou and Santeria. Product of the convergence of Yoruba, Fon, Efik and Kongo expansive bodies of knowledge, these highly syncretic practices have been performed in secrecy or disguised as baroque Christian rituals. However, we will examine how Afro inspired spiritual practices expand beyond the scope of religions and beliefs. Through in-depth studies of the work of artists as Hector Hypolite, Wilfredo Lam, Belkis Ayon, and Ana Mendieta, we will examine the contribution of these aesthetic practices to contemporary discourses about art and performance. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Villarroel Lamoza The recent onslaughts of reproductive rights, and the rights of trans and gender non-conforming people, have irrevocably crushed our illusions of a taken-for-granted sovereignty over our own bodies. In this class, we will examine contemporary art practices from Africa and the African diaspora that explore a radical feminist self-possession, which cannot be reduced to claims of ownership, domination, and control. Interrogating how Black feminist artists have responded to the refused recognition of institutions as museum and art galleries, we will trace the ever-expanding significance of immaterial, performative, and ephemeral artworks through the twenty-first century. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies an Art major and minor requirement. Satisfies a Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Harper-Shipman This course will introduce students to the unique methodological questions raised by Africana studies. We will explore the methodological problems inherent in Africana studies research-what are the challenges to answering the questions raised by Africana scholars? More importantly, this course engages the different frameworks for conducting Africana scholarship that are derived from the experiences of people in the African diaspora. Meets the Cultural Diversity requirement
Instructor Staff Looking out from a Caribbean center provides a different view of the world. In this course, we complexify the Caribbean beyond sun, sea, and sand. First, we accept Caribbean scholars’ invitation to study the region across colonial and linguistic borders that erase pre-colonial/pre-Columbian history and re-center Europe. In exploring the region comparatively through time, we recognize the space as the laboratory of modernity, consequently re-situation the Caribbean within the larger story of humanity and contemporary geopolitics. Accordingly, we will engage in discussions about history vs. prehistory, colonization, racial capitalism, race, gender, and slavery, rebellions and revolutions, emancipation and independence, anti-colonial, labor and feminist movements, colorism/shadism, neoliberalism, sovereignty and postcolonialism. This course is multi-disciplinary. It covers the fields of Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies, Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, Africana Studies, International Politics, and Political Science. As such, we will examine the different methodologies employed in scholarly research on the region. In addition to academic works, we will watch documentaries about politics and cultural production in the region, read first-account papers and speeches from key thinkers, listen to music, view artwork, and even cook some staples meals from the Caribbean. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
AFR 222Race, Policing, and Justice correct title is Policing Black Radical Aesthetics
Instructor Garcia-Rojas This course explores the relationship among Black radical aesthetics, policing, and abolition from a philosophical perspective. It enlists Black feminist, political, and social theories and philosophies to critically examine concepts, such as aesthetics, fugitivity, black politics, policing, and justice in relation to socio-political and legal issues that fall under the umbrella of national security (criminalization, incarceration, ecologies of warfare, criminal justice reform, political protest, police militarization, and surveillance).This course will also critically think through historically pivotal moments of black protest, resistance, and triumph. By studying an array of multidisciplinary and media sources through an intersectional lens, such as film, photography, poetry, performance and visual art, in addition to reading Ida B. Wells, Simone Browne, Cedric J. Robinson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, to name a few, this course will enable us to ask the following questions: What is the relationship between Black radical aesthetics and policing? What is policing and justice? What role does aesthetics play in Black liberation? Is Black liberation possible without abolition? Satisfies Social and Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies Sociology major requirement.
