48 courses with the subject CBST, 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.
CBST 199Introduction to Critical Black Studies1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3The course introduces students to concepts, theories, and debates of the vibrant discipline of Critical Black Studies. It surveys major themes, questions, concerns, and events of African, African American, and other African diasporic communities. The course examines the making of the modern world through the lens of black global experience.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course will introduce students to the field of performance theory as it is engaged through the lens of the Black World. It will place scholars in Black performance theory in conversation with scholars working in the black radical tradition whose work raises important questions about performance, blackness, and more.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course samples Black filmmakers' work from the 70s into the present, examines how their films analyze the persistence and specificity of antiblack animus, and how Black people navigate that animus. Sometimes, they achieve this on their own terms, other times, they must work under the press of Hollywood's demands. Crosslisted as ENFS 202.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3We explore how the idea of the Americas as a “new world” of discovery and wonder was (and is) entangled with racialized systems of domination. Looking into anti-racist ideas and actions today, the course critically explores the shared histories and common futures of diverse peoples across the Americas. Crosslisted as LAMS 204.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course examines films from the '70s and '90s, historically situating the '80s as a decade that parlays '70s Blaxpoitation imagery into both a cultural anxiety about and appetite for those images. These, in turn, help manifest the stark, real-life conditions that the '90s "'hood" films aim to critique.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3In this course, we will investigate the historical and intellectual grounds of films by and about Black people in Latin America. Crosslisted as LAMS 206.
Offered Alternate Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3An introduction to "non-standard" dialects of English with a primary focus on African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). This course explores the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that give rise to language variation. Crosslisted as LING 210.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course introduces students to how race riots and resistance shaped American politics. We will study how political violence shaped the racial identity of American citizens and Black people’s struggle for freedom. If you are wondering what can be done about systemic racism, this class provides a helpful critical perspective.
CBST 221Introduction to African American Literature1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Provides a selection from across the vast array of examples collected under the inadequate rubric “African American Literature.” We'll read poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama in order to understand how a group of people who have been written out of American history and culture write themselves back into these stories. Crosslisted as ENLS 221.
Offered Fall, Spring or Summer; Lecture hours:3Introduction to selected literatures, cultures, and histories of the Caribbean, with close analysis of text and context. When taught in the summer, the course is the core of the Bucknell in the Caribbean summer study abroad program. Crosslisted as ENLS 227 and LAMS 227.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3The term “post-racial” has emerged within public discourse from time to time over the course of America’s existence. From Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, this expression has described an American aspirational goal. Our class will take a contemporary and literary approach to understanding the limits of the term. Crosslisted as ENLS 223.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores African experiences with living in and migrating to Europe. More specifically, it explores the dynamics of migration across the Mediterranean Sea, citizenship, humanitarianism, migrant labor, cinematic representation, monuments/memorials and more.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores the constructions of and intersections between race and sexuality. It also investigates the ways that these identities/locations have informed understanding of inequality in the U.S. Crosslisted as WMST 227.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Critical examination of the nature and meaning of "race" in terms of conceptual analysis, experience, social constructionism, feminism, class, ethnicity, politics, colonialism, violence, and redress. Crosslisted as PHIL 229 and POLS 259.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course introduces students to the historical formation of the Black Radical Tradition. It focuses on the historical context that shapes Black people’s varying forms of organized resistance and on how political practice shapes the formation of different political ideologies, knowledge, and thought.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Afrofuturism is a transnational intellectual movement in which African and African- descended peoples envision how science, technology, and race—especially blackness—might appear in imagined futures. The course investigates how Afrofuturist artists and intellectuals complicate the master narrative that “A.I. is the future” and that humans are moving towards a singular, collective, technologically advanced future that is unburdened by algorithmic oppression.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores how African and African-descended artists have used the horror genre to narrate the terrors wrought upon global Black populations by European colonialism, racial slavery, anti-Blackness and other such monstrosities; to grapple with how these histories hauntingly hound Black lives in the contemporary; and to wrest representations of Blackness and Black peoples’ humanity from cannibalizing tropes of anti-Blackness.
CBST 234Insurgent Knowledge: Black Ecologies & Geographies1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course examines intersections of Black Studies, environmental thought and critical geography to explore how Black communities have theorized, resisted and reimagined environmental relations beyond dominant Western frameworks of nature and space. Students trace how slavery, colonialism and racial capitalism have shaped landscapes, ecologies and spatial orders, while also attending to Black life-making practices, diasporic place relations and ecological futures.
CBST 235Black Radical Thought & Art – Multi-disciplinarily Considered1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3W.E.B. DuBois’ assertion of the color-line as the 20th century problem now speaks to this century. We will examine Black Radical Thought as it is enacted through the Arts and host a series of renowned guest artist-activists whose works intervene in the ongoing problem of racism on a global scale. Crosslisted as ENLS 235.
Offered Summer Session Only; Lecture hours:3This course is designed to (1) introduce the fundamentals of cinematic elements and strategies; and (2) provoke a conversation and several key questions related to the vampire and zombie myths, why their cinematic performances remain so popular and what the implications are of that popularity.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Explore the relationship between technological invention and Black culture. We will think through how technology reshaped Black culture – for instance how the phonograph changed Black music. We will also consider how Black people have created new forms of culture as technologies and inventions for life, resistance, and revolution.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores the historical, philosophical, social and political discourse on the relationship between guns and race in American society. It provides an interdisciplinary introduction to America’s unique “gun culture” inclusive of laws, policies, notions of self-defense, and more.
