62 courses with the subject BLST, 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.
BLST 001SBreaking the Internet: Slavery, Resistance and the Digital Humanities1
Cross listed with HIST 001S “Breaking The Internet: Slavery, Resistance, and the Digital Humanities,” is a first year seminar that considers vibrant new developments at the intersections of the digital humanities and the study of slavery. Students will encounter early histories of Black life in the era of slavery through a variety of digital humanities projects. They will grapple with debates in the history of slavery as they relate to the digital humantiies, consider the ethics of knowledge production about the history of slavery, and hone their analytical skills through critiques of digital humanities projects and by designing one. 1 credit
BLST 006AWest Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade, 1500 to 18501
Cross-listed as HIST 008A . This survey course focuses on the origins and impact of the slave trade on West African societies. Concentration: Culture and Identity, Domination and Resistance Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for Eligible for BLST, GLBL-paired. Fall 2027 Burke.
BLST 006BMfecane, Mines, and Mandela: Southern Africa from 1650 to the Present1
Cross-listed as HIST 008B. This course surveys southern African history from the establishment of Dutch rule at the Cape of Good Hope to the present day, focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. Concentration: Domination and Resistance, Empires and Nations Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for Eligible for BLST, GLBL-paired.
BLST 006CFrom Leopold to Kabila: The Bad Twentieth Century in Central Africa1
Cross-listed with HIST 008C . This course is a survey covering the history of Central Africa from the onset of the “Scramble for Africa” in the 19th Century, the era of European colonial rule, the process of decolonization, and postcolonial struggles including the Rwandan genocide, warfare in Eastern Congo, and the violent extraction of industrial raw materials. Students will also discuss current events in Central Africa in relationship to the history covered in the course. Concentrations: Domination and Resistance; Migration, Diaspora and Space Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for Eligible for BLST, GLBL-paired. Concentrations: Domination and Resistance; Migration, Diaspora and Space Fall 2026. Burke.
(Cross-listed as ENVS 007 for Fall 2026) Chester Semester is an interdisciplinary course on social change with an engaged scholarship internship component. Housed within the Environmental Studies Program and the Black Studies Program and supported by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, it consists of a weekly class facilitated by engaged faculty, staff, and community partners; a supervised internship in the nearby city of Chester; and a final research paper with a public-facing presentation. The purpose of Chester Semester is to build strong relationships between committed students and community leaders on common projects of mutual transformation. In sum, the Chester Semester Fellowship includes a Fall course with a 4-5 hr/wk internship (and Spring paid internship) in Chester City. Humanities. 1 cedit. Eligible for Eligible for BLST, ENVS, ESCH Fall 2026. Berger.
BLST 007AMore Than a Drum Line: Exploring the Legacies of HBCU Marching Band Traditions1
(Cross-listed as MUSI 007A ) In this course we will explore the socio-cultural significance of Historically Black College and University marching bands for Black communities across the United States. Using Howard University’s Showtime Marching Band, Texas Southern’s ” Ocean of Soul,” Grambling State University’s “World Famed Tiger Marching Band,” Florida A&M University’s “Marching 100,” Morgan State University’s “Magnificent Marching Machine,” and Bowie State University’s “Symphony of Soul” as case studies, we will consider the histories and development of these institutions and their band programs. This will require us to examine the circumstances under which they evolved, and the culture that has evolved in and around them from the 18th century to the present-day. This course will highlight the impact of HBCU marching bands and music programs on the social, cultural, economic, and political realities of the communities that they serve, and on the students, faculty, and alumni who continue to serve them. We will explore the sounds and styles that differentiate Black collegiate marching bands from those at predominately white institutions, and the characteristics that distinguish Black collegiate marching bands from each other. Students will learn that in addition to being performatively dynamic, HBCU marching bands have consistently had a profound and lasting impact on the lives of their students, faculty, alumni, and communities across generations, throughout the twentieth century and in the present-day. Ethnomusicology credit. 1 credit.