Instructor Garcia-Rojas This course explores the freedom dreams of Black political actors and thinkers alongside the carceral politics of the U.S. We will engage through a conceptual framework multiple genres and mediums (autobiographies, speeches, poetry, documentaries, film, visual art, performances, etc.) to inquire into the meaning of freedom, liberation, political resistance, and Black power. We will read the works of Robin D.G. Kelley, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Elaine Browne, Fannie Lou Hamer, George Jackson, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., to wrestle with the question: What is a free life? We will further consider how cultural and socio-political histories, alongside factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, impact how we envision liberation from the carceral state, as well as how it influences our understanding and dreams of freedom. This course will involve in-class participatory workshops, map-making, and other creative assignments that will enable us to give consideration to the power of imagination to radically transform the worlds we inhabit. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies English major requirement. Fulfills the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Fulfills the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Green This course introduces students to the major themes, issues, and questions related to slavery and emancipation at institutions of higher education, with emphasis on Davidson University and the University of Alabama. The guiding questions: How do institutions of higher education attempt to reconcile their slave pasts and legacies for the present stakeholders? How might the current scholarship provide a pathway forward for encouraging truth and reconciliation? Over the course of the semester, we will read selections from Craig Wilder’s foundational work as well as newer works by Leslie Harris, Al Brophy, Lolita Buckner Inniss, and other scholars for understanding the institution of slavery and its legacy at colleges and universities. Students will explore this unique and often underappreciated topic of campus history, lives of the enslaved, and consequences for the postwar African American and University communities through reading foundational scholarly texts as well as newer works, participating in discussions and trips to university archives, completing short writing assignments grounded in primary and secondary sources, and a final project exploring how should universities reckon with this history and tell fuller and inclusive narratives to current and future stakeholders. Satisfies History major and minor credit Fulfills the Historical Thought requirement
Instructor Staff Hip Hop may be one of the largest cultural movements the world has ever experienced - a cultural movement that has influenced everything from the music to which we listen, the clothes with which we adorn ourselves and to the words we speak. However Hip Hop culture is more than the music, the fashion and the style that is popular today. It transcends the commercialized products sold to mainstream U.S. America and the around globe. How so? Why did Hip Hop emerge? What does mainstream Hip Hop today represent? This course addresses these questions by tracing the historical and political context of the formation of hip hop; its expansion into a discourse of resistance; to its more mainstream contemporary global commodification. Hip Hop was born from racial, class and gendered divides as a way for marginalized, Black and Brown youth in the United States to share their stories and their experiences. Rooted in the struggles and voices of millions of Black and Brown youth, it served as an expression and alternative to the urban woes plaguing their lives. The early spirit of Hip Hop has been one of empowerment through artistic expression. It has enabled people to articulate the reality of their lived experiences and to share their knowledge with the world. Hip Hop through its diverse elements (B-boying/B-girling, Graffiti, DJing, MCing) is about fighting self-imposed and systemic oppression. By tracing the philosophies, events and actors that have contributed to Hip Hop, this course simultaneously takes up the race, class, gender and sexual politics the space espouses. We will look critically at Hip Hop today, its problems as well as its possibilities. This is not a purely musical appreciation course. However, students will have ample opportunity to engage Hip Hop lyrics, videos and images throughout the span of the course. Satisfies a major requirement for Africana Studies Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement
AFR 233Africana Political Economy: Anti-Blackness in Capitalist Development
Instructor Harper-Shipman This course will examine the various ways in which people of the African diaspora have shaped and been shaped by capitalist institutions using state and global institutions. There are 3 questions that animate this course: 1. How have the experiences of people of African descent from around the world shaped and interacted with capitalism in its various stages from mercantilism through to globalization? 2. What role have political institutions from liberal democracies to authoritarian regimes played in mitigating the effects of capitalism on people of African descent? 3. Are there alternate frameworks for thinking through a generative relationship between people of African descent and capitalism? Satisfies Africana Studies major Social Thought and Institutions requirement. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Instructor Gill-Sadler How did tourism come to be a defining characteristic of the Caribbean? Who benefits from tourism in the Caribbean and who is harmed by it? What can a study of tourism tells us about how race and gender are conceptualized in the Caribbean? This course examines the historical and contemporary representations of tourism in the Caribbean in literary, visual, and digital cultures with special attention to questions of race and gender. In its analysis of tourism, this course foregrounds Caribbean writers, scholars, and artists. Key points of discussion will include the political economy of the tourism industry, sex tourism, tourism’s impact on the environment, and alternative models of tourism produced in the region. Rather than view tourism as merely a leisure activity, the course prompts students to engage the cultural history of tourism and its meaning making power. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major requirement. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff This course explores the historical underpinnings of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, U.S.-Cuban relations, and how Cubans have experienced the changes the island has undergone in the past 100 years. Particular attention is given to people of African descent who make up over a one-third of the island’s population. This Cuban narrative illuminates a variety of themes including the spread of U.S. imperialism, Cuba’s fight for sovereignty, and race relations in the Americas. Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies (Geographic Region: Latin American/Caribbean). Satisfies a major or minor requirement in History. Satisfies a major or minor requirement in Latin American Studies. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Wooten This course investigates the spatial aspects of anti-Blackness and the resistance strategies that emerge in response, viewed through comparative and relational geographic lenses. It explores the legacies of colonial spatial violence, as well as current issues such as segregation in housing, homelessness, and police violence, while also addressing the fight for urban inclusion within African Diaspora communities. The course focuses on three key aims: 1) examining how both institutional policies and everyday actions contribute to creating anti-Black spaces in urban, rural, and suburban contexts; 2) explore theories of race and space; and c) bring attention to the ways in which Black gendered spatial practices resist and at times extend exclusionary, imperialist and colonial geographies that sustain anti-Blackness. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Wooten This course will examine the social construction of Black sexuality as it relates to geography in the U.S. context and beyond, with specific emphasis on the ways in which space and place shape understandings of Black identity, culture, homemaking, belonging, self-governance, politics, and resistance. Pointedly, we will ask: how and where does Black sexuality take place and shape; what geographies foster Black sexual identity development; and what happens to our understandings of geography when we put Black sexuality at the center of analysis? Students will develop a richer understanding of how racialized sexual deviance and difference are managed through spatial terms and practices as well as the ways that Black people have (re)claimed and reimagined space and place through the analytics of sex and sexuality. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Green This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the field of Black Women’s Biography. Over the course of the semester, we will grapple the nuances and challenges of how to write about Black women as thinkers, cultural workers, and mothers through biographies for both scholarly and general audiences. Readings, discussions, and assignments will consider the process, challenges, and major trends of how scholars attempted to explore the thoughts, experiences, and interior lives of a range of Black women across time, space, political ideologies, and conceptions of race. Satisfiest Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff This course considers the ways in which Black women have operationalized performance as a site for cultural criticism and social commentary. Centering the work of artists including Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham and others, students will investigate how the use of dance, music, song, costume and other performance elements are leveraged to both stabilize and interrupt audience assumptions about the possibilities of performance beyond entertainment or the stimulation of pleasure. The course will consider how notions of race, gender and sexuality are repeated as consistent performative acts and how these categories are crafted and expressed through the artistic choices of select Black women performers working across theatrical genres from the 1920s to the present. Counts as an elective in the Cultural Production & Expression category of the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region = North America). Counts as an elective for the Dance minor. Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Wooten In the months prior to the 2016 presidential election, race relations in the United States were propelled into the American public consciousness with great force, although race has continually exerted an omnipresent influence on contemporary politics. Beginning with Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, this course will survey how discourse on black femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and class has impacted American politics from 1991 to the present. Topics for consideration include welfare reform, reproductive justice, mass incarceration, backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency, and white nationalist support for Donald Trump. Readings will also consider how black activists, lawyers, journalists, and politicians have responded to and resisted racism and sexism in contemporary politics. Fulfills a Social Thought & Institutions requirement for the Africana Studies major (Geographic region: North America). Fulfills a requirement in the History and Geneaologies track of the Gender & Sexuality Studies major and minor. Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Villarroel Lamoza This course explores the continuities between ancient and contemporary art making traditions con-cerned with performance, ritual, sexuality, and identity in Africa. Through a broad spectrum of case studies, we will outline a historical overview of key art forms and styles starting circa 40,000 BCE- with the earliest known figurative painting found in what is now South Africa. In doing so, we will consider how far from mere representation, the arts of Africa play an active role in giving form and meaning to the world we inhabit. And in the wake of an ever-expanding environmental crisis, we will pay particular attention to the models the art of Africa can offer for us to engage with an environment that is not passive but animated and brimming with agencies. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Art major and minor requirement. Satisfies Visual and Performing Arts requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Castaneda This interdisciplinary course explores how gender and race are experienced, defined, challenged, and expressed through and in relation to food across the Americas. We will engage with literature from anthropology, feminist food studies, Black Studies and Latin American Studies and engage with topics such as: how appetites are marked by gender and race, how cooking has served as a medium of female oppression and empowerment, and how food has nurtured racial justice movements in ways that have been under-acknowledged. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Fache Africa Shoots Back examines West African cinema from its beginnings in the early 1960s to today. The selection of films exposes students to new voices, perspectives and representations of Francophone West Africa from a West African perspective. We will discuss issues of decolonization and post-colonial cultural economy, as well as analyze traditional African narrative strategies and new and unconventional images. Fulfills a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Africa). Fulfills a requirement in the Film & Media Studies interdisciplinary minor. Counts towards the French & Francophone Studies major and minor. Satisfies requirement in Visual and Performing Arts.
