147 courses with the subject AAAD, 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.
Introduction to the study of the African continent, its peoples, history, and contemporary problems of development in a globalized world, including a survey of the African past, society and culture, and contemporary political, economic, and social issues.
This course explores the precolonial, colonial, and the contemporary media in Africa. It focuses on the different types of media, its impact on socioeconomic and political development, and the growth and development of internet in the region. It introduces students to the inventors, copyright regulations, African governments' media regulation statutes, and careers in the media industry in the continent.
This course explores various cuisines in the West African subregion. Focus on Nigeria, as well as accommodations in West African countries of interest, will be explored. Foods have different health benefits. Foods also have cultural significance. It is interesting to note, for instance, that the Yoruba people of West Africa have the highest rate of twins in the world. It is assumed that a particular food eaten contributes largely to this phenomenon. Students will have the opportunity to try out and prepare some of their favorite cuisines.
The course tracks the contours of history, life, societies, and cultures of the Atlantic African diaspora from their origins through Emancipation in the United States, the Caribbean, and South America.
This is a historical exploration of the manufacture and marketing of Black music, from the first phonograph recording by an African American in 1890, to today's Spotify hits.
A survey of the historical development of the black church in America, beginning during the antebellum period and continuing to the present day.
This course considers the quest for freedom,along that "stony road" that the poet James Weldon Johnson tells us about, largely through primary sources, most of them either post-1865 or viewed through a post-1865 lens. Values are central to this discussion. What values are set forth by notable documents authored by African Americans, as well as in such documents as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? To what extent has there been a gap between theory in freedom and practice. How much have post-1865 constitutional amendments and court interpretations narrowed that gap?
West and West Central Africans in the Americas created and recreated preferred dishes from their homelands generating unique material culture and historic, multicultural food and visual aesthetics. This course chronicles and explores the preparation, presentation, and patterns of collective consumption associated with food crops, cooking methods, and shared aesthetics. Students will analyze horticultural practices associated with tropical and temperate crop zones, in addition to food preparation and consumption in homes, restaurants, churches, and temples, across the African diaspora giving special attention to U.S. South, Brazil, and the Circum-Caribbean region.
A critical introduction to the study of development, sustainability and rights as interlinked approaches to understanding contemporary challenges in Africa and the African diaspora. Development is a concept with multiple meanings and contextual incarnations. The course emphasizes thinking of development as a field of expertise and intervention and as a modality of change, that goes beyond economistic understandings of development as simply economic growth. Previously offered as AAAD 391.
Introduces students to research methods and practices in African, African American, and diaspora studies. Course content varies by semester and instructor's interest. Course is open to all undergraduates; there are no prerequisites and no prior knowledge of African, African American, and diaspora studies is necessary. Undergraduates who have no experience in college-level research are especially welcome, and this course fulfills the Research & Discovery requirement.
Subject matter will vary by instructor.
Introduction to the study of gender and sexuality in African societies. Theoretical questions relating to the cross-cultural study of gender will be a primary focus. Topics include historical perspectives on the study of kinship and family in Africa and the impact of colonialism and other forms of social change.
An introduction to African literature, with an emphasis on works by writers from the late colonial period to the present, and including a survey of different genres.
AAAD 202 explores African society and culture as portrayed in cinema. The course approaches film as a critical medium of studying social, cultural, and political practices, as well as a vehicle of knowledge and history in Africa. First, the course surveys how colonial cinema represented Africa and African subjects. Then, it expands on how African filmmakers tapped into indigenous traditions and media to author agentive narratives in context of postcolonialism, migration, and globalization.
What is wisdom? What makes a good society? How can we live well in specific social contexts? How are individuals related to their communities? How are the dead related to the living? In this course, we will engage the answers that African thinkers provide to such questions with attention to specific historical, social, political, and spiritual contexts. This is a discussion-based course which relies on active participation through debate, small group discusssions, writing, and creative activities. We will pursue a humanities approach: we come to class not mainly to master ideas but to learn and practice how to live well.