BLST 007BBlack Atlantic History I: Slavery and Revolutions
Cross-listed with HIST 007A. This introductory course centers the lived experiences of people of African descent in the Americas and the wider Atlantic World during the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will examine the histories of slavery and freedom, gender and sexuality, marronage, revolt, and revolution through the perspectives of enslaved and free people of African descent who lived through this turbulent time and profoundly shaped the histories of North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Recommended for teacher certification. Concentrations: Culture and Identity, Domination and Resistance 1 Eligible for Eligible for BLST, GSST, LALS. Concentrations: Culture and Identity, Domination and Resistance
Cross-listed as HIST 007B . This introductory course centers the lived experiences of Black people in the U.S. and the wider Americas during the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will be covering people of African descents’ pivotal social justice movements, freedom struggles, and cultural movements in the U.S. and beyond, inclusive of their experiences of mass migrations within the U.S. and to the U.S. from the Caribbean and South America, Africa, and to a lesser extent, Europe. Recommended for teacher certification. Concentrations: Culture and Identity, Domination and Resistance Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, GSST, LALS. Concentrations: Culture and Identity, Domination and Resistance Spring 2027. Mitchell.
(Cross-listed as MUSI 008B ) What is the power of music? How can music empower individuals and groups in the fight for justice? In this course we will investigate contemporary case studies from around the world when groups have employed music to confront racism and classism in pursuit of social justice. Case studies include Apartheid South Africa, Buraku Taiko drummers in Japan, and the Kamehameha Schools Songs Contest in Hawai’i. Students will complete an original community project to share their course experience with other students on campus. Open to all students without prerequisite. Non-distribution. Eligible for PEAC, BLST, GLBL-Core, ASAM Access the class schedule to search for sections.
(Cross-listed as ARTH 080) This course introduces students to the history of black art and the representation of blackness in the American museum. Black art has been at various times excluded from, segregated within, and problematically embraced by museums. Black artists, curators, and activists have found ways to challenge these institutions’ racial politics, while also creating networks, models, and venues for showcasing black artists’ works and processes to their communities of concern. This class will take stock of this history and its relationship to the current moment of recognition black artists face. Arts and Humanities. 1 credit.
BLST 010FYS: Blackness in the Crosshairs: Living (and dying) in an Anti-Black World
(Cross-listed as SOCI 005C ) Blackness: identity, concept, or ideology? This first-year seminar provides students with an in-depth exploration of Blackness as all three. We will analyze how Blackness has been, and is, depicted in media, art, philosophy, and literature, and how these representations have shaped our understanding of the Black experience. In the Black Studies tradition, we take an interdisciplinary approach drawing from primary sources, academic texts, and social media to investigate how blackness is defined, contested, and transformed. The bulk of the course focuses on the now-contemporary topics spanning from “diaspora wars”, to digital Black face, to food deserts, Black Twitter, Black Lives Matter, and importantly, Black Joy. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
BLST 010AFirst Year Seminar: The Black Material Object1
This course is a close read, deep look, and occasionally hands-on approach to the black material object through a range of everyday items, artifacts, artworks and apparatuses. We consider how their origins, development and popularity come through black people’s invention, utility and repurposing. We will trace how the virtual and symbolic are linked to the physical, where black bodies are conditioned as both source material and raw material of the modern world, and used to extract the resources needed for science, technology, entertainment and culture. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Rahaman.
(Cross-listed THEA 010 ) This course examines Black theater and performance traditions in the United States - from William Alexander Brown’s African Grove to the era of “Post-Black” plays. We will survey and analyze aesthetic innovations and transformations in the Black theatrical and dramaturgical imaginations and carefully consider the crucial role the stage has played in shaping perceptions and understandings of race. Humanities.
In this course, students will be introduced to Black Studies and how it came to be an academic field of study. Through engagement with the field’s activist and creative histories we will explore how Black Studies can remain a vital source for engaging Black life and challenging the brutal systems that contest its flourishing. Together, we will make a number of creative projects that will make the work of Black Studies accessible to the broader Swarthmore Community. The class will work as a rigorous Reading and Art Club, engaging with foundational Black Studies texts and making them relevant to our contemporary moment. These works remix methods drawn from the Humanities and Social Sciences in order to present the complexity of blackness and refuse the violence of slavery, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and other forms of domination. We will leave class better prepared to utilize creative methods from the field of Black Studies, making research projects that are up to the task of studying, facing, and refusing the current assault on Black life. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, ESCH Fall 2026. Veras. Fall 2027 Batts.
Queerness disrupts normative arrangements of bodies, spaces, and institutions. Equally, ‘queerness’ is akin to ‘blackness’ as both positionalities are constantly in flux, mixing and remixing functioning as forms of resistance against anti-blackness/otherness and anti-queerness. We will develop our understanding of black and queer geographies and their intersections through a variety of ‘texts’ from the disciplinary fields of geography, sociology, and philosophy to literature, art history and visual culture. This transdisciplinary approach is necessary when we consider Edouard Glissant’s concept of nonhistory which gestures toward the submarine archive for African diasporic subjects in the Americas. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST Fall 2026. Smith.
