267 courses with the subject AFRC, 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.
AFRC 0008Sociology of the Black Community
This course explores a broad set of issues defining important aspects of the Black/African American experience. In addition to the "usual suspects" (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, poverty, gender, and group culture), we also think about matters of health and well-being, the family, education, and identity in Black/African American communities. Our goal is to gain a deeper sociological understanding and appreciation of the diverse and ever-changing life experiences of Blacks/African Americans.
This first-year seminar examines the homelessness problem from a variety of scientific and policy perspectives. Contemporary homelessness differs significantly from related conditions of destitute poverty during other eras of our nation's history. Advocates, researchers and policymakers have all played key roles in defining the current problem, measuring its prevalence, and designing interventions to reduce it. The first section of this course examines the definitional and measurement issues, and how they affect our understanding of the scale and composition of the problem. Explanations for homelessness have also been varied, and the second part of the course focuses on examining the merits of some of those explanations, and in particular, the role of the affordable housing crisis. The third section of the course focuses on the dynamics of homelessness, combining evidence from ethnographic studies of how people become homeless and experience homelessness, with quantitative research on the patterns of entry and exit from the condition. The final section of the course turns to the approaches taken by policymakers and advocates to address the problem, and considers the efficacy and quandaries associated with various policy strategies. The course concludes by contemplating the future of homelessness research and public policy.
This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major African American author. Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See th English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
AFRC 0015Race and Identity: Coming of Age in 20th Century America
In this First-Year Seminar, we will use coming-of-age autobiographies to explore some of the most significant historical developments of the 20th century. By coming of age I mean autobiographies in which the author focuses primarily on the periods of childhood and adolescence into young adulthood. We will read books by people who lived during segregation in the South, the Great Depression, Japanese Internment during World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We will consider many issues, including: race, racism, immigration, religion, social class, and gender. We will contemplate questions about identity, family, honesty, and memory. As we read each book we will examine an individual life in a particular place and time, and we will move out beyond the confines of a person, family, or town to explore the broader historical moment in which the individual lived. To make this deeper contextualization possible, the course is divided into segments that will allow us to study the historical context of the autobiography as well as engage in focused discussion of the texts themselves.
AFRC 0018Black Sounds, Black Sights: Reading Black Life
Black cultural production surrounds us, impacting us through a variety of mediums ranging across visual, sonic, and sensory registers. All of it combines to create the rich [and unfinished] tapestry we understand as Blackness. Each class meeting will focus attention on a small corpus of cultural artifacts. Our collective goal will be to engage with this inclusive and volatile body of texts, emphasizing acts of close reading and listening, nuanced forms of visual interpretation, in order to ponder the question: how does Blackness mean? Authors, artists, and musicians to be studied will include (but not be limited to) Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Spike Lee, Billie Holliday, Kara Walker, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Stevie Wonder, Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, and Frederick Douglass. Students will also be invited to propose cultural artifacts to be considered as part of our interpretive practice during the week.
AFRC 0019Visions of America: Plural Nations, Places and Ideals
This course will introduce students to a more hemispheric understanding of the American experience, through the writings of many authors from the New World, including the United States, on what it means to be an American. Students will read texts from many genres including but not limited to poetry, film, prose, political speeches and autobiography, to come to terms with histories of native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and whites in the United States, as well as peoples of South America and the Caribbean. In the process students will become familiar with scholarship across the social sciences and humanities that consider issues of race, culture, nation, freedom and inequality in the Americas, and how racial slavery and the Afro-American hemispheric experience has informed multiple American visions.
AFRC 0030First-Year Seminar: Africa in World History
This seminar examines Africa's connections--economic, political, intellectual and cultural--with the wider world from ancient times to the 21st century, drawing on a diverse sample of historical sources. It also explores Africa's place in the imaginations of outsiders, from ancient Greeks to modern-day development "experts." Whether you know a lot or almost nothing about the continent, the course will get you to rethink your stereotypes and to question your assumptions about the importance of Africa in world history. First-year students only.
Wine and cheese, baguettes and croissants, multiple courses and fresh ingredients straight from the market—these are the internationally recognized hallmarks of French food. Yet, even as the practices surrounding the mythical French table have been deemed worthy of a place on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2010, culinary traditions in France remain persistently rooted in legacies of colonialism that are invisible to many. In order to “decolonize” French food, this seminar turns to art, literature, and film, as well as archival documents such as advertisements, maps, and cookbooks. In what ways do writers and filmmakers use food to interrogate the human, environmental, and cultural toll that French colonialism has taken on the world? How do their references to food demonstrate the complex cultural creations, exchanges, and asymmetries that have arisen from legacies of colonialism? We will interpret artworks, read literature (in English or i translation), and watch films (subtitled in English) that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by authors and directors from across the Francosphere—from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the Caribbean; to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; from the Vietnamese diaspora in France, Canada, and the United States; to North, Central, and West Africa. Just as food can be examined from many angles, our discussions will focus on art, literature, and film, but also take into account perspectives from the fields of history, anthropology, and environmental studies. Moreover, we will employ the theoretical tools supplied by food studies, feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 0081, FREN 0081 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 979
This course will introduce students to Caribbean literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 0082, ENGL 1220 1 Course Unit
AFRC 0100African Language Tutorial I: Beginning Level I
This is a course in beginning level of an African language that could be offered to students interested in particular region or country. The courses offerings are flexible and could be scheduled based on student requests.
Survey of major themes and issues in African history before 1800. Topics include: early civilizations, African kingdoms and empires, population movements, the spread of Islam, and the slave trade. Also, emphasis on how historians use archaeology, linguistics, and oral traditions to reconstruct Africa's early history.
AFRC 0320First Year Seminar: Black Queer Traditions
This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: ENGL 0320, GSWS 0320 1 Course Unit
Survey of major themes, events, and personalities in African history from the early nineteenth century through the 1960s. Topics include abolition of the slave trade, European imperialism, impact of colonial rule, African resistance, religious and cultural movements, rise of naturalism and pan- Africanism, issues of ethnicity and "tribalism" in modern Africa.
The colonial period (1492- 1800) saw huge population movements (many of them involuntary) within the Americas and across the Atlantic. As a result, Latin America was created from the entanglement of technologies, institutions, knowledge systems, and cosmologies from Indigenous, European, and African cultures. We will learn about colonial institutions such as slavery and encomienda. We will also explore the different strategies pursued by individuals and communities to build meaningful lives in the face of often dire social and environmental circumstances. Class readings are primary sources and the focus of discussions, papers, and exams will be their interpretation.
AFRC 0511Global Inequalities: A Comparative History of Caste and Race
Can we deploy a comparative lens to understand the categories of caste and race better? Does their juxtaposition illuminate new facets of these two structures of ‘global inequalities’? The course seeks to explore these questions by systematically studying how both caste and racial institutions, structures, and identities were historically produced, transformed, and challenged through their global circulation from the nineteenth-century to the present. Caste and race have been old co- travelers, and their various points of intersection can be traced at least to the nineteenth century. And so, in this course we will embark upon a historical adventure, one replete with stories of violence, political intrigue, intense emotions, as also episodes of incandescent resistance. Together, we will trace the genealogy of how modern categories of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ were systematically composed by colonial knowledge production, orientalist writings, and utilitarian discourse, both in Europe and the colonies. While colonialism and the global hegemony of European modernity were crucial to the co-constitution and the circulation of caste and race, anti-caste and anti-race politics too have historically brought a unique comparative lens to these two categories. And so, this course will also include a close analysis of critical works on caste and race by activists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present from all over the world. Also Offered As: GSWS 0511, SAST 0511, SOCI 0511 1 Course Unit
This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding protest print forms like the magazine, cultural journal and newspaper produced by anticolonial movements of the global south. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: COML 0745, ENGL 0745 1 Course Unit
Sociology provides a unique way to look at human behavior and social interaction. Sociology is the systematic study of the groups and societies in which people live. In this introductory course, we analyze how social structures and cultures are created, maintained, and changed, and how they affect the lives of individuals. We will consider what theory and research can tell us about our social world.