Introduction to the plastic arts of sub-Saharan Africa through study of their relationship to the human values, institutions, and modes of aesthetic expression of select traditional and modern African societies.
This course provides a critical examination of the historical and theoretical bases for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing African states and societies in the current global system, which is dominated by neoliberal globalization.
How do we imagine and practice good living in social contexts? And how do we recognize when we fail to attain such good living? In this course, we engage African proposals for utopias and dystopias within difficult political conditions. We will analyze various media (academic texts, novels, films, songs) to understand how various African thinkers and artists have imagined and enacted optimistic or pessimistic futures for the continent. Through classrooms activities and assignments, students will appreciate what it takes to experience, analyze and design society within specific local and global parameters.
This course examines the ways by which anthropologists have used ethnographic texts to describe and frame African societies. Among the topics explored through a close textual reading of both classical and contemporary ethnographic texts are systems of thought, politics, economics, social organization and the politics of representation.
This course centers on the role of media in democratic governance in Africa. In particular, the course introduces to students political and normative theoretical bases for understanding the responsibility of the press in various forms of democracy, freedom of expression, and news influence on politics. Students will also explore and criticize the electoral processes and dynamics in electoral campaigns. The legal pressure on media during the elections and other times when African governments face scrutiny
This course examines the broad contours of African American history and culture in what would become the United States. Lectures and discussion include the development of preceding African states and societies, the origins of slavery, the middle passage, the domestic slave trade, the Black family under slavery, the Black church, Black abolitionists, and the antebellum free Black community to the Civil War and Emancipation.
Special emphasis on postemancipation developments.
An examination of the individual and collective experiences of black women in America from slavery to the present and the evolution of feminist consciousness.
An introduction to African American art and artists and their social contexts from early slavery.
This course is an introductory and chronological study of the African American literary canon. It examines various African American literary genres, including slave narratives, poetry, and the novel.
Since the 1920s environmental, health, industrial and other disasters have shaped southern African American culture, communities, and politics. The mass dislocation and despair brought by disasters and the manners in which African Americans resisted and struggled to overcome them have significantly changed the country's geographic, cultural, and political landscape. This course examines such epic disasters as floods, hurricanes, disease, and work-related tragedies and their long-term consequences and meanings.
A survey of African American political development from emancipation to the present. The course examines the dynamics of minority group politics with African Americans as the primary unit of analysis. Students consider African American politics in domestic and global contexts and issues of local, regional, national, and international relevance.
This course will analyze the role of the African American in motion pictures, explore the development of stereotypical portrayals, and investigate the efforts of African American actors and actresses to overcome these portrayals.
African Americans in the West is a survey course that examines the origins, migration, and development of African descended peoples in the United States west of the Mississippi River.
This course is an overview of the black experience in North Carolina with special emphasis on Chapel Hill and Wilmington.
This course traces the evolution of black nationalism, both as an idea and a movement, from the era of the American Revolution to its current Afrocentric expressions.
An examination of the struggle by black Americans for social justice since World War II and of the systemic responses.
This course examines the influence of African American expressive culture, particularly popular music, on American mainstream culture.
The majority of people of African descent in this hemisphere live in Latin America. This course will explore how blackness is understood and reproduced in Latin America, as well as Black history, cultures, experiences, and social movements in the region.
This class will guide students to explore how body techniques produce social meaning, have political effects, and travel over time and space. The course material is grounded in the dance repertoires transmitted by enslaved Africans and their descendants in Cuba. Concepts are conveyed through readings and movement practice.
This course will look at the experiences of black Caribbean immigrants in the United States and the activities in which they participate, as well as their shifting senses of their identities.
Scholars of Afropessimism argue that we are not living in the age of post-slavery, but in the "afterlife of slavery" and that Blacks exist outside of the world, because the social world is held together by anti-Blackness. This argumentation has had important effects within Black German and Black European Studies. This course seeks to explore these philosophical claims, by comparing American films with European films that deal with anti-Black racism. Readings and class discussions in English.