Cross-listed with SOCI 020C and GLBL 020 . “I don’t see color.” The common adage is an allusion to a society in which phenotype bares minimal weight on one’s life chances. Scholars have long noted that the opposite is true-what we look like matters and greatly impacts our lives. Only coined in the 1980s, colorism, the preferential treatment of those with lighter skin and “desirable” features, has plagued communities of color for centuries. In this course, we will trace the origins of colorism considering global contexts for communities of color in general, and the African diaspora in particular. We will use emerging theories of colorism to examine the role of racism, colonialism, media, and capitalism in engendering and maintaining colorist ideals in contemporary society. We will engage academic and ‘non-academic’ texts to expose the variations of systemic colorism on a global scale often impacted by other demographic markers including: gender, region, class, ethnicity, and culture. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, GLBL-paired, LALS Spring 2027. Veras.
(Cross-listed as SOCI 028 ) 2020 has been a tumultuous year. Economic, social, environmental and political events around the world have put global racial hierarchy in stark relief. In the United States, the Coronavirus pandemic is revealing and exacerbating existing racial inequalities. The continued state sponsored killing of Black people has sparked the latest iterations of the Black Liberation Movement within and across multiple boundaries. In this interdisciplinary course, we will investigate and uncover the seeds of these movements in previous eras, the conditions of white supremacy that continue to call forth resistance, and the manifestations of that constant resistance globally, nationally, and local to our city of Philadelphia. In partnership with the Pulitzer Center, students will work with preeminent journalists, local organizers and community members to create a podcast that will serve as a digital archive to tell multifaceted stories of Black Liberation 2020. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, GLBL-core
BLST 030CThe Black Atlantic: Diasporic Perspectives and Resistance1
(Cross-listed as SOCI 030C ) Triumph, failure, defeat, and resistance vis a vis slavery, colonization, and emancipation, are central in shaping the vastness of Black experiences. In this course we bridge individual and historical processes. Our engagement with Black authors’ historical fiction and empirical works invites us to consider the day-to-day negotiations of Black: struggles, joys, sorrows, and freedoms as both intimately personal and ideological endeavors. Our focus spans slavery in the US and Caribbean and colonization of sub-Saharan Africa, highlighting important connections and distinctions unique to locales and their relationality to white supremacy. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST
Cross-listed with EDUC 033 . This course examines the lives of Black children and youth in American education from a socio-historical perspective. A particular focus is placed on the Black struggle for educational access and equality, and educational policies and programs designed to advance the education of Black students. The goal is to reconsider how schools and classrooms can realize the promise and potential of Blacks in the United States.
This course is an introduction to the filmmakers and history of the cinemas (film, video, and new media) of the African continent, focusing primarily on Francophone West Africa. Students will be introduced to key film concepts and will develop their ability to write critically on the moving image. Discussion immediately follows each film. Readings and course discussion are in English. Films are subtitled in English. 0.5 Eligible for BLST, GLBL-Paired Access the class schedule to search for sections.
Black Studies has something vital to contribute to the study of how pandemics and epidemics are thought and intervened in. By considering literature, visual art, history, political science, and sociology focused on health, medicine, the body, and disease, from the Yellow Fever epidemic to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, we will gain a fuller understanding of how black cultures have lived through and resisted pandemics, epidemics, and medical brutality. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-paired Spring 2028 Batts.
BLST 040GBetween the “Is” and the “Ought” Black Social and Political Thought1
(Cross-listed as SOCI 048G ) Our study of global Black social and political thought will include not only the pivotal scholarly texts, but also the social and political practice and cultural production of abolitionists, maroons, Pan-Africanists, club women, poets, and the vast array of “race” people across the spectrum of crusades. We will explore the range of intellectual and cultural production and protest ideology/action of Black people through the politics and social observation of the pre-emancipation period, post-emancipation liberation struggles, post-colonial and post-civil rights periods, Black feminist and Black queer theory, and more contemporary freedom fighters. Non-distribution. 1 credit.