or AFRC 2430 Race, Science & Justice or SOCI 1060 Race and Ethnic Relations or SOCI 2430 Race, Science & Justice Or any course with attribute AAFT (https:// catalog.upenn.edu/attributes/aaft/)
This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociological study of urban areas. This includes more general topics as the rise of cities and theories urbanism, as well as more specific areas of inquiry, including American urbanism, segregation, urban poverty, suburbanization and sprawl, neighborhoods and crime, and immigrant ghettos. The course will also devote significant attention to globalization and the process of urbanization in less developed counties. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: LALS 1090, SOCI 1090, URBS 1090 1 Course Unit
The readings for this course expose students to a wide range of American fiction and poetry since World War II, giving considerable attention to recent work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CIMS 1092, ENGL 1092 1 Course Unit
Images and beliefs about Jesus have always been a compelling part of American life. This course seeks to examine the social, political, religious and artistic ways that Jesus has been appropriated and used in American life, making him a unique figure for exploring American religious life. Special attention will be given to how Jesus is used to shape social and political concerns, including race, gender, sexuality and culture. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: RELS 1100 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This course is designed to explore major themes and events in early American legal history. Because of the richness of the subject matter and the wealth of sources available, we will be selective in our focus. The course will emphasize several core areas of legal development that run throughout colonial and early national history: 1) the state: including topics such as war and other military or police action, insurrection, revolution, regulation, courts, economic policy, and public health; 2) labor: including race and racially-based slavery, varied forms of servitude and labor coercion, household labor, industrialization, unionization, and market development; 3) property: including property in persons, land, and business, and the role of lawyers in promoting the creation of wealth; 4) private spaces: including family, individual rights, sexuality, gender, and private relations of authority; 5) constitutionalism: various methods of setting norms (rules, principles, values) that create, structure, and define the limits of government power and authority in colonial/imperial, state, and national contexts; 6) democracy and belonging: including questions of citizenship, voting rights, and participation in public life. By placing primary sources within historical context, the course will expose students to the ways that legal change has affected the course of American history and contemporary life. The course will be conducted primarily in lecture format, but I invite student questions and participation. In the end, the central aim of this course is to acquaint students with a keen sense of the ways that law has operated to liberate, constrain, and organize Americans. Ideally, students will come away with sharper critical thinking and reading skills, as well. *This course is a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor (LSHS).*
Religious beliefs of Malcolm X and MLK formed their social action during the Civil Rights for African Americans. This seminar will explore the religious religious biographies of each leader, how religion shaped their public and private personas, and the transformative and transgressive role that religion played in the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and abroad. Students in this course will leave with a clearer understanding of religious beliefs of Christianity, The Nation of Islam, and Islam, as well as religiously based social activism. Other course emphases include the public and private roles of religion within the context of the shaping of ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality in the United States, the role of the "Black church" in depicting messages of democracy and freedom, and religious oratory as exemplified through MLK and Malcolm X.
Southern culture and history from 1607-1860, from Jamestown to seccession. Traces the rise of slavery and plantation society, the growth of Southern sectionalism and its explosion into Civil War. Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either Also Offered As: HIST 1121 1 Course Unit
After introducing students to the major theoretical concepts concerning law and society, significant controversial societal issues that deal with law and the legal systems both domestically and internationally will be examined. Class discussions will focus on issues involving civil liberties, the organization of courts, legislatures, the legal profession an administrative agencies. Although the focus will be on law in the United States, law and society in other countries of Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America will be covered in a comparative context. Readings included research reports, statutes and cases.
This class provides an introduction to contemporary African politics. The core questions that motivate the course are (i) to what extent are political outcomes in contemporary Africa a consequence of its history, culture and geography? (ii.) Why are state structures and institutions weaker in Africa than elsewhere? (iii.) What accounts for Africa's relatively slow economic growth? (iv.) Why have some African countries been plagued by high levels of political violence while others have not? (v.) What explains the behavior of key African actors: parties or politicians?
This course examines the concept of Blackness within Israeli popular culture and contemporary art. We will explore how Blackness is constructed, represented, and contested in Israeli-Jewish society, considering both its historical roots and evolving meanings. Central questions will include: Who is considered Black in Israel? and How does Blackness in Israel compare to Blackness in the United States? Focusing primarily on two major groups within Jewish society — Mizrahi Jews and Ethiopian Jews — the course will analyze their representation in mainstream Israeli culture, and how these representations are challenged by contemporary non-white artists. A range of visual art forms will be incorporated to deepen our understanding of the cultural narratives at play. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: JWST 1145, MELC 1660 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 983
This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 1160, LALS 1160 1 Course Unit
AFRC 1166A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered (SNF Paideia Program
d Course) Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people. Also Offered As: ASAM 1166, HIST 1166, LALS 1166 1 Course Unit
This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through- lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time.
This course will trace the history of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the present. Charting its course out of the smoldering aftermath of the post-Civil War South, it will track a narrative of politics economics, and culture across more than 150 years of life in the modern American South. The course will include deep examinations of race, gender, and culture, including a broad set of Southern stories and voices in an interdisciplinary journey across what is perhaps America’s most storied region. Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either Also Offered As: HIST 1171 1 Course Unit
This course examines the experiences of Africans and African Americans in colonial America and in the United States to 1865. We will explore a variety of themes through the use of primary and secondary sources. Topics include: the development of racial slavery, labor, identity, gender, religion, education, law, protest, resistance, and abolition.
This course provides a study of the major events, issues, and personalities in African American history from Reconstruction to the , present. It introduces the freedom-oriented practices for Black progress, social transformation, and well-being that African Americans have pursued through varieties of advocacy, organizing, and cultural creativity in the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and early-twenty-first centuries. Students will explore this history while maintaining an analytical focus on intersecting factors in the pursuit of Black freedom in the United States, including class, (dis)ability, gender, generation, orientation, race, region, and religion.
English is a global language with a distinctly imperial history, and this course serves as an essential introduction to literary works produced in or about the former European colonies. The focus will be poetry, film, fiction and non fiction and at least two geographic areas spanning the Americas, South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa as they reflect the impact of colonial rule on the cultural representations of identity, nationalism, race, class and gender. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CIMS 1190, COML 1190, ENGL 1190, GSWS 1190, SAST 1190 1 Course Unit
An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 1200, GSWS 1201 1 Course Unit
This course is designed to provide students with a broad introduction to possession experiences in Caribbean Religions. Through historical, ethnographic, autobiographical, literary and visual texts this course examines complex, gendered practices within the possession process, the vibrant spiritual energy that sustains communal connections during religious ceremonies, and the transnational imaginations that animate Caribbean religious practices in the Americas. Special attention will be given to Santeria, Candomble, Vodou, Myal, Palo Monte, and Revival Zion in the Americas. Possession is a process through which gender and sexuality can be performed, contesting national and regional discourses of sexuality, gender, and race in the Caribbean. Thematically, we will work through concepts of memory, community, adornment, ritual, borders, and the senses. We will investigate religious ritual practices to understand various religious worldviews that shape communities' religious and social lives. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit
This class introduces students to the United States Constitution, specifically Articles I, II, III, the Tenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment. The format for each class will consist of a 45-minute lecture followed by small group discussions on assigned issues and questions.
This course examines American constitutional development from the eve of WWI through the second Obama administration. Topics include the growth of the New Deal and a Great Society regulatory and redistributive state, struggles for equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women and GLBT Americans, contests over freedoms of religion and expression, criminal justice issues, the Reagan Revolution and the revival of federalism and property rights, and issues of nationalsecurity powers after September 11, 2001. Also Offered As: PSCI 1206 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 985
That modernism is steeped as much in the rituals of race as of innovation is most evident in the emergence of the music we have come to know as jazz, which results from collaborations and confrontations taking place both across and within the color line. In this course we will look at jazz and the literary representations it engendered in order to understand modern American culture. We will explore a dizzying variety of forms, including autobiography and album liner notes, biography, poetry, fiction, and cinema. We'll examine how race, gender, and class influenced the development of jazz music, and then will use jazz music to develop critical approaches to literary form. Students are not required to have a critical understanding of music. Class will involve visits from musicians and critics, as well as field trips to some of Philadelphia's most vibrant jazz venues. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 1210 1 Course Unit
All across the continent, Africa is alive with the energies of young people, expressed in music, art, fashion, drama, video, poetry, protest, and urban legends. In this course, we take a close look at the wide variety of popular forms produced and consumed by young people in a diversity of contexts, urban and rural, elite and marginal, mainstream and transgressive. We will examine how popular culture draws from African tradition to craft innovative versions of modernity and futurity. We will explore themes of democracy, inequality, and social justice threaded through popular genres as well as experiences of joy, anger, fear, and hilarity. We will see how popular culture provides escape and entertainment for young people while also working to transform African societies.