CBST 248Music and Culture: Jazz and Social Justice1
Offered Alternate Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3A critical examination of musicians, movements, and cultural intersections within the development of jazz. Crosslisted as MUSC 248.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course will provide students with an introduction to the key intellectual approaches and methods specific to Critical Black Studies.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course focuses on a variety of playwrights who examine the predicament of blackness across a little more than a century. We pay particular attention to plays not just as artistic creations and entertainments, but also as political gestures that address that predicament. Crosslisted as ENLS 254.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3A thorough examination of historically important musicians and movements within the context of race and culture. Crosslisted as MUSC 257.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This class will explore the relationship between Blackness and the internet, social media, & artificial intelligence. Particular attention will be given to how Black musicians, artists, and activists use the digital space in order to contest dominant racial politics.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3We study how policing has developed across the Americas and continues to shape everyday life. Students explore how the police and military industrial complex impacts communities and environments, and examine how peoples across the Americas are navigating, enduring and resisting these forms of state power. Crosslisted as LAMS 259 and SOCI 259.
CBST 260Blackness & Diaspora in the Global South: Afrolatinidades in Diaspora1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Afro-Latinx identity challenges the notion that Blackness and Whiteness are THE two political categories of race in the Global South. In this course, we will interrogate Afro-Latinidad via an interdisciplinary survey of history and narrative modes of film, literature, music and popular culture. Crosslisted as LAMS 260.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Through a series of case studies and a final research project, students will gain in-depth knowledge of conservation efforts on the African continent. Emphasizing local and global contexts, course themes include the colonial origins of protected areas, African environmental activists and scholars, and the multiple methods used in political ecology. Crosslisted as ENST 263.
CBST 265(Really) Reading Black Plays: August Wilson, Part 11
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course will examine the plays of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, August Wilson and by extension explore what is so often referred to as the “Black experience” in a regional, national, and global context.
CBST 267(Really) Reading Black Plays: August Wilson, Part 21
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3In Part two of our focus on renowned playwright August Wilson's examination of Black life, we will read the second half of his 10-play cycle: Fences (1957), Two Trains Running (1969), Jitney (1977), King Hedley II (1985) and Radio Golf (1997).
CBST 270Race-ing Latinidad in US: Dialogues of Blackness & Latinidad1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3An interdisciplinary study of the competing definitions of the relationship between Blackness and Latinidad in US culture. We will approach the subject through literature, film and music, through academic articles from various disciplines and through direct contact with the local Latinx population. Crosslisted as LAMS 270.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course will introduce students to the political history of anti-black racism as a contingent, but consistent formation of domination that shaped the modern world. In particular, this course will help students to form a critical vocabulary for how anti-black racism inform or interact with many political crisis.
CBST 274Africa and International Relations in Historical Perspective1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3From popular culture: music, film, fashion to digital technologies: cell phones, computers, fit-bits, and GOOGLE-glass to our food: morning coffee, sugar, and spices, we rely on African ideas and resources. Through novels, films, and scholarly articles we examine how International Relations across Africa and with Africa matter in our lives. Crosslisted as HIST 274 and IREL 274.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3The history of photography is inseparable from histories of race, imperialism, and slavery. This course examines how camera and film technologies affected depictions of race globally. Beginning with the invention of the modern camera, this course traces dynamics of voyeurism, othering, and personhood in photography to the present day. Crosslisted as HIST 278.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores the dynamic convergence of race, violence, and criminal justice. More specifically, it explores policing and punishment from Reconstruction to contemporary mass incarceration. Police practices, political imprisonment, abolition, and more will also be examined.
Offered Either Fall or Spring,Topics course; Lecture hours:3A variable topics course in which students will take a critical and empowering look at various expressions of Black culture, experience, and thought.
CBST 291Africa: Ancient to Early Modern Times 4000BCE-1400CE1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Survey of Africa from Ancient economic, social, cultural, economic, and political developments to the Early Modern Era and the rise of Atlantic era trade. This course focuses on social, cultural, political, and economic changes generated by populations across the continent. Crosslisted as HIST 291 and IREL 291.
CBST 292Making Contemporary Africa: 'Early Modern' to the 'Post-Modern' World - 1400 to the Present1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Survey of African history from the 15th century to the contemporary period. We explore six major themes in African History: The Indian Ocean World, Making of the Atlantic World, Colonialism in Africa, Nationalism and Independence Movements, Post-Colonialism and Issues in the Making of Contemporary Africa. Crosslisted as HIST 292 and IREL 293.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course will explore the ways in which hip-hop culture has impacted global youth culture, particularly within the realms of music, film, television, clothing styles, politics, language, public policy, race, gender and sexuality. In summary, it will provide a much-needed perspective on the intersection of hip hop and blackness.
CBST 302Contemporary Africa & Colonial Pasts: Investments and Re-Emergences1
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Globalized investment, oil extraction, Oprah and Bono-endorsed RED products, a rising middle class: This course addresses contemporary political economy, meanings of 'the continent', and colonial legacy in Africa. We draw on human geography, African history, postcolonial and feminist studies, and literature to understand a rapidly changing continent. Crosslisted as GEOG 302.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores the historical and contemporary relationship between race and capitalism. It will also explore the culture and politics of anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism and more.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This course explores the nuanced and controversial relationship between race and sports worldwide. Topics will include social justice and rebellion; political economy; mass media and popular culture; and globalization.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3Study of selected thematic, aesthetic and ideological issues in writing from the Americas. Crosslisted as ENLS 322 and ENLS 622.
Offered Either Fall or Spring; Lecture hours:3This seminar explores the theory, history and aesthetics of Black avant-garde cultural production spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Texts may include poetry, fiction, music and film. Crosslisted as ENLS 324 and ENLS 624.
Offered Occasionally; Lecture hours:3This course explores the context, development, and outcomes of black feminists in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. Crosslisted as WMST 333 and WMST 633.
Offered Either Fall or Spring,Topics course; Lecture hours:Varies,Other:4; RepeatableIndividual study or project, supervised by instructor. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.