BLST 041Transnational Perspectives in Black Studies: Haitian Literature and Culture from the 19th Century, the Contemporary, to the Diaspora1
In viewing literature as a part of the archival landscape, we will map the socio-political currents of Saint-Domingue on the way to ‘becoming’ post-revolutionary Haiti through its literary and cultural production both within and outside of its borders. Haitian literature interlaced with the socio-political shifts of the island-nation republic has origins in the country’s grand marronage away from French imperialism. Moving from colonialism, independence, to Haiti’s current impasse at the hand of neocolonialism, we will analyze the works of Antoine Dupré, Oswald Durand, Massillon Coicou, Jean-Price Mars, Jacques Roumain, and René Depestre. Regarding the diaspora, we will explore Haitian literature from a transnational perspective through the works of Dany Laferrière, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, and conclude with selections from contemporary Haitian author Frankétienne and his “spiralist” oeuvre. What has been the “price of the ticket” for Haiti asserting itself as the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere? How can we use the Haitian Revolution (the first iteration of the “Black Lives Matter” movement) as a pedagogical moment for current and future black freedom struggle? 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-paired
BLST 042Black Feminist and Queer Contemporary Culture1
In this course we will study how blackness, gender, and sexuality are represented in visual and literary arts and culture. Using the tools of black feminist and queer theory, the class will cover topics and concepts such as Afrofuturism, stereotypes, intersectionality, surveillance, film, performance, abstraction/figuration, photography, poetry, and ungendering. The works of black queer and trans visual artists and writers will be central to the class. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST Spring 2028 Batts.
In Faulkner, Mississippi (2000), Caribbean philosopher, novelist, playwright, and literary critic Edouard Glissant exclaims, “The configuration of the Plantation was the same everywhere, from northeastern Brazil to the Caribbean, to the southern United States”. We will remap the geographical and cultural boundaries of the circum-Caribbean to include the U.S. Gulf and Coastal South through literature, visual art, film, and performance. What are the sociohistorical links between these two regions regarding cultural production? In order to respond to this guiding question, we will examine selected texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, Edwidge Danticat, Erna Brodber, Marta Moreno Vega, Kara Walker, Edouard Duval-Carrié, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. 1 credit. Fall 2027 Smith.
(Cross-listed as SOCI 048I ) Using Philadelphia neighborhoods as our site of study, this course will analyze the relationship between race/ethnicity and spatial inequality, emphasizing the institutions, processes, and mechanisms that shape the lives of urban dwellers. We will survey major theoretical approaches and empirical investigations of racial and ethnic stratification in cities, their concomitant policy considerations, and the impact at the local level in Philadelphia. As part of The Tri-Co Philly Program, this course will engage scholars, practitioners, community members, and leaders as teachers, learners, and researchers alongside students in the course. Requires permission of the Instructor. 1 credit.
BLST 050Fanon: From the Postcolonial to the Philosophical1
Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon has made an indelible impact on the fields of postcolonial studies and political philosophy. His contributions to Black thought geographically span from the Caribbean, Continental Europe, and the African continent. Drawing upon not only psychology and political theory, but also literature and poetry, Fanon has coined terms such as “a psychology of oppression” and “lactification” in regard to the psychological effects of colonialism on the colonized subject. The revolutionary thinker is equally known for his thoughts on the uses and effects of violence in the decolonial context. In this course we will critically examine key Fanonian texts including The Wretched of the Earth , Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, Alienation and Freedom , and Decolonizing Madness. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Smith.
Cross-listed with HIST 053 . Through this course, students will read a variety of historians’ approaches to the study of the Black body from the earliest days of slavery through the present. Topics include representations of Black bodies in art and literature, Black people’s embodied experiences of pleasure and pain. Black people’s experiences of health, reproduction, suffering, and healing, the ways Black bodies have been controlled and how Black people resisted. Writing course. 1 Eligible for Concentrations: Gender and Sexuality, Science, Medicine, and Environment
(Cross listed as ENGL 054 ) As the recipient of numerous literary prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, and National Book Critics Circle Award, to name a few), Toni Morrison was an author of international renown whose books routinely occupied a place on domestic and international best seller lists. Indeed, it is safe to say that her work transcended what many readers ascertain as “black writing” in the 21st Century. Her works consistently engaged the role memory, place, and community play in our lived experience. But how did Morrison understand her literary project in light of the fact that she eschewed the white gaze as a controlling motif in her fictions? In a moment when discussions about how-and sometimes, whether-we value Black bodies are happening all around us, this course offers us an opportunity to use the reading of Morrison’s novels as a catalyst for new ways to think not only about how we can occupy place, but happily cohabit with our neighbors whether they look like us, share our point of origin, or reflect our values. In the process, we will endeavor to become a learning community in which critical thinking, analysis, dialogue, and debate are central to developing inclusive methods of inquiry. Humanities. Eligible for BLST
BLST 054AHistories of Gender and Racial Capitalism1
Cross-listed as HIST 054 . What is racial capitalism? How have gender and racial ideologies structured capitalism throughout history? How have Black and Native American people endured and resisted the rise of capitalism in North American and the Caribbean? How has gender influenced their experiences and actions? This history course will explore these questions and more. We will take a thematic approach to the intertwined histories of race, gender, and capitalism from the earliest days of slavery to the present, with a focus on markets, property, and labor. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, GSST, and LALS. Concentrations: Capitalism; Gender and Sexuality Fall 2026. Mitchell.
