7 courses with the subject AFST B, 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.
AFST B101BLACK MATTERS: INTRODUCTION TO BLACK STUDIES1.0
This interdisciplinary course situates the study of Black lives, known interchangeably as African American Studies, Black Studies, Africana Studies, or African Diaspora Studies, within the context of ongoing struggles against anti-Black racism. We will explore the founding principles and purposes of the field, the evolution of its imperatives, its key debates, and the lives and missions of its progenitors and practitioners. In doing so we will survey, broadly and deeply, the diverse historical, political, social, cultural, religious/spiritual, and economic experiences and expressions of the African Diaspora in the Americas and beyond.
This interdisciplinary course explores over two decades of work produced by and about Black Queer Diasporic communities throughout the circum-Atlantic world. While providing an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the Black Queer Diaspora, this course examines the viability of Black Queer Diaspora world-making praxis as a form of theorizing. We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific Black Queer Diasporic forms of peacemaking, erotic knowledge productions, as well as the concept of “aesthetics” more broadly. Our aim is to use the prism of Blackness/Queerness/Diaspora to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies. By the end of this course students will have a strong understanding of how systems of power work to restrict the freedoms of Black Queer and Trans communities, and how Black LGBTQ people have lived, organized, and created in spite of and in response to these oppressions. This interdisciplinary undergraduate upper-level course will utilize academic texts accompanied by poetry, fiction, film, television, and visual art to understand Black Queer and Trans subjectivities.
#BlackLivesMatterEverywhere: Ethnographies & Theories on the African Diaspora is a interdisciplinary course closely examines political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual mobilizations for Black Lives on local, global and hemispheric levels. We will engage an array of materials ranging from literature, history, oral histories, folklore, dance, music, popular culture, social media, ethnography, and film/documentaries. By centering the political and intellectual labor of Black women and LGBTQ folks at the forefront of the movements for Black Lives, we unapologetically excavate how #BlackLivesMatterEverywhere has a long and rich genealogy in the African diaspora. Lastly, students will be immersed in Black queer feminist theorizations on diaspora, political movements, and the multiplicities of Blackness.
This interdisciplinary course examines the extensive and diverse histories, social movements, political mobilization and cultures of Black people (Afrodescendientes) in Latin America and the Caribbean. While the course will begin in the slavery era, most of our scholarly-activist attention will focus on the histories of peoples of African descent in Latin America after emancipation to the present. Some topics we will explore include: the particularities of slavery in the Americas, the Haitian Revolution and its impact on articulations of race and nation in the region, debates on “racial democracy,” the relationship between gender, class, race, and empire, and recent attempts to write Afro-Latin American histories from “transnational” and “diaspora” perspectives. We will engage the works of historians, activists, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists who have been key contributors to the rich knowledge production on Black Latin America.
Why is Black beauty important, across different historical periods and geographies? This course answers this through a deep engagement with Black visual culture, from diaspora histories of Black hair cultures to anthropological studies of Black beauty salons to digital engagement with Black beauty culture on You Tube and Instagram. We’ll do comparative magazine analyses of 20th century Black fashion coverage and today’s celebrity-driven brands like Fenty. Black Beauty is foundational to how we understand the construction of value in art, politics,and society. We’ll also study different Black-studies approaches to visual culture including those from art history, museum studies, film & media studies, communication, popular culture, disability studies, performance studies, feminist theory, and queer studies. Students will walk away with strong training in visual and communication methods and in the aesthetic and political history of Black beauty. The course will culminate with a collective digital exhibition on Black Beauty Cultures that we assemble and annotate as a class.
Black Feminist Studies, which emerged in the 1970s as a corrective to both Black Studies and Women's Studies, probes the silences, erasures, distortions, and complexities surrounding the experiences of peoples of African descent wherever they live. The early scholarship was comparable to the painstaking excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women's literature going back to the nineteenth century. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students closely examine the historical, critical and theoretical perspectives that led to the development of Black Feminist theory/praxis. The course will draw from the 19th century to the present, but will focus on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on “western” and global feminisms. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and of race, to gender, class, and sexuality. We will conclude the course with the exploration of various expressions of contemporary Black feminist thought around the globe as a way of broadening our knowledge of feminist theory.
This course will focus on the history, present, and future of race and reproductive health across the Black Diaspora. We’ll look at historical documents, literature, and historiography of the Early Americas to trace the development of Black reproduction and birth during chattel slavery and colonialism. Then we will turn to 20th and 21st century movements for reproductive justice, including the development of reproductive care in Nigeria, the contemporary push to address Black maternal mortality rates in the US, and the politics of assisted reproductive technology in relationship to race, gender, and sexuality. Medical studies, feminist studies, sociology, and anthropology will work alongside journalism, art, literature, and culture to illuminate and interpret Black reproductive health experience, including artists and writers such as Linda Villarosa, Angelina Weld Grimke, Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, Tlotlo Tsamaase, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jamaica Kincaid. At the end of the course, students will be able to connect Black medical and cultural histories of reproduction, and they will develop research projects related to race and reproduction based on their own interests and expertise.