An interdisciplinary survey of African-descendant communities and the development and expression of African/black identities in the context of competing definitions of diaspora.
Explores the experiences of Africans in European colonies in locations such as colonial Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean, and mainland North America. Lecture and discussion format. The major themes of inquiry include labor, law, gender, culture, and resistance, exploring differing experiences based on gender, location, and religion.
Examines historical and contemporary processes shaping health and well-being in Africa Diaspora communities. Emphasis will be placed on health and health equity within African-descendant communities in the United States, Haiti, and Brazil.
Through an interdisciplinary analysis of key aspects of black popular cultures in their global diversity, this course tackles fundamental questions about the meanings of black identity, identification, and belonging.
Subject matter will vary by instructor. Course description available from department office.
This course engages live performance and orature as genres of knowledge production and cultural self-determination on the African continent. In group dialogues, presentations, and team projects, we will explore audience-responsive, live literary and storytelling arts as a vital mode of sociopolitical reflection, deliberation, and imagination in historical and contemporary regional contexts. Students will build on research-based, faculty-directed, in-class projects to present a live, public performance for the African Studies Center's annual conference, and collaboratively contribute materials for NC K-16 classroom curricula. All are welcome: prior arts experience helpful but not required.
Students work internships and develop, in conjunction with a faculty supervisor, an academic project relating to their internship experience. Permission of the director of undergraduate studies required.
This course looks at blacks in the British world to 1833, with particular attention on the 13 colonies and the lands that would eventually form the Dominion of Canada.
Subject matter will vary by instructor.
This course explores contemporary economic, political, and social factors influencing the health and welfare of African peoples. Emphasis is placed on understanding the cultural perspectives that shape non-Western experiences of health, disease, and notions of spiritual and physical well-being. Readings draw from the fields of anthropology, history, and public health.
The course examines the contemporary relationship between China and Africa. This includes China and Africa's history; China's economic, trade, strategic, and foreign policy towards Africa; as well as the relationship between China and the Africans who live and work there.
The first half of this course introduces students to the broad themes of West African history. The second half builds on this historical background by exploring case studies on a range of issues. Among the topics addressed in the case studies are Islam, gender, health, political violence, and globalization.
By examining the social history and meaning of various cultural practices, literature, art, and popular music among Muslim Africans, this course introduces students to how Islam has influenced contemporary African identity and to the practices that came to be associated with Africa as a land of Islam.
Examines the 21st-century global competition for African resources and compares it to the 19th-century "scramble for Africa." Major actors include the European Union, the United States, and China.
This course introduces students to the phenomenon of religious-based terrorism in Africa today, its causes, dynamics, and what the states affected, regional organizations, and the international community are doing to eradicate it.
This course surveys contemporary forms of political conflict and protest in Africa. The nature, causes, and consequences of these conflicts will be examined.
This is a discussion-based seminar that examines the emergence and evolution of the concept of sustainable development, including processes enacted by the United Nations' members states, such their 2015 adoption of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals. Further, it explores dynamics of sustainable development with a focus on selected cases studies drawn from various parts of the Africa continent.
This course considers a variety of African artists and art scenes in their political, economic, and cultural contexts. Likely topics include artists under Apartheid, the global trade in traditional wood carvings, and Africa's place in the global contemporary art circuit.
An introduction to African music new and old, focusing on the continent's distinctive techniques and concepts, and on its musical interactions with the rest of the world. The politics of music making in various historical settings will be explored. Prior musical experience is helpful, but not required.
This course explores African cultures and societies through the lens of cultural hybridity, with particular emphasis on the Swahili coast, one of the most enduring examples of a long-standing African hybrid cultural world. Students examine how African coastal communities interacted with diverse peoples across the Indian Ocean, resulting in dynamic blends of African, Arab, European, Persian, and Asian influences. These interactions shaped distinct cultural forms expressed through language, architecture, literature, food, social organization, dress, and artistic practices. While the Swahili are the anchor case study, the course also surveys hybrid cultural formations from North, West, and Sahelian Africa.