Cross-listd as HIST 050. How have Black healers and communities conceived of health and healing throughout history? How has healing exceeded notions of individual physical well-being to include political action, collective care, spirituality, and social cohesion? Notions of health and healing and healing practices in the “Black Atlantic” (inclusive of Africa and the Americas) from the era of slavery to the present are the focus of this course. Concentrations: Gender and Sexuality; Science, Medicine, and Environment Social sciences. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST, GLBL-paired, GSST, LALS. Concentrations: Gender and Sexuality; Science, Medicine, and Environment
BLST 054CThe Black History of Public Health in Philadelphia1
Cross-listed as HIST 055 . Spring 2027 Semester: This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly program. Concentrations: Gender and Sexuality; Science, Medicine, and Environment
Admission to the Tri-Co Philly Program or permission of instructor. Social sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for Concentrations: Gender and Sexuality; Science, Medicine, and Environment Spring 2027. Mitchell. Catalog chapter: Black Studies . Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/black-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
BLST 058BBlack Feminisms1
(Cross-listed with SOCI 058B ) In this course, we will examine the contours of Black women’s (womyn’s/womxn’s) ways of naming, being and knowing, their resistance to gender and race hierarchies, violence, domination, and oppression, and their insistent love, joy, art, and creative practices. We will center black queer feminisms, explore the intersections of race, gender and sexuality with class, region, religious and spiritual practices, generation, space and place; explore black feminist thought and its relationship to womanism and other feminisms; explore the multitude of positionalities of black women (womyn/womxn); examine mediated representations of black women; the commodification of black women’s aesthetics, bodies and sexualities, and the resistance to the same; and highlight black women (womyn/womxn) and femme centered spaces and collectives. 1 credit. Eligible for GSST
BLST 059The Black Freedom Struggle: From Civil Rights to Hip-Hop1
This course is devoted to the study of the black efforts to achieve political, social and economic equality within the United States through protest. Students will investigate the links between protest efforts in the era of World War II, the nonviolent and radical phases of the modern civil rights movement and the development of a new culture of protest in the last quarter of the 20th century. In addition to studying historical texts, students will analyze various forms of protest media such as Black Radio Days, cartoons, paintings and plays of 1960s Black Arts Movement and the poems, lyrics, and graphic art of early hip-hop. Non-distribution. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as ENGL 060 ) This course studies the wide variety of Black media cultures in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, including newspapers, broadside poetry, sheet music, friendship albums, political pamphlets, and novels. We will attend closely to the materiality of these texts, reading not only for the work of authors but also that of illustrators, editors, typesetters, and readers. How did these cultural workers shape racial identities, aesthetic forms, and political possibilities through media technologies? Our investigations will be informed by readings in recent theory and criticism on Black Studies, media culture, and literary history. In their final projects, students will have the chance to pursue their own original research using the rich resources of Philadelphia-area libraries. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST Fall 2027 Cohen. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
(Cross-listed with ENGL 061 ) How did Black literary production emerge to resist the institution and ideology of slavery in the United States? While this course will focus largely on antebellum slave narratives- powerful acts of self-presentation that challenged the racial logic of slavery and bore witness to its brutal violence-we will also consider Black oratory, essays, poetry, and fiction of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Humanities. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed with ENGL 062 ) A survey of twentieth-century Black autobiography, emphasizing the significance of the autobiography as an act of representation, not simply a document of experience. What strategies do Black narrators like Du Bois, Wright, Hurston, Dunham, Baldwin, Lorde, and Malcolm X employ to represent themselves, and how? How do their textual strategies and contextual concerns change from the Jim Crow regime into the post-Civil Rights era? 1 credit. Spring 2027. Foy.