This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples.
This class explores diverse readings and perspectives on the African Diaspora. Through works on history, culture, aesthetics and literature, and materials taken from Africa, the Caribbean, the US and Europe, we will explore the multiple meanings of the concept of Diaspora and its role in identity formation in the late twentieth century cultures of the Atlantic basin. We will pay particular attention to the ways the experiences of slavery and dislocation - and by corollary, rootedness and mobility - have constituted foundational tropes for Black Atlantic identities, both historically and in the contemporary period. We will also examine how the diaspora concept subverts Eurocentric formulations of nationalism, citizenship, and cultural belonging.
This course is designed to provide the students with a broad understanding of the history of Islam in Africa. The focus will be mostly on West Africa, but we will also look at developments in other regions of the continent. We will explore Islam not only as religious practice but also as ideology and an instrument of social change. We will examine the process of islamization in Africa and the different uses of Jihad. Topics include prophetic jihad, jihad of the pen and the different varieties of jiha of the sword throughout the history in Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.
This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present. Also Offered As: CIMS 1358, HIST 1358 1 Course Unit
This course is an exploration of the family of musical idioms called jazz. Attention will be given to issues of style development, selective musicians, and to the social and cultural conditions and the scholarly discourses that have informed the creation, dissemination and reception of this dynamic set of styles from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Fulfills Cultural Diversity in the U.S. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MUSC 1400 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 1475Brazil: The Long Struggle for Democracy, 1500-Present
In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has d shaped and been shaped by global events. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: HIST 1475, LALS 1475 1 Course Unit
This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person- to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process. Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.
AFRC 1510Music of Africa (SNF Paideia Program Course)
African Contemporary Music: North, South, East, and West. Come to know contemporary Africa through the sounds of its music: from South African kwela, jazz, marabi, and kwaito to Zimbabwean chimurenga; Central African soukous and pygmy pop; West African Fuji, and North African rai and hophop. Through reading and listening to live performance, audio and video recordings, we will examine the music of Africa and its intersections with politics, history, gender, and religion in the colonial a post colonial era. (Formerly Music 053). Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MUSC 1510 1 Course Unit
African Contemporary Music: North, South, East, and West. Come to know contemporary Africa through the sounds of its music: from South African kwela, jazz, marabi, and kwaito to Zimbabwean chimurenga; Central African soukous and pygmy pop; West African Fuji, and North African rai and hophop. Through reading and listening to live performance, audio and video recordings, we will examine the music of Africa and its intersections with politics, history, gender, and religion in the colonial a post colonial era. Also Offered As: MUSC 1511 1 Course Unit
AFRC 1560Seeing/Hearing Globally (SNF Paideia Program Course)
This is a Penn Global Seminars Abroad semester long class with travel abroad after. It focuses on the interrelationship of music, arts, community-building, land, politics, and history. Places covered in coursework and travel vary by semester, and students have to apply for the class through Penn Global. The class is limited in student participation to no more than 20 students. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 1560, MUSC 1560 1 Course Unit
This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: HIST 0835, MELC 1600 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 987
This class examines the global ramifications of the era of Atlantic revolutions from the 1770s through the 1820s. With a particular focus on French Saint Domingue and Latin America, it provides an overview of key events and individuals from the period. Along the way, it assesses the impact of the American and French revolutions on the breakdown of colonial regimes across the Americas. Students will learn how to nd think critically about citizenship, constitutional power, and independence movements throughout the Atlantic world. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were seriously challenged in places such as Haiti, and the class investigates the appropriation and circulation of revolutionary ideas by enslaved people and other subaltern groups. Also Offered As: HIST 1625, LALS 1625 1 Course Unit
This class examines the cultural and social ramifications of the African diaspora on a global level. It is divided into two major sections. The first section provides the historical background to the African diaspora by focusing on the forced migration of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. We will then delve into the black experience nd in French and British colonial spaces. In this section, we will also endeavor to move beyond the Atlantic-centric paradigm in studies of the African diaspora by examining free and unfree migrations of African people across the Indian Ocean to places as far away as India and the Philippines. The second half of the class devotes significant attention to the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism in places like Brazil, Cuba and the United States. In this section, we will discuss such issues as race relations, the struggle for civil rights for African-descent people as well as the emergence and the implementation of affirmative action policies in places like Brazil and the US.
Never before has poetry been so inescapable. Hip hop, the soundtrack of our times, has made rhyme, meter, and word-play part of our daily lives. How did this happen? This course ranges through oral and lyric traditions in Europe, the Americas, and the Commonwealth. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.
AFRC 1880African American Drama: Origins to present
This course will introduce students to African American drama from its origins to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
AFRC 2130Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition
The total number of incarcerated peoples in the United States is currently around 2.1 million people, held across various carceral sites – jails, immigration detention centers, and state and federal prisons. If we include all human beings under the direct control of the criminal justice system in the tally, not just the actively incarcerated but those on probation or parole as well, that number swells to approximately eight- million adults, or one person in thirty-seven (Wacquant, 2009). The United States, in both absolute terms and as a percent of its population, is the of most aggressive incarcerator of its own citizens in the world. If those under supervision of the criminal justice system were counted as a city population, it would be the second most populous in the country just behind New York City. Currently, one of every six Black men in the United States has been or is currently locked up, and one in three is destined to be at some point in their life. One in six Latinx men will similarly find themselves locked down throughout their life-course. Forty- percent of Black males from the nation’s “hyperghettos” (Wacquant) between the ages of 18 and 35 years-old are under some form of carceral control, and police and prisons are often the primary contact between young Black men and the state. It was within this context that in the summer of 2020, the nation witnessed the extra-legal police executions of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Subsequent civil disobedience actions rocked the country from coast to coast with calls to “defund the police” and “end mass incarceration.” As a result, the notion of police/prison abolition has entered mainstream political discourse to a remarkable degree not witnessed in generations. And its appearance has spawned strident debate across the political spectrum about the viability of police and/or prison abolition, its potential societal effect(s) and/or abolition’s very necessity or even its desirability. The aims of this seminar are twofold. First, we will engage a set of interdisciplinary texts (Sociological, Philosophical, Black Studies, Geographical, Autobiographical, Ethnographic etc.) to develop a broad understanding of that complex set of forces that have transformed the United States into the most rapacious incarcerator of its own citizens of any nation in the global state system. Said straightforwardly, we want to explore the questions: why do we have such a large prison system in the United States and how did it come to be? What work does the prison do on behalf of civil society and why does it deleteriously impact communities of color most profoundly? Secondly, this seminar will work to develop a broad familiarity with abolitionist discourse not only with regards to the questions raised above, but also to develop an understanding of abolitionist perspectives/orientations on what we can, should or even must do about prisons, policing and carcerality – “mass” incarceration - more broadly. In order to realize these contextualizations, this seminar is organized across three larger themes each thinking about “mass” incarceration from a differing vantage - whether external and/or internal to the prison itself: 1. An examination of the political, social, economic and historical forces that have built contemporary carcerality in both ideology and in material fact, 2. A familiarization with abolitionist perspectives on “what must be done” to challenge racialized “mass” incarceration as well as abolitionists’ critique of mainstream political proposals on police and/or prison reform, and 3. An analysis of the carceral interior through the politicized writings of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated abolitionist thinkers as well as those scholars who take the culture/institutions internal to the prison as proper site for abolitionist intervention.