Instructor Wooten In this course, students will explore the root causes, historical context, and personal experiences of homelessness, as well as examine current programs and affordable housing initiatives designed to tackle these issues. Students will become familiarized with models of care (mental and physical) tailored to people experiencing homelessness. Further, the course while allow students to interact with organizations that assist vulnerable groups. Central to these discussions will be an analysis of how race shapes and informs who becomes homeless, how one experiences homelessness, how homelessness is framed in public health and political rhetoric, and how people from the Black Diaspora have theorized and conceptualized homelessness and its intervention differently from dominant discourse. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Harper-Shipman The course surveys reproductive health policies in the U.S. and from select African countries and their intersections with race and for-profit motives in health care. We examine various feminist movements for reproductive autonomy and how these movements overlap with women’s struggles for improved material conditions. Satisfies a major requirement for Africana Studies Satisfies a major and minor requirement for Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Public Health
AFR 271Disease and Desire in Black Visual Cultures
Instructor Villarroel Lamoza It is often taken for granted how the geographic distribution of suffering is mapped over the boundaries defined by gender, race, and class. Advancements in our understanding of the biological roots of disease have translated into a direct relationship between poor health and moral failures of individual nature. Yet, ailments affecting Black, Brown, female and/or gender-non-conforming bodies remain blatantly unacknowledged and under-researched. This class offers an introduction to the theory and method of visual culture to approach the vexed relationship between disease and desire. In doing so, we will explore understandings of health and healing that are deeply rooted beyond the body and in the social across the Black Atlantic. Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Africana Studies Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies the Visual and Performing Arts requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Gill-Sadler What is the culture of U.S. imperialism? How has U.S. empire utilized cultural production–literature, film, visual arts, music, etc.– to affirm and naturalize its global power? How have opponents of U.S. empire utilized cultural objects to contest U.S. imperialism? What do cultural studies methods that foreground empire look like? This course highlights empire, in its historical and contemporary iterations, as a central feature of American culture. More specifically, this course explores tropes of U.S. empire across a range of genres and surveys scholarly texts and methods that center empire in their close readings of cultural objects. In so doing, the course examines culture as a site of political struggle and demonstrates the value of cultural studies approaches to the study of empire. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
AFR 282African American Literature: 1955 and Beyond (=ENG 282)
Instructor Flanagan This course introduces students to some of the literature African Americans produced during the crucial years of the modern civil rights movement. Works by Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Wanda Coleman, Malcolm X, and others will be studied alongside major connecting moments in the struggle for civil liberties, and for their introduction of new literary modes into the American canon. Satisfies the Diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Counts as an elective in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
AFR 283Islands, Archipelagoes and Black Women’s Literature
Instructor Gill-Sadler This course analyzes the intersections of gender, geography, race, and literature through a study of Black women’s writing that emanates from and explores islands and archipelagoes. The course foregrounds Black women’s archipelagic literature to, at once, contest assumptions that Black women’s literature and islands are “too insular” to speak to global questions and explore the ways in which Black women’s archipelagic literature reimagines the world all together. Course themes include, but are not limited to, colonialism, necolonialism, revolution, diaspora and sexuality. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement for elective in “Cultural Production and Expression” and diversity requirement Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement in all three catagories. Satisfies Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
AFR 287African American Literature and the Archive (=ENG 287)
Instructor Gill-Sadler This course explores how a variety of archives, from an authors’ personal papers to institutional special collections, both inform and are represented in African American literature. What new literary forms and histories might be discovered through archival research? How might African American literary texts model more equitable and justice-oriented approaches to archives and the practice of archiving? The course will consider these questions through close readings of texts by writers like Gloria Naylor, Erna Brodber, John Keene, and Roger Reeves and through visits to Davidson Special collections and bookstores for rare, Black books. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies English major requirement. (Innovation) Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructors Staff In this hands-on methods course, students will build interdisciplinary research skills focused on the theory and practice of oral history. We will explore the theories, methods, and debates surrounding one of the oldest research tools: oral testimony. Students will learn to critically evaluate oral sources and use oral histories in conjunction with other forms of research. Students will engage with the practical aspects of oral history by completing and transcribing two oral history interviews. In addition, students will gain a sophisticated understanding of individual and collective memory and the questions that both raise for writing oral history. Each student will participate in a class oral history project. Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies Satisfies a major requirement in Sociology Satisfies a major requirement in Gender and Sexuality Studies Satisfies a major requirement in CIS Educational Studies Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies Satisfies the Historical Thought requirement
Instructor Bailey Students will be taught how to use journalistic skills and ethics to better harness the power empathy adds to storytelling on extremely sensitive subjects such as race, politics, gender, etc. as well as learn how to navigate the world of political punditry and the growing fake news phenomenon. The course will focus on how the media discourse marginalizes people of color, and African Americans in particular and how rhetorical shifts can lead to non-factual news reporting. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Satisfies a requirement in the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community Requirement.