(Cross-listed as ENGL 063 ) How does the Black subject become the source and site of intersectional theory? This course examines the complexities of Black self-presentation in relation to gender, sexuality, class, place, and history, with a particular focus on developments within the last decade, the era of Black Lives Matter. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed with ENGL 064A ) The first in a sequence of courses on the post-Emancipation development of African American literature, this course focuses on the Black literary florescence that began at the end of the 19th century even as the strictures and structures of the Jim Crow regime hardened. What, then, is the relationship between the birth of Jim Crow and the birth of a “New Negro”? 1 credit.
(Cross-listed with ENGL 064B ) The second in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course explores the historical conditions, political concerns, and aesthetic currents of Black cultural production during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through its aftermath in the 1930s. 1 credit. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
(Cross-listed as ENGL 064C ) The third in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course examines both the rise of popular Black protest literature and other works that sought to counter, complicate, or complement it during the 1940s and 1950s. Through the work of such Black writers as Wright, Petry, Ellison, Baldwin, Brooks, Himes, Marshall, and Hansberry, we will consider how they addressed the dilemmas of racial representation. Humanities. Writing course. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Foy.
(Cross-listed with ENGL 064D ) The fourth in a sequence of courses on the development of African American literature, this course examines the impact of Black cultural nationalism on the poetry, drama, fiction, and autobiography of the 1960s, attending to the iconography, ideology, and aesthetics of “soul.” 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as ENGL 067 ) Focusing on that prolific period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s when James Baldwin arose as a spokesperson, celebrity, and artist of the Civil Rights Movement, this course engages his thought through his fiction, essays, drama, and memoir, paying particular attention to the ethics and aesthetics of Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, and history. 20th/21st c. 1 credit. Eligible for ASAM Spring 2027. Foy.
Cross-listed with ENGL 067B . “James Baldwin’s B-sides” Whereas ENGL 67 (“James Baldwin’s Civil Rights”) focuses closely on the legendary Black author’s major work of the 1960s, this complementary course explores Baldwin’s other work-fiction, drama, essays (both collected and uncollected), interviews, conversations, and films.This reading-intensive course will continue to examine some key themes in Baldwin’s work: Blackness, race, gender, sexuality, and history. Appropriate for students who have not yet taken ENGL 67, as well as those who have. 1
BLST 076Beyond the Boulevards: The Black Atlantic in the City of Light1
Cross-listed with FREN 076 . Paris, the “Colonial Metropolis” is known for its wide, tree-lined Haussmannian boulevards punctuated by off-white limestone buildings. How did the City of Light become the “second home” for the African diaspora in the Transatlantic world? This seminar explores how the Paname not just as a French capital, but as a crucial rhizomatic node in the Black Atlantic became a site where African, American, and Caribbean identities collided and transformed creating a distinctly modern/post-modern expression. From the jazz-soaked nights of 1920’s Montmartre to the contemporary hip-hop scenes in the Louvre expressed in visual culture, we will explore how Black artists used “the view from another shore” to redefine freedom and citizenship. Students will master the art of academic writing through iterative drafts, close-reading/viewing workshops, and an original research project on the intersection of race, space, nationality, and cultural memory in the past and present from Josephine Baker, Beyoncé, to Aya Nakamura and beyond. Taught in English. Humanities. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Smith.
(Cross listed as SOCI 088 ) 56% of the US Black population lives in the South (close to 17% in the Northeast and Midwest and close to 10% in the West). In this course, we will explore why a majority of Black Americans live in the U.S. South and how this shapes Black life today. We will examine the social, political, and economic forces that produced this regional concentration, paying close attention to migration, labor, and urban development. We will engage the neglected histories of Black Southern life worlds, focusing on how Black communities create meaning, build rich cultures, and generate powerful intellectual traditions. We will also analyze how federal, state and local policies-along with resistance and social movements-have structured everyday life for Black residents in Southern cities. By the end of the course, students will be able to connect historical processes to contemporary Black Southern experiences and debates about the politics of memory, racial justice, liberation, belonging, and place. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Spring 2027. Johnson.