Focus on the historical development of African American art from the Harlem Renaissance of early 20th century through the Black Arts Movement and Feminist Art Movement 1960s and early 1970s.
The course provides an examination of the ways that the past plays out in the present. Specifically this course examines memorials, monuments, and museums that remember and reinvent slavery and race in the United States and throughout the rest of the Diaspora.
Exploration of the relationship between race and public policy in the U.S. Primary focus on African Americans, but other racial groups also studied. Key areas include reproductive justice, health care, employment, labor, welfare, education, housing, environmental justice, policing, criminalization, foreign policy, immigration, and war.
Taking an issue of current or historic importance to African American communities, students conduct archival research and collect and/or analyze oral histories and work to create a documentary play that will be publicly performed.
This course treats the structural properties of African American English. Students will learn to use sentence data to test hypotheses about language structure by investigating the phonology, syntax and semantics of African American English.
Examines the socio-political dimensions of African diaspora art and culture with a focus on African Americans in the 20th century.
This course explores the intersection of law and societal developments drawing from the disciplines of history, political science, anthropology, feminist legal studies, and constitutional law. The themes of the course will vary depending on the training, research interests, and geographical concentration of the faculty teaching the course.
This course investigates the history and legacy, as well as contemporary trends and ideas of African American drama through the study of its literary texts, performance styles, and cultural history. We will explore how the African American's dramatists voice is shaping cultural landscapes and ongoing conversations.
An exploration of outstanding themes of the Harlem Renaissance's poetry, fiction, painting and visual art, and political journalism. The course includes excursions to museums and libraries. Previously offered as AAAD 450.
Examines the origins of race in America, the relationship of racial oppression to class struggle at key points in American history, the proliferation of versions of the concept of privilege, and approaches to eliminating inequality. Previously offered as AAAD 491.
The course will explore the gap between public policy and the lived experiences of and reactions from constituents. Students will explore this gap by studying the development of twentieth-century public policy, examining the differing outcomes across groups, and the contemporary impact on housing, voting, education, and policing.
Examines the emergence and impact of hip-hop music and culture and its broad influence in mainstream culture, as a global phenomenon and as a vehicle embodying formative ideas of its constituent communities.
This course surveys Black women's experiences living with and confronting state oppression in Latin America and the Caribbean. Black women experience similar patterns of political, social, and economic inequality in the region. Transnationally, racism, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, and classism affect the quality of life of Black women, particularly within nation-states with legacies of slavery and colonialism. This course takes a historical, social, and theoretical look at the roots of this inequality.
How do struggles by Afro-Latin American populations expand our understanding of liberation? This course addresses this question from various disciplinary perspectives. This interdisciplinary course focuses on tactics and strategies ranging from the anthropology of everyday forms of resistance and infra-politics, Black feminists' understandings of how the personal becomes political, historical rebellions and guerrilla warfare, the sociologies of social movements, to the more ''unnoticed'' place-based resistance through the lenses of Black geographies and the creation of Black senses of place in Latin America.
The course provides an examination of the ways that the past plays out in the present. Specifically this course examines memorials, monuments, and museums that remember and reinvent slavery and race in the United States and throughout the rest of the Diaspora. This course has a public history focus and it stresses communication almost every time it meets.
Students will examine the way that the process of emancipation unfolded in Haiti, Antiqua, and Cuba, with major emphasis on emancipation in the United States.
Examines participatory development theory and practice in Africa and the United States in the context of other intervention strategies and with special attention to culture and gender.
This course explores the history and contemporary politics of HIV/AIDS in African communities and across the Diaspora. The differing trajectories of the epidemic on the continent, in the West, and in the Caribbean and Latin America will be explored.
This class places transnational Black feminist thought in conversation with Black speculative fiction from across the diaspora, particularly emphasizing sci-fi and fantasy narratives set in dystopic or post-apocalyptic worlds. By reading these two traditions of writing together, we study how both genres theorize the potential sources of, responses to, and preventative measures against forms of political, social, and environmental catastrophe.