Instructor Flanagan The Caribbean is key to any understanding of the New World. Caribbean Literature takes students beyond the islands’ popular music, food, and landscapes to an understanding of the formation of cultures from Europe, Africa, and India that have produced two Nobel Laureates. In novels such as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea , we see how love leads to the death of a young woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre . We’ll understand, too, why and how Aime Cesaire rewrites Shakespeare’s The Tempest to allow for the resurrection of the spirit of Caliban’s mother, Sycorax. Students do not need to know theory to take this course. Students may retake this course for credit when the topic/readings change with instructor’s permission. Satisfies the diversity requirement of the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: Latin America/Caribbean). Satisfies a requirement in the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
Instructor Bailey We know the names Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Tamir Rice. But we should also know the name Damon Kearns, a young black man born in Davidson who killed the only officer to die while on duty in the town - while being killed by the officer. This class will include an exhaustive look into the 20th anniversary of Kearns’ death as a way of exploring larger issues of race in American journalism. This loccal case study will help to illumine a myriad of lessons for young journalists and social justice warriors on the intersection of race, media, crime, and inequality in the 21st century, including many that are often misunderstood or overlooked. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Satisfies the Diversity requirement in the English major. Satisfies a requirement in the Communication Studies interdisciplinary major and minor. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff Black and mulata women have participated in constructing Cubanidad (Cuban nationalism) since the beginning of the Cuban republic in 1902. However, the largely male-dominated national narrative that has made Che Guevara’s “New Man” famous since 1959 frequently overshadows their interventions. Despite this public silence, Afro-Cubanas (Afro-Cuban women) have consistently challenged narratives of exclusion and contributed to antiracist and antisexist movements in Cuba. As theater critic, Inés María Martiatu Terry explained in 2011 one of the goals of the Afrocubanas movement is to “feminize negritude and to blacken feminism.” This course will analyze Afro-Cubana feminisms through a close reading of the work of four key black and mulata intellectuals and activists-Sara Gómez, Nancy Morejón, Daisy Rubiera, and Gloria Rolando. In doing so, it seeks to trace the legacy of the many black and mulata women who participated in revolutionary Cuba from the 1960s to the present. In particular, the course will examine how Afro-Cubanas have challenged negative stereotypes about black women, worked both inside and outside of Cuba’s state-sponsored women’s movement, and fought to create space for racial and sexual rights. All course readings will be in English and will include memoirs, films, and first-hand historical documents in additional to scholarly books and articles. Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies. Satisfies a major requirement in Latin American Studies.
Major Thinkers in Africana Studies courses expose students to classical and foundational figures whose works have helped to shape the disciplinary debates, theoretical contours, or methodological innovations of the field. These seminars are designed to engage larger conceptual issues in Africana Studies through the close study of the written corpus of a major thinker in the discipline. It is a topics course in intellectual history that enables students to gain competency in primary, secondary, biographical, theoretical, and/or literary works related to a single scholarly figure in Africana Studies. Courses will draw upon notable scholars in both the African and African Diaspora intellectual traditions.
AFR 301Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: Zora Neale Hurston
Instructor Bowles Through the lens of Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work as an anthropologist, this course examines the following: the politics of language and inequality, the perils and sanctity of segregation and the value of imagination in ethnographic writing. Works to be examined during the course are Hurston’s biography, excerpts from her autobiography, plays, short stories, critical essays and one of her many novels. Satisfies a major requirement in Africana Studies (Geographical Region: North America). Satisfies a major and minor requirement in Anthropology. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Instructor Green This course is designed to provide students with an in-depth study of major intellectual debates and movements that have shaped the politics, history and identities of women of African descent in the United States and the African diaspora. The course will combine methodologies and concepts from multiple disciplines including, history, political theory, literature, women’s studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy.\ Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.
Instructor Green Spring 2026 Topic: W.E.B. Du Bois This course will introduce students to the major works of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Readings will include (in chronological order): The Philadelphia Negro (1899); The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Dark Princess (1928); Black Reconstruction in America (1935); Color and Democracy (1945); and The World and Africa (1947) to name a few. They will be supplemented with secondary readings by: Booker T. Washington, Michael Rudolph West, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy, Adolph Reed, Lewis Gordon, Marina Bilbija, C. L. R. James and others. Satisfies a requirement in Africana Studies. Satisfies an interdisciplinary minor requirement in Global Literary Theory. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
AFR 305Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: “Engaging the Race Question”: Cedric Robinson & Sylvia Wynter
Instructor Staff This seminar is designed to explore the origins and transformations of the concepts of race and blackness on a global scale (beyond the U.S.) and across time (even before our modern era). More specifically, the course is designed to expose students to classical and foundational Africana Studies thinkers who offer us key historical, empirical, and theoretical frameworks to understand race and blackness in relation to other systems of domination and resistance. In particular, this seminar focuses on the works of Black Marxist historian Cedric J. Robinson and decolonial feminist scholar Sylvia Wynter. Additionally, we also discuss the production of organic and academic intellectuals who draw from these thinkers. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement Satisfies Justice Equality and Community requirement
Instructor Irele Frantz Fanon is considered one of the most influential postcolonial thinkers of the twentieth century. This course will serve as an introduction to the theorist, focusing on his Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. Employing primarily close reading, this course will engage students in examination of the evolution of Fanon’s ideologies and the connections between his work and relevant social movements. This is a seminar course and students will be required to participate actively in discussion. Students may read the texts in French or English. Satisfies requirement in Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric
Instructor Vanessa Castaneda This course intends to expose students to classical and foundational figures whose work have helped shape the disciplinary debates, theoretical contours, or methodological innovations of the field. By studying the life and work of Beatriz Nascimento, as both an activist and intellectual, this course will offer us key frameworks and concepts related to the Black Atlantic, Black Feminism, and Black liberation, particularly from a transnational and hemispheric perspective. This course will engage with the author’s translated work (from Portuguese to English), as well as the work of scholars and activists influenced by the theoretical contributions of Nascimento. Satisfies Latin American Studies Major and Minor elective requirement. Satisfies Africana Studies Major and Minor requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Gill-Sadler Course Description: A self- proclaimed Pan-Africanist-socialist-feminist, cultural worker, Toni Cade Bambara has left an indelible impact on African American literature and Black feminist literary criticism. This course explores her artistic expression and political postures across various forms and genres including, but not limited to, novels, essays, short stories, and film. Through an examination of Bambara’s oeuvre, the course explores the various shifts in Black feminist thought, Black politics, and Black cultural production in the late twentieth century. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major requirement.