AFRC 2140Tutankhamun’s Tomb: Its Treasures and Significance
This course examines the short life of the young boy king and what the discovery of his tomb and its contents mean in terms of Egypt’s long history and accomplishments. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MELC 2140 Mutually Exclusive: MELC 6140 1 Course Unit
This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States. Also Offered As: ASAM 2159, GSWS 2159, HIST 2159 1 Course Unit
This course will examine the classical phase of the African American Civil Rights Movement between the years 1954 and 1968. Focusing primarily on the American South, this class will explore the nature of Jim Crow- era racial segregation and the origins and effects of the massive rise in social protests that fundamentally reshaped race in the United States of America and influenced social and political movements across the world. We will study iconic civil rights campaigns and legendary figures, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1964 Freedom Summer, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also closely examining the activism of lesser-known actors and analyzing how dramatic racial alterations affected the lives of everyday people. Also Offered As: HIST 2161 Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3151 1 Course Unit
The goal of this course is to study the role the law has played, and continues to play, in addressing the problems of racial discrimination in the United States. Contemporary issues such as racial profiling, affirmative action, and diversity will all be covered in their social and legal context. The basis for discussion will be assigned texts, articles, editorials and cases. In addition, interactive videos will also be used to aid class discussion. Course requirements will include a term paper and class case presentations.
In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2200 1 Course Unit
This course, Journeys in Black Feminism, is a survey of Black feminist thought and theory, both in the United States and transnationally. The course considers what constitutes Black feminism and womanism, and it allows students to learn about the expansiveness of Black feminist theory. Journeys in Black Feminism is divided into three sections: 1) Black Feminism: What Is It?, 2) Transnational Black Feminism, and 3) New Horizons in Black Feminism. In the first section, we will read fundamentals in Black feminist theory such as the Combahee River Collective’s “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), selections from Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), chapters from bell hooks’ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), essays from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984), and selections from Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990). In section 2, the transnational section, we will read from Carol Boyce Davies Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (translated from French) (1986), the introduction and chapter about I, Tituba from Kaiama Glover’s A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (2020), and selections from Lorraine Leu and Christen Smith’s Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas (2023). Finally, in the third section, we will read contemporary Black feminist theory such as the introduction and preface to C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), selections from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), and the introduction to Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’ Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022). Ultimately, students should leave this course feeling knowledgeable in the fundamentals of Black feminist theory and thought. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: GSWS 2200 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This course examines the coming to pass of trap music from several perspectives: 1) that of its technological foundations and innovations (the Roland 808, Auto-tune, FL Studio (FruityLoops), etc.); 2) that of it masters/mastery (its transformation of stardom through the figures of the producer (Metro Boomin) and the rock star (Future)); 3) that of its interpretability and effects (what does the music say and do to us). We will thus engage with this music as a practice of art and form of techno- sociality that manifests uncanny and maximal attunement with the now. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2210 1 Course Unit
Restoring women to African history is a worthy goal, but easier said than done.The course examines scholarship over the past forty years that brings to light previously overlooked contributions African women have made to political struggle, religious change, culture preservation, and economic development from pre-colonial times to present. The course addresses basic questions about changing women's roles and human rights controversies associated with African women within the wider cultural and historical contexts in which their lives are lived. It also raises fundamental questions about sources, methodology, and representation, including the value of African women's oral and written narrative and cinema production as avenues to insider perspectives on African women's lives. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: GSWS 2220 1 Course Unit
This course explores the experimentation with creating new forms (in poetry, drama, visual art, and music) during the 1960s and early 1970s Black Arts Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: ENGL 2225 1 Course Unit
African storytellers entertain, educate, and comment obliquely on sensitive and controversial issues in artful performance. The course considers motifs, structures, and interpretations of trickster tales and other folktales, storytellers performance skills, and challenges to presenting oral narrative in written and film texts. The course also explores ways traditional storytelling has inspired African social reformers and artists, particularly filmmakers. Students will have opportunities to view films in class.
Africa has interwoven linkages for centuries with the Arabian Peninsula, and India, politically, historically, geographically, and culturally. These s linkages were represented in continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The ancient world of Africa, Arabia, and India had served as an epicenter of the global economy in the pre-modern world. As such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. The eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from India and Arabia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions, India, and Arabia are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalence of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between these three regions are also apparent in several archeological sites and in the expansion that allowed the populations in these areas to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats. The objectives of this course are to achieve the followings: • Explore the geographic and historical interconnectedness between Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and India. • Examine the history of the different forces that have shaped the cultural landscape of the African shores with reference to India and the Arabian Peninsula. • Examine the political, economic, and cultural interconnections between Africa, Arabia, and India and the impact of Europe's colonial expansion. •Explore the historical concept of globalization and the challenges of inter-disciplinary study and research in the study of Africa and its neighbors.
AFRC 2238Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2338, LALS 2238 1 Course Unit
Beginning with discussion of various perspectives on social change and law, this course then examines in detail the interdependent relationship between changes in legal and societal institutions. Emphasis will be placed on (1) how and when law can be an instrument for social change, and (2) how and when social change can cause legal change. In the assessment of this relationship, emphasis will be on the laws of the United States. However, laws of other countries and international law relevant to civil liberties, economic, social and political progress will be studied. Throughout the course, discussions will include legal controversies relevant to social change such as issues of race, gender and the law. Other issues relevanat to State-Building and development will discussed. A comparative framework will be used in the analysis of this interdependent relationship between law and social change.
This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography, and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political significance of black bodies in motion. 1 Course Unit
The aim of the course is to provide an overall perspective on African languages and linguistics. No background in linguistics is necessary. Students will be introduced to theoretical linguistics-its concepts, theories, ways of argumentation, data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation. The focus will be on the languages and linguistics of Africa to provide you with the knowledge and skills required to handle the language and language-related issues typical of African conditions. We will cover topics related to formal linguistics (phonology/phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics), aspects of pragmatics as well as the general socio-linguistic character of African countries. We will also cover language in context, language and culture, borrowing, multilingualism, and cross-cultural communication in Africa.
This course explores an aspect of race and ethnicity intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 2250 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 991
This course is designed to introduce students to the multiple methods of engaging Africana entrepreneurship, public service and philanthropy. Alongside a thorough review of both popular and independent activist media, students will be trained to use accessible technology to participate in international communications networks. "Big ideas," will be translated into succinct artistic statements. We will look intimately at the architecture of David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates; the initiatives of Majora Carter for Sustainable South Bronx and Majora Carter Group; the philanthropic equity of Vista Equity Partners and C.E.O. Robert Smith, and the political work of Mayor Ras Baraka, City of Newark among other examples from the public and private sector throughout the African Diaspora. Prior to the development of our own app ideas, we will focus on the urban market advertising strategies of majority companies that are lauded for their sustainable initiatives including Nike, Hewlett-Packard and Apple. We will also use as secondary resources macro approaches to sustainability from the United Nations Foundation. This course makes an argument for inclusion of race, class and gender equity in the evolving definition of sustainability. Our argument, consistent with the growth of so many of these professionals inside of and clearly influenced by hip- hop culture, is that they are best prepared, culturally, to "make something out of nothing." Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit
AFRC 2310Gender, Sexuality, and Literature Seminar
This advanced seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 2310, ENGL 2310, GSWS 2310 1 Course Unit
The end of colonial rule was the springboard for the start of cold wars in various regions of Africa. Where peace could not be maintained violence erupted. Even where secession has been attained, as in the new country of South Sudan, the threat of civil war lingers. While domestic politics have led to the rise of armed conflicts and civil wars in many African countries, the external factors should also not be ignored. Important in all current conflicts is the concern to international peace and security. Overall this course will: (1) investigate the general nature of armed conflicts in Africa (2) provide in-depth analysis of the underlying factors (3) and discuss the regional and the international responses to these conflicts and their implications. Special emphasis will be placed upon African conflicts and civil wars in: great Lakes area, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.
Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio- economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced b the surrounding forces.
AFRC 2350Migration and Refugees in African History
This seminar will examine the experiences of recent African emigrants and refugees within and from the continent Africa from a historical and comparative perspective. We will look at the relations of overseas Africans with both their home and host societies, drawing on some of the extensive comparative literature on immigration, ethnic diasporas, and transnationalism. Other topics include reasons for leaving Africa, patterns of economic and educational adaptation abroad, changes in gender and generational roles, issues of cultural, religious, and political identity, and the impact of international immigration policies. Students will have the opportunity to conduct focused research on specific African communities in Philadelphia or elsewhere in North America, Europe, or the Middle East. We will employ a variety of sources and methodologies from different disciplines--including newspapers, government and NGOs, literature and film, and diaspora internet sites--to explore the lives, aspirations, and perceptions of Africans abroad. History Majors may complete the research requirement if their paper is based on primary sources. Students not seeking credit for the research requirement may write papers drawing on secondary sources exclusively. Class will consist of a combination of lectures (including several by invited guests), discussions, video y screenings, and presentations by students of their research in progress.