This course will examine literature, film, art, and music from the Caribbean that illustrates and critiques the past and present impacts of colonial rule in the region. What role has anticolonial Caribbean literature and art played in shaping the region's present and future, and in shaping global anticolonial politics?
This course examines struggles to shape urban space and create rights to access public space as major issues in both American cities and cities in the Global South, with a particular focus on cities in Africa and cities with African diasporic populations. We analyze rights to access the spaces of the city and how they have been intricately tied to specifically located struggles, trajectories of development, and socio-spatial relations. Overall, we consider struggles to remain in the city across contexts and focus on the centrality of the local politics of place.
This course examines the lives of people of African descent living in the U.S. and throughout the Atlantic world through the lens of biography, autobiography, micro-history, and memoir.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Subject matter will vary with each instructor. Each course will concern itself with a study in depth of some problem in African, African American, or diaspora studies.
Permission of the director of undergraduate studies. Independent study projects defined by student and faculty advisor. Majors only.
This upper level seminar examines contemporary African politics with a focus on political trends in the post-1990s period.
This course provides an understanding of how poverty is defined, the consequences of poverty, and policies to reduce poverty. It explores the determinants of human development outcomes from an interdisciplinary perspective (with a heavy economics focus).
This course explores forms of filmic and photographic representation of and by Africans. An introduction to key concepts in social theory and their application to the field of media studies and ethnography is a primary focus.
This course explores major conceptual debates in the field of human rights. Further, it examines human rights practices and struggles in selected countries in Africa.
An exploration of musical articulations of African diasporic identity focusing on aesthetics, social fields of production, and the historical development of the diaspora concept around music.
Examines modern and contemporary African art (1940s to the present) for Africans on the continent and abroad. Examines tradition, cultural heritage, colonialism, postcolonialism, local versus global, nationalism, gender, identity, diaspora.
This upper-level seminar focuses on debates in international development studies exploring theories and policies of development, particularly those pertaining to gender, sexuality, masculinities, and women's political agency in contemporary Africa.
This course provides an overview of Senegalese society and culture through film, literary works, and scholarly books and articles. The course examines the geography, population, religious beliefs, visual culture, popular music, and gender discourses in Senegalese contexts.
This course will equip students to critically analyze key issues in African and African diaspora socio-cultural and political thought through readings, lectures, film and assigned research.
This course is an introduction to the languages of Africa. No linguistics background is required. Topics include classification, characteristic linguistic features of African languages, and their role in their respective societies.
An examination of major intellectual trends in African American life from the 19th to the early 21st century.
This study abroad course introduces students to the art and culture of the East African region, where the Swahili language is spoken most. It applies cultural skills studies and language theories to gain intercultural and interpersonal understanding and increase awareness of African critical issues, including politics, culture, socioeconomic, and education in a multi-ethnic society by engaging with the Pwani University students, the hosting Campus and its environs.
This course will provide students the opportunity to compare and contrast how race, especially Blackness, and ethnicity are constructed across the globe as well as how race, politics, and policy interact in various countries. We will examine the phenomena of race and ethnicity in the political development of several countries including the U.S., South Africa, France, Australia, Brazil, and several others.
This course interrogates the diverse representations that black women personified on screen, investigates intersections between their off-screen lives and on-screen images, and explores what and how they contributed to the cinema industry. This course is a theoretical, critical, and historical examination of the black woman's cinematic experience.
Examines the divide between literacy- and orality-based modes of self-expression and cultural production, and the effects of this fault line on the African American struggle for inclusion and self-definition in the United States.
Examines race, culture, and politics in Brazil from historical and contemporary perspectives. Focuses on dynamics of race, gender, class, and nation in shaping Brazilian social relations.
The course is designed to give students a simulated experience of ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative research. Students are led through a learning experience where they will examine black activism in Cuba from historical and contemporary perspectives.