AFR 309Consuming Culture: Food & Identity Across the Afro-Americas (=LAS 309)
Instructor Castaneda This interdisciplinary course intends to examine an array of socio-cultural questions about Afro-Latin America and the role that food has had in constructing and imagining Afro-Latin American communities and subjectivities. By placing Afro-Latin America at the center as subjects and knowledge producers, this course commits to an intentional practice of learning from and of the Global South and decentering the United States, and the west more broadly, within the arena of political, intellectual, and cultural production. Beginning with Brazil, the country that has the largest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa and once heralded internationally as a “racial democracy,” we will examine the ways that food has served to both reinforce and disrupt socio-cultural assumptions and stereotypes related to race, gender, and class. We will examine food’s relationship to questions of gender norms, sexuality and labor and place these conceptualizations in dialogue with other countries and Afro-descendent populations across the Americas. We will end the course placing Afro-Latin America in dialogue with the Afro-Latinx diaspora and African Americans. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement Satisfies Latin American Studies major and minor requirement Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement
AFR 310The Afterlife of School Segregation (= EDU 310)
Instructor Staff This course is about the everyday ways Black students and educators suffer in schools. Despite the end of legal segregation of schooling in the United States, Black students and educators remain racialized, dehumanized, criminalized and hypersexualized in educational spaces from hallways to classrooms to communities. But there’s more to the story: Black students and educators also resist, refuse, and reimagine the routine and enduring practices of schooling that cause Black suffering, melancholy and indignities in schooling. While we will explore an Afropessimist view of schooling, we will also examine black educational fugitive spaces as spaces of radical possibility. The course is designed as a reading seminar that prepares students to create a critical intervention that grows out of complicated conversations, personal experiences and alternative research methodologies in educational spaces Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement Satisfies Educational Studies minor requirement Meets the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Meets the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
AFR 321Special Topics: Black Lives and Black Protests in the Americas and the Caribbean
Instructor Staff In all societies, present and historical, people have joined together to press for or against social change. In this course, we are most interested in the struggles of people who imagined and sometimes- even if only briefly- lived in ways other than those imposed violently by the “over-represented (Western bourgeois) ethnoclass human figure of Man.” We focus on the rebellions of the survivors of the Middle Passage who challenged “the inequality of the races” to re-define blackness and to “counteract the imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths.” We pay special attention to these visionary thinkers and doers who made claims on how to organize human (and non-human) life on the planet, thereby re-shaping modernity or rather giving shape to alternative modernities (and in this case, black modernities). Studying black social movements in various historical and national contexts then allows us to ultimately reflect on more general questions about the nature of political power, conflict, and legitimacy, as well as the relationship between human agency, social structure, historical change, and identity formation and politics in the modern world. In this course, we begin with the perspective that culture is politics and politics is culture. We depart from the theoretical frameworks that view rebellions as irrational outbursts or as strategic and rational dissent to an approach that views organized and seemingly un-organized movements of people as struggles over meaning and value. This perspective challenges traditional Marxist critiques that so-called “new” social movements are products of postmodern concerns and angsts. As such, we recognize that identity politics are underpinned by demands not only for recognition but also for the redistribution of resources and material goods. Consequently, the control and use of land and water (and air) is fundamental to these claims since we build our homes, grow our food, define our subjectivities and ways of being on land, which is surrounded by the water that nourishes our seeds, replenishes our bodies, and with which we honor our ancestors. During the semester, we will address the following questions: What constitutes a social movement? Why, where, and when do social movements emerge? What social or individual factors explain their development and decline? Who joins social movements? Who does not? Why? What ideas or ideals animate those who do participate? What is it like to be part of a social movement? How are social movements organized? What sorts of strategies do social movements construct and what are common goals that many movements share? What are the tactical repertoires utilized by social movements today? How do external forces such as the state, media, counter-movements, supranational