AFRC 2401Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of
the Colonial Caribbean This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention t the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.
In August 1791, enslaved Africans on the northern plain of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) rose up in a coordinated attack against their French colonial masters, launching the initial revolt in what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. In the years that followed, their actions forced the abolition of racial discrimination and slavery throughout the French Empire. When Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to return slavery to Saint Domingue, they waged a war for independence, declaring Haiti the world's first "Black Republic" in 1804. This seminar will examine some of the major themes and debates surrounding Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history. We will begin by considering the colonial paradox: France's leading role in the intellectual movement called the "Enlightenment" coincided with its ascent as a slaveholding colonial power. The seminar will also explore parallels and points of connection between the revolutionary movements in France and Saint Domingue: how did increasingly radical ideas in France shape events in the Caribbean? Likewise, how did west African traditions and political ideologies influence insurgents and their leaders? And how, in turn, did revolution in the Caribbean impact the revolution in France? Finally, we will ask how the Haitian Revolution influenced ideas about liberty, sovereignty and freedom throughout the Atlantic World. We will read a combination of primary and secondary materials each week. A final research paper will be required of all students.
What is the role of the life and social sciences in shaping our understanding of race? How has racial stratification influenced scientists and how have scientists constructed racial difference and helped to maintain or contest racial inequities? How have these racial theories shaped the production of scientific knowledge and the way we think about human bodies, diversity, and commonality—and what are the consequences for justice in our society? This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, o from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, medicine, and public health, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.
AFRC 2501The Science-Fictions of Octavia E. Butler
This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings. Also Offered As: ENGL 2501, GSWS 2501 1 Course Unit
AFRC 2545Sex, Love, and Race in African American Life and History
This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.
AFRC 2548Black Women’s Activism in the United States
This advanced undergraduate course examines African-American women’s history in the U.S., with an emphasis on social activism, politics, and cultural production. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of African-American women’s lives from slavery to the contemporary period. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 2670, LALS 2670 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6670 1 Course Unit
AFRC 2715Beyond Race: a Conceptual Framework for the 21st Century
This course will visit some of the existing studies that contradict, facilitate and challenge the extant discourses on hierarchies and status observed through the conceptualisation of race and caste. These two concepts have overlapped throughout the past two hundred years. The concept of caste is as old as the nineteenth century, seen through public policy interventions led by Boston Senator Charles Sumner. Similarly, race is studied through the South Asian topography by colonialists such as Herbert Risely, emphasizing the racial dimensions of societies. These studies were influential for the next one hundred years. But they were also challenged and critiqued. These studies aid us in informing the contemporary scales of societies that weigh oppression and control through antecedent-held concepts of race and caste, which can be effectively understood through colour-castes, a term popularized by Du Bois. In this course, we will study cross-national historical, anthropological, and political debates to make sense of our times. Students will learn about the twenty-first century’s new concepts and what they mean to our times and near future. Also Offered As: HIST 2715, SAST 2715 1 Course Unit
AFRC 2716Color, Caste and Global Resistance Movements 1920-2020s
Caste is one of the oldest surviving forms of hierarchy, and it has many avatars and forms. While color is a recent invention that has taken the form of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the West, caste refers to a much older order comprising diverse socio-cultural relations. This course explores these systems of hierarchies through the lens of caste and color tracing how 20th-century political upheavals—from global decolonization to the U.S. Civil Rights movement—to the Reconstruction of modern Europe—reshaped how we understand identity and belonging in a mobile, post-war world. We will examine iconic movements from the 1920s to 2020s, including anti-caste resistance in India and Nepal, as well as the Civil Rights Campaigns and Black Solidarity Movements of the UK and beyond. Also Offered As: HIST 2716, SAST 2716 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 2760African American Life and Culture in Slavery
This course will examine the lives of enslaved African Americans in the United States, both in the North and the South. We will engage historiographical debates, and tackle questions that have long concerned historians. For example, if slaves were wrenched from families and traded, could they sustain family relationships? If slaves worked from sun-up until sun-down, how could they create music? We will engage with primary and secondary sources to expand our understandings of values, cultural practices, and daily life among enslaved people. Topics will include: literacy, family, labor, food, music and dance, hair and clothing, religion, material culture, resistance, and memories of slavery. Several disciplines including History, Archaeology, Literature, and Music, will help us in our explorations. Written, oral, and artistic texts for the course will provide us with rich sources for exploring the nuances of slave life, and students will have opportunities to delve deeply into topics that are of particular interest to them. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: HIST 0710 1 Course Unit
This course will explore the different dimensions of everyday life in Africa. Everyday life has been described by Agnes Heller (1978) as “the secret yeast of history.” What constitutes this “yeast of history” in contemporary Africa? In exploring everyday life, we will examine the existing (in)capacities in the structures of state and society in Africa for human well-being in relation to the differences between political life (bios) and bare life (zoe). The course engages with the everyday life in terms of how social, economic, and political lives are constituted and the implications of this process for whether Africans live well or not, how they die, and their struggles for alternative lives. With (ethnographic) accounts and perspectives from different countries in Africa, the course focuses deeply on how to understand and explain the conditions under which everyday social needs and economic necessities are turned into political/ existential struggles as well as the conditions under which political exigencies can transform into economic, social and bodily fatalities. The overarching questions that will animate this course include these: What are the prevalent conditions of everyday life in Africa? What and who determines (in)eligibility regarding the everyday tools of good life and human survival? How are these determinations related to the differential distribution of potential and/or actual injury, harm, and damage to human life and the conditions of its survival? What can ethnographic insight contribute to our understanding of everydayness in Africa? The roles of sexualities, gender, generation, humor, identities, racism, hate, memory, memorial, transactions, etc., in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of daily life – and death – in the continent will be examined. Audio-visual materials will be used to analyze important themes about quotidian life in Africa.
AFRC 2800"In the Dark We Can All Be Free": Black Queer, Feminist &
Trans Art(s) of Abolition If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities? In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongsid a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art. Also Offered As: ARTH 3989, GSWS 2800 1 Course Unit
The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the nation and how to represent it, developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the artistic practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the ramifications of colonialism, colonial masquerade, post-colonial monuments and memorials, the African influence on Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, colonial arts education, and the South African built environment under and after Apartheid. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 2850 1 Course Unit
The objectives are to continue to strengthen students' knowledge of speaking, listening, reading, and writing Swahili and to compare it with the language of the students; to continue learning about the cultures of East Africa and to continue making comparisons with the culture(s) of the students; to continue to consider the relationship between that knowledge and the knowledge of other disciplines; and using that knowledge, to continue to unite students with communities outside of class. Level 3 on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale.