This course examines constructions of race and gender in a comparative framework from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Students will explore how people across the Atlantic understood visual differences and human diversity in emerging concepts of race. Students will also focus on how inhabitants of Africa, Europe, North America, and South America constructed the category of "woman" and "man" and the constraints and liberties these constructions imposed.
Explores performance traditions in African American music, tracing development from African song through reels, blues, gospel, and contemporary vernacular expression. Focuses on continuity, creativity, and change within African American aesthetics. Previously offered as FOLK 610/AAAD 432.
This course uses social science approaches to explore the development of black feminist thought and activism in diverse cultural and national contexts. Students will gain knowledge of black feminist thought writing and activism in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.
Examines the ways African art appears in United States popular culture (advertisements, magazines, toys, films, art) to generate meanings about Africa. Addresses intersecting issues of nationalism, multiculturalism, imperialism, nostalgia, and race. Restricted to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
In this seminar students will examine primary documents of engaged scholarship written by Africans and people of African descent in the Americas, Europe, and elsewhere in the African Diaspora.
This course examines how questions of democracy and human rights have been conceptualized in African Diaspora communities in the Americas and Europe.
This course is designed to give students a broad-ranging, interpretative perspective on-and analytical tools for studying-the migration and settlement of African peoples in various parts of the world, largely over the past several centuries. Based on selected secondary readings, students will study and compare the ways in which people of African descent have created political, cultural, and territorial communities in Africa and beyond the continent, especially in the slave and post-emancipation societies of the Americas.
This course introduces concepts and themes on the development of urbanism in the "Global South". Students engage with current debates over urbanism in the Global South, including looking at urban inequalities in contemporary cities. Through the course, students will be able to compare and critically analyze formations of contemporary urbanism in selected cities in the Global South from a comparative perspective.
Blackness and whiteness as racial categories have existed in the United States from the earliest colonial times, but their meanings have shifted and continue to shift. Over the semester we will attempt to define and redefine blackness in the United States.
The contemporary arts of Africa are framed by urbanization and global mobility. This course examines how artists examine, reflect on, and express visually experiences of these conditions.
This course is designed to investigate how race has been represented in cinema historically with an emphasis on representations of race when blackness is masqueraded.
This seminar focuses on artists from around the world who have taken an experimental approach to music-making and performance, inspired by black politics, culture, and history. Considers the special challenges blacks have faced in the field of "modernism." Students may opt to do creative artistic projects in lieu of a final research paper.
This discussion-oriented seminar will use the works of African authors and filmmakers to explore how this dimension of the African experience has in part shaped the everyday lives of the peoples of the African continent.
This seminar explores the role of youth in processes of social change on the African continent historically and in the contemporary era. It begins with an exploration of youth's experiences and involvement in liberation struggles against colonial rule. With a focus on the post-1980s period, it examines youth mobilization for democratization, human rights, and horizontal accountability by state actors, and the role of African Union in promoting youth citizenship.
This course examines constructions of gender and individual and collective responses to developing systems of inequality in the Atlantic World shaped by sex, race, and class. Students analyze and compare how African, European, and American societies constructed the category of "woman" and the constraints and liberties these constructions imposed. Course readings survey societies from the early modern period to the twentieth century focusing on power, kinship, labor, and sexuality in daily life. Students will engage travel writing, visual art, and historic Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions as critical source materials for the course.
What does it mean to be both racially Black and ethnically Latino in the U.S.? This discussion-based course will look at the history, culture, experiences, political struggles, and social dilemmas of ''Afro-Latina/o/xs'': African-descended peoples from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who reside in the U.S. The erasure of these communities, along with their struggles for well-being, prosperity, belonging, and visibility, will be explored.
This first-year seminar examines the ways that healthcare access and health itself are shaped by social, racial, and economic inequalities in our society and others. The geographic focus of this course is Africa and the United States. Drawing on research in medical anthropology, sociology, public health, and history, we will gain an understanding of the political, economic, and social factors that create health inequalities.