institutions, and transnational corporations shape movements? What effect do they or have they had on identity, politics, power and efforts at social change? What effect do they or have they had on the organization of human life on this planet? This course explores the theoretical explanations for movement processes and grounds them in specific ethnographic examples of Black Atlantic social movements but also in other materials such as speeches, position papers, blogs, etc. While it attempts to transnationalize and historicize our conceptualizations of Black Atlantic rebellions, this course is nevertheless limited to works produced by Anglophone and English-speaking authors. As such, throughout the semester, I invite you to share readings with the class (as will I) by different thinkers and doers speaking or writing in the different languages and registers of the African Diaspora. Satisfies a requirement for the Africana Studies major Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Garcia-Rojas This course introduces students to the critical role Black feminists have played in helping to shape and challenge the field of surveillance studies. In taking up questions that examine how issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class collide with state power–i.e., questions that have been largely left unexamined in surveillance studies–Black feminist artists, activists, and scholars are providing new and exciting directions for understanding surveillance as a mechanism of carceral logics, disciplinary power, and policing. They have enacted interventions that expose how surveillance technologies and practices are tied to systemic and interlocking forms of oppression, as well as how surveillance can be used in the service of resistance, self-defense, and freedom. An array of multidisciplinary sources will be explored such as film, literature, theories, and visual art. We’ll read Black feminist scholars such as, Simone Browne, bell hooks, Harriet Jacobs, June Jordan, Gloria Naylor, Patricia Hill Collins, Fannie Lou Hamer, Octavia Butler, and more. Satisfies Africana Studies major requirement. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement
Instructor Harper-Shipman The purpose of this course is to continue a discussion on the debates, structures, and agents that inform international development in Africa but through the varied perspectives and experiences of African women. Their perspectives offer critical interventions into development discourses and practices traditionally viewed through masculine and Western lenses. In studying development from the African woman’s perspective, one is better able to engage both the successes and failures of this formal process we call “development” in Africa. By examining African women and their relationship to this process, we will also see the alternative frames of feminisms and knowledges that emerge from these realities. The core questions driving this course are: (i) what are the various development ideologies and processes that have shaped contemporary Africa? (ii) How have African women adopted, rejected, and/or creolized these ideologies and processes for the purposes of changing their cultural, political, and economic conditions? The course readings come predominantly from African women, although there are texts from non-African women and men that generally serve to highlight the larger discourses taking place around a particular topic. Satisfies Africana Studies major Social Thought and Institutions track requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major requirement. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies the Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Harper-Shipman In this course, we examine African feminisms as both a theoretical account and an activist praxis that considers how gendered differences are grounded in the complex realities of African women’s everyday experiences. Through explorations of how African women have used their diverse experiences to produce knowledge and challenge oppressive systems both in African and the world, writ-large, this course focuses on anti-colonial discourse, development, grassroots activism, and intellectual scholarship that advocates for gender equity and the liberation and autonomy of African people. Some of the core questions that guide this class are: what are African feminisms? What conditions created the need for different types of gendered responses from African women? How are the varied feminisms across Africa uniquely different from one another and from feminisms elaborated based on Western women? Through readings that centralize the scholarship of African feminists, we explore topics such as race, gender, and sexuality, class politics, the tensions of rural-urban/ traditional-modern dichotomies in Africa, transnational feminisms, reproductive justice, sexual violence, homophobia, heteronormativity, and the historicity and cultural specificity of the subordinations that African women adopt, negotiate, and/or resist. We will examine these concerns through a critical reading of a wide range of texts-from memoir, policy case studies, ethnography, novels, essays, and cultural criticism and sociopolitical analyses. Satisfies Africana Sttudies major Social Thought and Institutions track requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Theory requirement, or elective requirement of Sociology major. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality and Community requirement.