BLST 090GBlack Liberation 1969: Black Studies in History Theory and Praxis1.5
This research seminar on the civil rights movement and student activism will investigate the history of the black student movement on college campuses in America circa 1968-1972 with an emphasis on unearthing the story of Swarthmore’s own black student protest in 1969. Students will write the first accurate history of the black protest as well as develop a creative project designed to educate the campus and broader community about these events. Non-distribution. 1.5 credits.
BLST 094AStudent Run: Freedom Dreaming: Black Radical Insurgency and Abolitionist Imaginings1
Students Fighting for Transformative Justice, Abolition, and Revolution (STAR) cultivates campus spaces that find ways in which we can join the global fight to abolish the carceral state. The goal of this student-designed and student-run course is to provide members of STAR and the greater Swarthmore College student sphere with foundational understandings of the carceral state, how it maintains hegemony, and its relationships to racial capitalism, western imperialism, transformative justice, and abolition. Additionally, the course will seek to engage students with histories of resistance and present-day movements for abolition, both inside and outside prison walls. This course will allow its participants to devise a more fine-tuned vision for a world where power is reinstilled to the people- where justice is synonymous with accountability, restoration, transformation- a world not only absent of the carceral state, but teeming with life-affirming institutions and freedom. 1 credit. Eligible for BLST
In The Repeating Island, Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a vehement dreamer while placing the Black American civil rights activists’ posture in the realm of ‘Caribbean performance.’ King’s capacious vision of world-making is rooted in a nebulous African-diasporic identity encompassing both North American and Caribbean sensibilities. The nexus point of these intertwined geographies symbolize a fecund space of intersections, much like jazz music, representing a fluid, transnational, and creolized identity. Commencing with MLK’s “The Other America” speech at Stanford University in 1967, the course contents will branch outward from here to place the selected works of Benítez-Rojo, Alejo Carpentier, William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Kara Walker, Tessa Mars, Édouard-Duval Carrié, Firelei Báez, and Édouard Glissant into a gestalt of ‘one-world’ relation. 2 credits. Spring 2028 Smith.
(Cross-listed as ENGL 116 ) Our focus this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. 20th/21st c. Humanities. 2 credits.
For the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, thinking archipelagically invites us to consider productive ways of reorganizing the world that eschews hierarchical structures and systems. Multiplicity/hybridity, creolization, and ambiguity allow for a rhizomatic philosophy that proffers the “insurrection of the imaginary.” In this course we will examine an edited corpus of Glissant’s works including Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, The Fourth Century, Mahagony, along with his poetry, essays, and novels in relation to his archipelagic thought applied to cultural memory in the present. The course will be taught in English. Social Sciences. 2 credits.
(Cross-listed as SOCI 121 ) This course examines statelessness, citizenship, and unfreedom as interconnected conditions produced by modern states rather than exceptional failures. Through historical and contemporary cases across the Americas, the Caribbean, and the global South, students analyze how law, documentation, labor regimes, and borders create populations that are formally free yet substantively constrained. Race and labor operate throughout as structuring forces shaping belonging, dispossession, and differential access to rights. Readings draw from sociology, history, legal studies, and Black Studies, pairing theory with empirical cases. Students will interrogate how freedom is unevenly distributed and how unfreedom persists after slavery, emancipation, and decolonization in modern societies. Social Sciences. 2 credits. Spring 2027. Veras.
(Cross-listed as EDUC 133 ) This seminar examines the lives of Black boys in U.S. schools and classrooms. Black boyhood and Black masculinity are utilized as frameworks to interpret how aspects of school life influence their learning and identities, such as teacher expectations, school discipline policy, and special education referral processes. Rooted in boys’ agency and resistance, its goal is to inform a (re)imagining of educational spaces in ways that cutivate the promise of Black boys, and other boys (and girls) of color. Social Sciences. 2 credits. Eligible for BLST, GSST
Cross-listed as SOCI 138 . This course will generate an understanding of the sociology of W. E. B. DuBois and the role of insurgent theory. In it, we will uncover DuBois’ role as a founder of American sociology and analyze the social and political factors that relegated DuBois to the margins of the sociological enterprise for over a century. Further, we will explore the significance of W.E.B. DuBois’ contributions to projects of collective racial advancement and the intellectual climate of twentieth-century America; identify critical junctures in the scholar’s life related to his evolving and some would argue increasingly radical worldview; highlight the importance of DuBois’ sociological, philosophical, artistic, and educational contributions to the transformation of 20th century American society; and ruminate on what lessons the life and work of DuBois offer us in this contemporary moment. 2 credits. Eligible for BLST