AFRC 2852The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance
This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day. BAM artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, producers, directors, and teachers, shared a goal to develop an alternative theatre based in Africanist and Black aesthetics combining poetry, music, and dance in a non-linear fashion allowing stories to e emerge through alternative and abstract structures that are activist in nature. We will ground our examination of the period in a growing global black consciousness, as well as the relationship between black aesthetics and self-determination. The course will explore a breadth of mid twentieth century Black experimental theatre ranging from Jean Genet’s The Blacks and Imamu Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, to Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoems, and the performance poetry Jayne Cortez. The course culminates in the work of present-day performance artists that have taken up and evolved the form. The course is designed to incorporate theory and practice through play and poetry readings, movement investigations, student presentations of Theatre/Performance Artists, and viewing performances either virtually or in person. Students will develop either a choreopoem of their own or curate an imagined Black Arts Movement theatre festival or season. Also Offered As: ENGL 2850, THAR 2850 1 Course Unit
In recent decades, many African countries have perennially ranked very high among the most religious. This course serves as an introduction to major forms of religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis will be devoted to the indigenous religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as they are practiced on the continent. We will examine how these religious traditions intersect with various aspects of life on the continent. The aim of this class is to help students to better understand various aspects of African cultures by dismantling stereotypes and assumptions that have long characterized the study of religions in Africa. The readings and lectures are will be drawn from historical and a few anthropological, and literary sources. Also Offered As: HIST 0837, RELS 2870 1 Course Unit
This course concerns the exhibiting of Black Bodies in Museums and gallery spaces. We will trace the evolution of public history from the "Cabinets of Curiosity" in 18th and 19th Century Europe, through to the current institutional confirmation of the vindications traditions represented by Museu Afro Brasil (Sao Paulo, Brazil), National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington,D.C.), and the Museum of Black Civilization (Dakar, Senegal). We will give particular attention to "why these representations at these times in these places?." In the process of addressing these questions we will give voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content from those with the colonial mentality, to those with the abolitiionist and nationalist and Pan-African visions. Also Offered As: SOCI 2903 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 3051Housing, Race, and Community in the United States
One's home is the first site of self-identity, socialization, and notions of citizenship. In the United States, neighborhoods are the basic units of political organization, educational options, and familial wealth. This course explores the intersections between race and housing in the United States with a specific focus on the experiences of African-Americans in urban centers. The intersectional housing experiences of Asian, Latinx, first-generation immigrants, Arab, and indigenous communities will also be analyzed. This course represents both a timely and nuanced opportunity to address housing as a focal point of existing racial tensions and deepening socio-economic inequalities in the U.S. Increasingly, housing has become a contested subject, with heated debates concerning its status as a human, and potentially constitutional, right. Students will explore urban governance values, the commodification of urban landscapes, and the institutional dimensions of race in the United States. Students will develop a critical understanding of the underlying structural causation for the issues faced by minority populations seeking adequate, affordable, and safe housing in the U.S. Prior knowledge of urban planning, housing, or social policy is not necessary for this course. Students will finish the course equipped with a broad knowledge base of associated development topics including globalization, commodification, and social justice.
Students will develop techniques for generating poems along with the critical tools necessary to revise and complete them. Through in-class exercises, weekly writing assignments, readings of established and emerging poets, and class critique, students will acquire an assortment of resources that will help them develop a more concrete sense of voice, rhythm, prosody, metaphor, and images as well as a deeper understanding of how these things come together to make a successful poem. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in poetry who are interested in pushing their practice and learning new poetic forms, such as long poems, serial poems, cross-genre work, multimedia poetry, or poetry informed by research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https:// creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This seminar course will examine how sub-Saharan Africans have interpreted and dealt with issues of health, healing, and medicine under colonial and postcolonial regimes. It will also look at how various social, economic, religious, and political factors have impacted health and healing on the continent and shaped African responses. Class discussions will center around both general themes affecting health and healing in Africa as well as case studies drawn from historical and anthropological works.
A creative writing workshop committed to experimentation. The workshop will be structured around writing experiments, collaborations, intensive readings, and new and innovative approaches to composition and form, which may also include work in digital, sound, and performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from its earliest stirrings in the 1st half of the twentieth-century to the boycotts, sit-ins, school desegregation struggles, freedom rides and marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. Among the question we will consider are: What inspired the Civil Rights movement, when does it begin and end, and how did it change American life? Readings will include both historical works and first-hand accounts of the movement by participants.
This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.
AFRC 3174Free State Slavery and Bound Labor Research Seminar
This seminar invites students to do original research into the stories of Black refugees – including escaped, kidnapped, sojourning, and other temporary or permanent residents of Pennsylvania. Their stories unfolded through contentious freedom suits, daring escapes on the Underground Railroad, newspaper wars, gun fights and thuggery, treason cases, and more. We have assembled an archive of statutes, legal cases, testimony, judicial and administrative decisions, newspaper stories, images, memoirs, maps, and more to help students get started with their research. In addition, students will have opportunities to pursue additional research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a co- sponsor of this course. Many of these materials have never been the subject of sustained study or placed in their historical context. Students will choose their topics in consultation with the professors and will produce research reports in written or digital or cinematic formats. Students are expected to contribute to the course website, a platform that will be available to the public as well as to the Penn community, and we aim to provide new information and venues for research. The course therefore will involve considerations of how best to convey what we learn, as well as explorations of historical methods and collaborating archives. Also Offered As: HIST 3174 1 Course Unit
AFRC 3200Making Latinidades: Culture, Community, and Consciousness
What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro- Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context. Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities. Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access. Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness.
This course will examine demographic and statistical methods used to capture the impact of racial stratification in society. This course covers the skills and insights used by demographers and social statisticians in the study of racial data. A key challenge facing researchers is the interpretation of the vast amount of racial data generated by society. As these data do not directly answer important social questions, data analysis and statistics must be used to interpret them. The course will examine the logic used to communicate statistical results from racial data in various societies. We will question the scientific claims of social science methodology by extending the critical perspective to biases that may underlie research methods. We will discuss good and bad practices within the context of the historical developments of the methods. Also Offered As: SOCI 3230 Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 6320 1 Course Unit
This course encourages a rethinking of the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement. In it, students will be pushed to think beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Students will understand Black agency, actions, and politics through careful reading of scholarship in the field, documentary film, and art. Students will also read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship. Each week students will focus on an individual case study, building upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today?
A creative writing workshop devoted to the art and practice of writing for children. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of the genre, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. This is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course.
This writing workshop will explore the craft of young adult literature. Students will focus on concerns crucial to writing about and for teens, such as voice, point of view, immediacy, and pacing, and will draw on the many possibilities available in YA literary fiction: blurred genres, unreliable narrators, surrealism, retellings, and issues of identity and self- discovery. We will look beyond straightforward prose into forms such as epistolary and verse novels and other experimental mashups. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https:// creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for children, including early chapter books and teen fiction. Exercises may include studies in voice, point of view, plot development, humor, description, developing a fantasy world, writing historical fiction, or memoir. Students will read and discuss a wide variety of published work for children and workshop the writing of their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https:// creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for young adults and want to spend the semester making significant progress toward a major work for young adults. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https:// creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Youth Voices Amplified is an improvisational workshop in creative nonfiction that connects you to current reporting opportunities; gives you structured choice in assignments; and teaches you how to write about hard subjects for and about young people. Big questions about the social, emotional, relational and physical structures that affect young people require clear, engaging prose that avoids self-importance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https:// creative.writing.upenn.edu.
This is a course for students who are looking for ways to use their writing to participate in electoral politics. Student writers will use many forms, including essay, social media posts, videos, scripts, and podcasts, to explore our desire to live responsibly in the world and to have a say in the systems that govern and structure us. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. Also Offered As: ENGL 3306 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
The Indian Ocean region represents an area with interwoven centuries of interactions, politically, historically, geographically and culturally. This area has witnessed continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The Indian Ocean world has served as an epicenter of global economy in pre- modern world and as such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. As part of the Indian Ocean World, the eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from Asia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions and the rest of the Indian Ocean world are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalent of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between the Indian Ocean world and the African shores are apparent in several archeological sites, as well as in the cultural practices of religion, language, architecture and modes of dress. The European colonial expansion, has allowed the populations in the Indian Ocean world to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and in addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.
This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3340, GSWS 3340 1 Course Unit
This course is a Global Seminar which includes a travel component; topics vary.Topics and locations may include Chile, Ghana, or China. For more information and to apply: https://global.upenn.edu/pennabroad/ pgs. 1 Course Unit
This course is designed to introduce students to the religious experiences of Africans and to the politics of culture. We will examine how traditional African religious ideas and practices interacted with Christianity and Islam. We will look specifically at religious expressions among the Yoruba, Southern African independent churches and millenarist movements, and the variety of Muslim organizations that developed during the colonial era. The purpose of this course is threefold. First, to develop in students an awareness of the wide range of meanings of conversion and people's motives in creating and adhering to religious institutions; Second, to examine the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in the expansion of religious social movements; And third, to investigate the role of religion as counterculture and instrument of resistance to European hegemony. Topics include: Mau Mau and Maji Maji movements in Kenya and Tanzania, Chimurenga in Mozambique, Watchtower churches in Southern Africa, anti-colonial Jihads in Sudan and Somalia and mystical Muslim orders in Senegal.