Instructor Harper-Shipman This course surveys the political ideologies and economic policies of foundational and influential leaders in the Caribbean and Africa. Breaking the regions into four historical moments (late-colonial, post-colonial; Structural adjustments, Post-Neoliberal moment), we examine policies from key political leaders in Africa and the Caribbean that supported, challenged, and/or initiated changes in the global structures of powers. Satisfies Africana Studies major Historical and Geographical Investigations track requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Castaneda What is joy? What are the possibilities of collective joy? How does joy inform ideology and political actions, including protest and resistance? This course will engage with concepts like “Black joy,” “decolonial joy,” and “joyful militancy” in order to rethink the depth and power of joy, particularly amongst Black and other racialized and marginalized communities. We will engage with recent interdisciplinary scholarship in order to invite us to think of new epistemological and political stances shaped by and through joy. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Latin American Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement
Instructor Dennie Since their earliest arrivals in the New World, African Americans crafted liberatory ideas as they articulated a desire for equality, justice, and self-determination. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, black intellectual thought took shape against the backdrop of processes of enslavement, emancipation, racial violence, and state-sanctioned oppression. Indeed, the discursive spaces that black political thinkers created became major sites of knowledge production and provided momentum for black mobilization. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829), this course will probe landmark texts by and about African American thinkers including Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm X., and Angela Davis. Students will evaluate historical perspectives on topics including racial uplift, feminism, black nationalism, and Pan-Africanism. They will also identify major debates that shaped the development of African American intellectual history. Satisfies Africana Studies major Historical and Geogrpahic Investigations track requirement.
Instructor Wooten This course will familiarize students with key texts and debates within the field of Black Queer Studies from various theoretical, literary, historical, and multi-media perspectives. As a driving question, this course asks: What is the relationship between Blackness and queerness? How have Black people theorized the two? Where do Black queer theories happen, and who gets recognized as producing them? How do we recover Black queer history? Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Social and Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Green The course explores education for African Americans in early American society to the emergence of the separate school system of the 19th and 20th centuries to current debates. Over the semester, emphasis will be placed on education for southern African Americans under slavery, emergence of the separate school system of the 19th and 20th centuries, and post- Brown vs. Board of Education decision across the region. We will pay particular attention to both historical and contemporary developments at Davidson College and the state of North Carolina. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Educational Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies History major requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
AFR 354Gender, Power, Spirituality in African Aesthetics
Instructor Villarroel Lamoza Does the gender binary (policed as if it were a biological bedrock) hold globally? This course explores how dynamic African imageries disrupt binary distinctions between feminine and masculine. In the arts and visual cultures of Africa and its diasporas, the feminine is often core to the expression and performance of political and spiritual power. Beginning in the sixteenth century, we will examine a wide range of case studies (including the Oyo, Benin, and Luba empires) and how they inform contemporary art practices across the Atlantic. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Gender and Sexuality Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Castaneda What is joy? What are the possibilities of collective joy? How does joy inform ideology and political actions, including protest and resistance? This course will engage with concepts like “Black joy,” “decolonial joy,” and “joyful militancy” in order to rethink the depth and power of joy, particularly amongst Black and other racialized and marginalized communities. We will engage with recent interdisciplinary scholarship in order to invite us to think of new epistemological and political stances shaped by and through joy. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Latin American Studies major requirement. Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement.
Instructor Staff This course introduces students to the development of critical race theory as a specific theoretical framework to explain or to investigate how race and racism are organized and operate within the United States. The course will have a sociological focus with emphasis on critical race scholarship that includes, but is not limited to, an analysis of double consciousness, colorblindness, intersectionality, whiteness as property, racial microaggressions, and structures of power. Students will also explore central tenets and key writings advanced in the 1990s primarily by African American, Latino/a, and Asian American scholars in law, education, and public policy. The course is both reading intensive and extensive with a major writing assignment that addresses a theoretical problem that grows out of the course topics and discussions. Satisfies a requirement in the Africana Studies major (Geographic Region: North America). Satisfies a minor requirement in Educational Studies. Satisfies the Social-Scientific Thought requirement.
Instructor Harper-Shipman This course explores the history and debates surrounding anarchist movements. We will chart anarchists movements in response to different forms of governance and different forms of capitalism. The course will interrogate anarchy in the form of mutual aid, maroon societies, squatters movements, reproductive autonomy, and other social arrangements that link the problems of the modern world to racial difference, sexual difference, and/or class difference produced through the state. Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement. Satisfies Social-Scientific Thought requirement. Satisfies Justice, Equality, and Community requirement.
Instructor Staff (Cross-listed with ENG 483) This course will bring together readings both literary and critical/theoretical, beginning with Frantz Fanon’s seminal Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Taking Fanon as its point of departure, then, this course will necessarily turn to a discussion of the recent discourse on Afro-pessimism and black optimism, attempting to introduce students to important issues and questions of race, race relations, anti-black racism, black sociality, the universality of whiteness, the fungibility of the black body, and of the vulnerability and precarity of black life; and together we will think more closely about how the complex and “unthinkable” histories of slavery, colonialism, and the Middle Passage, for examples, continue to challenge the representational limits and potentialities of traditional literary genres and modes of emplotment. In addition to Fanon, authors will include Orlando Patterson, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten. Counts as a humanities elective for the Africana Studies major. Counts as a senior seminar and fulfills the diversity requirement for the English major. Counts as a literature elective for the Global Literary Theory interdisciplinary minor. Satisfies the cultural diversity requirement.