A journey across the world (US, Kenya, Brazil, Jamaica, etc.) in film and fiction about love and desire in relation to Blackness. After a general introduction to theories and debates of #BlackLove (in texts and popular culture), we will shift our gaze towards narratives of people whose ways of living and loving are contested. We will analyze and appreciate how individuals and communities navigate desire, identity, and politics. In this class we learn by discussion and we practice joy, care, and community.
This course looks at the African American educational experience from the late 18th century to the present, elementary to college level. The course will range from the struggle for basic education to the fight for K-12 (and especially high school) education, to the challenges of access to college and university across the years. What makes for a good education? Particularly since this is a first-year seminar, the professor may from time to time include questions, suggestions, and practical lessons from African American history about how an individual might make the most of a chance to get an education.
Permission of the department. Beginning of mentored research on an honors thesis. Required of all candidates for graduation with honors in African, African American, and Diaspora studies.
Permission of the department. Completion of an honors thesis under the direction of a member of the faculty. Required of all candidates for graduation with honors in African, African American, and Diaspora studies.
This seminar aims to engage with theoretical debates in the field of Africana Studies with a focus on key theoretical approaches to selected thematic issues as they pertain to people of African descent in Africa and the African Diaspora.
Introduction to important scholarship on colonialism in Africa, especially in its cultural manifestations (education, arts, sport, religion, health)
This interdisciplinary course explores how literature and artistic expression in postcolonial Islamic Africa reflect the histories and politics of multicultural encounter. In addition to reading seminal texts on cosmopolitanism, this course engages students with Muslim African literature, cassette culture, popular music, and film in Muslim Africa. It explores critical issues of religious identity, education, gender, race, epistemology, and the sacred/secular divide in African Islamic contexts and from both an interdisciplinary and cosmopolitan perspective.
This seminar pursues professional development through three aims. First, through readings and guided exercises, students are able to implement tools related to the teaching craft with a focus on teaching philosophies and pedagogy, syllabi development, and lesson planning. Second, students will discuss topics related to job placement and professional dynamics within academia, with a particular focus on issues faced by underrepresented faculty. Third, guest lectures curated to student interests.
This graduate seminar aims to empower students to critically assess their understanding of race, gender, and social justice, emphasizing strategies for effecting change through community activism and social media. The course entails curated readings, discussions, and analyses of pivotal works on activism, race, gender, and social change in Africa. Students will explore theoretical frameworks and methodologies, culminating in a theory-driven paper on a relevant issue in race, gender, social justice, and social media.
This seminar explores contemporary debates in the field of International Development Studies (IDS) with a particular focus on those pertaining to gender, masculinities, human rights, and sexuality drawing on empirical developments in Africa.
The African policy makers and institutions have therefore been caught up in a complex language policy and planning problem complicated by a legacy of colonial languages considered superior and advanced. This course explores issues surrounding the politics of language in Africa from the creation of the imagined "nation-states" during colonization to the contemporary issues emanating from the realities of heterogeneous linguistic, ethnic, and cultural nations and continent.
This graduate-level course is structured as an intensive reading seminar where we will collectively examine significant academic texts on the 'great American city', looking at themes of race, place, class, crisis, and renewal that have attended urbanism, primarily focused on the US. Readings will examine cities that include Detroit, Oakland, Chicago, and Baltimore. Themes include urban de-industrialization and renewal, disinvestment, the politics of activism and power, public housing, and environmental toxicity.
The course is designed to offer students a deep historical exploration of the experiences of African Americans in the southern US states from the end of the American Civil War through the twentieth century. Much attention is given to activism, gender, labor, and community formation, as well as the ever-evolving nature of Black identities in the South and the larger nation. Additionally, the course examines the centrality of migration to the African American experience.
This course explores the genealogy of Black feminist and womanist thought as intersecting theoretical frameworks. We will investigate the expansion of womanist thought from a theologically dominated discourse to a broader category of critical reflection associated with Black feminism, analyze the relationship between the two, and review their historical interventions.
This course is designed to give students a broad-ranging historical perspective on the migration and settlement of African peoples in various parts of the world, largely over the past three centuries. Based on selected readings, students will study and compare the ways in which people of African descent have created cultural and geographic communities outside of Africa, especially in the pre- and post-emancipation societies of the Americas.