This seminar will explore the historical relationship between these two regions from the early modern age to the present. We will examine the history of trade, particularly the slave trade, and its cultural and politica legacy. We will compare the experiences of European imperialism--how the scramble for Africa dovetailed with the last decades of the Ottoman Empire--with an eye to how this shaped nationalist movements in both regions. The course will also explore the decades of independence with a special eye towards pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. We will also study the ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the relationship between African and Middle-Eastern countries, from Uganda to Ethiopia, from OPEC to Darfur. The course will pay close attention to migrations through the regions, whether forced or economic or religious. Whenever possible we will explore, through film and literature, how people in Africa and the Middle East see their connections, and their differences.
#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #ICantBreathe, #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, #BlackOutDay are just some of the many hashtags that Black people have created and use on social media to protest police brutality and proclaim their full humanity within the context of Blackness. Over the past three decades, Black people have created and utilized social media, along other digital platforms, media, and tools to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be Black in the United States and the larger world. This course is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between historical and contemporary cultural, social and political expressions of Blackness and what might be called the "Digital," the use of computers and computerized technologies, including the internet, to construct the world around us. More specifically, lectures, readings, and class discussions will help students deconstruct the cultural, political economy, and social construction of Blackness in the Digital in an effort to uncover the ways that race more broadly and Blackness more narrowly influences and shapes Black people's present social status and struggles for social justice. Accordingly, the course fosters a critical understanding of Blackness within the "Digital" and provides students with theoretical and practical apparatuses to analyze and develop new constructions of race and freedom using technology. Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms 1 Course Unit l
This course explores aspects of the origins, style development, aesthetic philosophies, historiography, and contemporary conventions of African- American musical traditions. Topics covered include: the music of West and Central Africa, the music of colonial America, 19th century church and dance music, minstrelsy, music of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, and film music. Special attention is given to the ways that black music produces "meaning" and to how the social energy circulating within black music articulates myriad issues about American identity at specific histroical moments. The course will also engage other expressive art forms from visual and literary sources in order to better position music making into the larger framework of African American aesthetics. (Formerly Music 146). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MUSC 3450 1 Course Unit
This course explores theories, debates, and frameworks in African American popular culture. Drawing on Africana, Gender and Sexuality, Communications and Performance Studies, it examines histories of Black representation across a number of performance forms. Television, film, dance, theater, music and more will be explored to interrogate the ways blackness has been defined, framed, and disseminated. What are the micro-politics through which racial difference is produced? How have Black people redefined and wrestled with questions of authenticity and "the real"? What are the capacities and the limits of popular culture to both render and shape Black life? In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the creative labor that Black people produce, and the processes of racialization produced through Black bodies. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COMM 3451, GSWS 3451 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 3460The Blackness of Rock: Revisiting Histories of Race, Gender
and Genre This course explores the history of rock music by focusing specifically g on the innovations and contributions of black musicians. The course will address itself to the legacies of race records, the uninterrupted appropriation of black sounds by white artists (think Elvis), and the further complications introduced by the British Invasion, all while , focusing on individual artists such as Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Jimi Hendrix. The course will highlight and offer hands-on explorations of the innovations brought to rock music by these black artists. And, because the guitar is such an iconic instrument in rock, the course also will introduce students, through a series of labs, to the gear that makes these sounds possible. Understanding how amplifiers, effects pedals, and guitars interact and produce radically divergent sounds depending on how they are set up will offer insights into the artistry of these early rock musicians. Understanding the circuits, and how using (and abusing) them in particular ways is part of the materiality of rock's sound, will help shed light on the extent to which creative engagement with technology determined particular sonic pathways within the genre (distortion, overdrive, fuzz, feedback, etc.). And, these innovations literally shaped the future of rock, providing a foundation of sound and style and a particular relationship to gear that extends into the present. The final unit of the course will explore the racial politics, gender dynamics, and industry structures that have buried the black histories of rock and sidelined women's crucial contributions to the genre, contributing to rock's framing and marketing as a (mostly) male, white genre. The course will also ask how black musicians who perform rock today, such as Tosin Abasi, Lenny Kravitz, Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes, Bad Brains, Big Joanie, and Living Colour, among many others, negotiate these politics, these silenced histories, these industry barriers, and these audience expectations?
This course concerns the exhibiting of Black Bodies in Museums and gallery spaces. We will trace the evolution of public history from the "Cabinets of Curiosity" in 18th and 19th Century Europe, through to the current institutional confirmation of the vindications traditions represented by Museu Afro Brasil (Sao Paulo, Brazil), National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington,D.C.), and the Museum of Black Civilization (Dakar, Senegal). We will give particular attention to "why these representations at these times in these places?." In the process of addressing these questions we will give voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content from those with the colonial mentality, to those with the abolitiionist and nationalist and Pan-African visions. Also Offered As: ANTH 3508, SOCI 3508 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5508, SOCI 6600 1 Course Unit
AFRC 3510Love, Anger, Madness: History and Silences in Modern Haiti
On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel- Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.
This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism. The course will be organized around the following objectives: 1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of social movements; 2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora; 3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, and rebellions; 4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.
AFRC 3518Haiti and the African Diaspora: Historical Methods
On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel- Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.
In this activity-centric course, you will explore art, medicine, and magic as entangled approaches for healing human bodies across time, space, and societies. At first glance, artists, doctors, and religious leaders may seem to address questions about bodies and healing in very different ways. Yet, in practice, art, magic, and medicine have been in deep conversation with one another for millennia. 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, medical doctors were professionals who had offices, hospital beds, and pharmacological and surgical equipment expertise, but they often worked hand in hand with diviners and exorcists. In rural Haiti today, Haitian Vodou priestesses collect herbs, craft sculptures, and sing as they clean wounds and dispense antibiotics within the course of a single "remed" (remedy). In the United States, megachurches send thousands of doctors on evangelical medical missions each year, while in Colombia, contemporary artists are called on to assuage profound social trauma related to decades of military conflict. Examples like these show that art, magic, and medical practice have long been entangled technologies; sometimes working together, sometimes at odds with one another, these practices have always been in dialog about what "healing" is and how it can be achieved. Attending to these entanglements this course asks "what does healing look like and feel like - in what ways do humans transform affliction?" Together, we will investigate how everyday bodily experiences of "wellbeing" and "illness" are configured through art, magic, and medical practices across human communities, shaping how people understand and manage disorders from COVID-19 to schizophrenia, from ancestral trauma to breast cancer. Throughout the course, you will use ethnographic case studies & in-class activities to work through three aspects of the core class question: 1) how do art, magic, and medicine work in communities? 2) how are they experienced in communities (who has access to what kind of healing and who doesn't have access; who can be a healer and who can't be; what should and does healing/sickness feel like?) 3) how do they approach inequalities? (e.g. how and why are illnesses unequally distributed; what illnesses matter more (and less) than others; which communities should be saved (and which sacrificed). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3540 1 Course Unit
This course focuses on the musical genres and styles (both traditional and popular) that have grown up around the accordion in the New World. We will begin our explorations in Nova Scotia and move toward the Midwest, travelling through the polka belt. From there, our investigation turns toward Louisiana and Texas--toward zydeco, Cajun, and Tex-Mex music. We will then work our way through Central and South America, considering norteno, cumbia, vallenato, tango, chamame, and forro. Our journey will conclude in the Caribbean, where we will spend some time thinking about merengue and rake-n-scrape music. Throughout the semester, the musical case studies will be matched by readings and film that afford ample opportunity to think about the ways that music is bound up in ethnicity, identity, and class. We will also have occasion to think about the accordion as a multiply meaningful instrument that continues to be incorporated into debates over cultural politics and mobilized as part of strategies of representation through the New World. (Formerly Music 157). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: LALS 3550, MUSC 3550 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This class provides an overview of the most popular musical styles and discussion of the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged in contemporary Africa. Learning to perform a limited range of African music/dance will be part of this course. No prior performance experience required. (Formerly Music 253). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2560, MUSC 3560 1 Course Unit
This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts-- concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North- American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258). Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 2570, LALS 3570, MUSC 3570 1 Course Unit
This creative and critical poetry writing workshop will focus on the study of poets associated with antiwar, feminist, leftist, queer/trans and racial justice liberatory movements. We will study the work of Pablo Neruda, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sean Bonney, Ntozake Shange, Jake Skeets, Chrystos, Natalie Diaz, Adelaide Ivánova, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez in relationship to the communities and movements which their work engages. Students will also work on their own poetry and will formulate innovative ways to present their work to a wider audience in the forms of video poems, zines, broadsides, social media posts, podcasts and letter print posters. Also Offered As: ENGL 3660, FNAR 3660, GSWS 3660, LALS 3660 1 Course Unit
AFRC 3665Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the
embodied archive Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3665, GSWS 3665 1 Course Unit
This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or
This course explores the relationship between art, religion, and power in pre-colonial Africa from 1500 to 1850, focusing on regions from Senegambia to Angola. Drawing on travelers’ accounts, missionary reports, Portuguese Inquisition documents, and early ethnographic records—alongside museum objects—students will examine how African communities used material culture to express spiritual beliefs, construct political authority, and resist external pressures. A central theme of the course is the study of amuletic bundles that circulated across West Africa and the Atlantic world. These objects serve as a case study for understanding broader African religious systems and the meanings ascribed to sacred materials across diasporic contexts. Students will work directly with primary sources and museum collections, including a visit to the Penn Museum, and will develop object-based analyses grounded in historical and critical methodologies.