This course explores key philosophical, theoretical and intellectual aspects of Pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism in the diaspora with emphasis on their expression in the Americas. We emphasize the work of individuals, organizations, and movements and the development of Pan-Africanism beginning with the era of African independence up to the contemporary period. We engage in close readings of texts and identify ideas that shaped Pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism in the last quarter of the 20th century.
A graduate-level introduction to the renderings of black feminist thought within various modalities of ethnographic practice and representation over time and across the African Diaspora. Explores how black feminists have understood and pushed disciplinary boundaries through their innovations in method and theory. The course centers black feminist contributions to intellectual debates and artistic craft in the social sciences and humanities, often blurring the division between artist and scholar.
Rather than prescribing a singular approach to Africana/Black Studies research, this graduate-level survey course celebrates the methodological innovations that have deepened our understanding of the modern world through the lens of Black experience. Featured is a selection of representative works by scholars who, in their time, advanced and troubled traditional disciplinary conventions in the social sciences and humanities to create new ways of knowing.
This seminar introduces students to the study of constitutionalism with a focus on contemporary Africa. It pays particular attention to the implications of constitutional making and remaking to institutional and political arrangements, and practices. Additionally, it explores the effects of constitutional developments to the land question, climate change, gender equality, the protection of human rights, and undercurrents of horizontal and social democratic accountability in terms of modalities of public power.
This class is designed to introduce graduate students to research methods that primarily center on African American Cinema History. The course explores a wide range of methods that are designed to heighten and refine the necessary skills students need to create specific research questions that will guide their investigation. Students will be trained in collecting data, organizing the data collected, and interpreting the findings related to their investigative inquiry.
This course examines the historical evolution of Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist ideologies and movements since the late nineteenth century. It is particularly concerned with the persistence of separatist political trends and cultural expressions among people of African descent across the diaspora(s), as well as the emergence and development of continental Pan-Africanism, decolonization movements, and Afro-Caribbean political projects.
In this graduate seminar, we will examine a wide range of Caribbean expressive forms including literature (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, film, music, and more in order to chart the historical entanglements between political mobilization and artistic production. Paying special attention to the artistic production of Caribbean women and queer writers and scholars, this seminar traces the evolution of the dynamic aesthetic, social, and political visions that have been generated by the region's artists.
This seminar examines historical dynamics of Black social movements in Africa and the African diaspora. The focus is on ideologies and practices of political imagination and organization in different times and places.
This graduate seminar examines the ways that reproductive healthcare access and health itself are shaped by social, racial, and economic inequalities in our society and others. Of particular interest will be the ways that negotiations over reproduction shed light on broader social conflicts, exposing the importance of centering questions of reproduction in social theory. The geographic focus of this course is Africa and the United States.
This graduate level course surveys some of the seminal texts that have shaped the study of enslaved and free Black women and girls in the African Diaspora. Throughout the semester, students will explore how enslaved and free Black women's lived experiences disrupt traditional centering of any nation's borders. This course will also explore how feminist methods have both challenged and transformed the study of slavery in pursuit of new narritive frames and distinct archival methods.
This course examines the lives of people of African descent living in the U.S. and throughout the Atlantic world through the lens of biography, autobiography, micro-history, and memoir. Students will develop a research topic, conduct independent research, and write a research paper.
Special Topics Course: content will vary each semester.
Graduate seminar in Africana Studies focusing on a topic or theme that varies based on instructor's focus and specialization.
Permission of the instructor. Independent reading programs for graduate students whose needs are covered by no course immediately available.
Graduate students are immersed in dissertation planning, including the advancement of research and writing on their selected projects.
Individual work on the M.A. project, pursued under the supervision of the M.A. Advisor. This course may be at least partially offered in a classroom setting involving a number of graduate students completing M.A.-level work.
Individual work on the doctoral dissertation, pursued under the supervision of the Ph.D. Advisor.
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