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar's exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3770, FNAR 3770 1 Course Unit
AFRC 3800Undergraduate Research Seminar: Black@Penn
In this course, students will learn the basics of social science research, from the conception of a research project to its execution and analysis. Working individually and in teams, we will explore the basics of social science research methods—both qualitative and quantitative and extant research on the social, psychological, and academic experiences of Black college students. Using these as a starting point, students will develop and execute one or more research projects. This will include decisions about the topic to be studied, the scope of the project, methodology and design, data collection and analysis. Students will develop research skills and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively on such projects, what kinds of assumptions and/or conclusions can/cannot be drawn from different types of research, and methods for making the results of their research accessible to various audiences. This course satisfies either the Methodology requirement or the upper-level research requirement for the Africana Studies major.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community- building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity? Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 3804 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6804 1 Course Unit
AFRC 3812Afro-Latin America: Culture, History, and Society
A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production.
AFRC 3814The Caribbean and Its Diaspora: Culture, History, and Society
A thorough panorama of contemporary Caribbean societies and their diasporic communities, this course enhances the students' knowledge of the region's main historical, political, and sociocultural trends. We will examine Caribbean multiple narratives of survival and resilience within a global context, through the study of 20th and 21st-centuries literary, cinematographic, musical, visual and performative works. The cultural analysis will be supported by a theoretical framework encompassing critical Caribbean theories on identity and identification.
This co-taught course examines films with thematic and epochal focus on some of the major political and historical events of the 20th century that have resulted in revolutions. In this course, Brink and Revolution will be given equal emphasis, as many film makers document, or render plausible through fiction, failures as well as successes, new vistas as well as blind spots, in attempts at revolution. We seek to explore the arc of revolutions, their beginnings, conflicts, and propulsion as people in movement attempt to create new social, cultural and economic orders, and the efforts of film makers to chronicle their actions, manifestos, popular mobilization, conflicts and constraints. Marx’s dictum “Men make history, but not as they choose” is evident in many films that capture cinematically the dialectical tensions between institutions and people seeking to maintain an existing order, often with high doses of repression, and those social movements and actors with oppositional imaginaries of the political present and future. Yet we are expanding Marx’s dictum to encompasses people of all genders who make, act in, produce and serve as models for cinemas on the brink of revolution.
Consult the Africana Studies Department Undergraduate Chair or Undergraduate Coordinator for instructions. Suite 331A, 3401 Walnut, or visit the department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu.
In the senior year each student, working with a faculty advisor, must complete a substantial Capstone paper of 20-25-pages on a topic of the student’s choice within the chosen Concentration.
or AFRC 4990 Honors Course Total Course Units 32 You may count no more than one course toward both a Major and a Sector requirement. For Exceptions, check the Policy Statement (http:// www.college.upenn.edu/sectors-policy/). Select a Research Course at the 3000-4000 level.
This course is an examination and analysis of the changing images and achievements of African Americans in motion pictures and television. The first half of the course focuses on African-American film images from the early years of D.W. Griffith's "renegade bucks" in The Birth of a Nation (1915); to the comic servants played by Steppin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and others during the Depression era; to the post-World War II New Negro heroes and heroines of Pinky (1949) and The Defiant Ones (1958); to the rise of the new movement of African American directors such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Charles Burnett, (To Sleep With Anger) and John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood). The second half explores television images from the early sitcoms "Amos 'n Andy" and "Beulah" to the "Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," and "Martin." Foremost this course will examine Black stereotypes in American films and television--and the manner in which those stereotypes have reflected national attitudes and outlooks during various historical periods. The in-class screenings and discussions will include such films as Show Boat (1936), the independently produced "race movies" of the 1930s and 1940s, Cabin in the Sky (1943), The Defiant Ones (1958), Imitation of Life (the 1959 remake) & Super Fly (1972).
AFRC 4050Religion, Social Justice & Urban Development
Urban development has been influenced by religious conceptions of social and economic justice. Progressive traditions within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Baha'i, Humanism and other religions and systems of moral thought have yielded powerful critiques of oppression and hierarchy as well as alternative economic frameworks for ownership, governance, production, labor, and community. Historical and contemporary case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be considered, as we examine the ways in which religious responses to poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction have generated new forms of resistance and development.
This advanced seminar places contemporary Black spiritualities at the center of the study of African-descended peoples. Through recent books in the ethnography of Africana religions, spiritual communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that have established communities in the United States will constitute the focus of our course readings and anchor our weekly discussions. As an advanced seminar, our meetings will allow participants to interrogate the authors of these ethnographies. We will assess how these accounts have conceptualized the African diaspora and the vantages (“insiders” and “outsiders”) from which they describe religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Beyond considering the commonalities and distinctions in form and practice that characterize various African diasporic religious practices, participants will also work to understand the constructions of race and belonging, ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location that affect the lives of Black religious adherents.
AFRC 4200The US and Human Rights: Policies and Pratices
After an examination of the philosophical, legal, and political perspectives on Human Rights, this course will focus on US policies and practices relevant to Human Rights. Toward that end, emphasis will be placed on both the domestic and the international aspects of Human Rights as reflected in US policies and practices. Domestically, the course will discuss (1) the process of incorporating the International Bill of Human Rights into the American legal system and (2) the US position on and practices regarding the political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights of minorities and various other groups within the US. Internationally, the course will examine US Human Rights policies toward Africa. Specific cases of Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, as well as other cases from the continent, will be presented in the assessment of US successes and failures in the pursuit of its Human Rights strategy in Africa. Readings will include research papers, reports, statutes, treaties, and cases.
African-American Childhood is an upper-level seminar designed to introduce students to the literature on childhood and youth through the lens of African-American children's history. The class will demonstrate the relationship that race, gender, and age have in shaping children's experiences. Readings will focus on institutions serving African- American children, their participation in civil rights struggles, and the representation of African-American children in popular culture. The class will also consider children as political actors in major moments of African-American history. Class assignments will include two long research papers, presentations on course texts and a field trip. Students will strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
This advanced undergraduate course examines women’s role in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, with an emphasis on women’s activism, impact, and gender dynamics in social movements. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of women’s experiences in major organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.
SPRING 2017 - UNDERSTANDING AFRICA: This course will explore the economic, social, and political realities facing sub-Saharan Africa today by placing them in historical and global contexts. Key themes will include colonial and precolonial history, nationalist movements and cold war politics, economic development and foreign aid, ethnic and political conflicts, media representation and popular culture. The course will focus on local and global dynamics that have a role in shaping the present day Africa.
The fundamental query underlying this course is what is the relationship between dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring and race, specifically blackness? This course will draw upon a number of disciplines and fields including history, performance theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies to examine how blackness is fashioned, and refashioned within the United States and globally. Throughout the course we will investigate how not only race--but attendant issues of gender, sexuality and citizenship have all been constructed and contested through dress. Finally, we will explore what new and more nuanced insights might fashion, dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring offer us for understanding black subjectivities more broadly. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit
AFRC 4387Black Feminist Approaches to History and Memory
Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https:// africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.
This course examines the flourishing civilizations of the African continent between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the "Age of Discovery." Although material remains of the complex cultures that created exceptional works of art are rare, current archaeology is bringing much new information to the fore, allowing for the first time a preliminary survey of the burgeoning artistic production of the African continent while Europe was building its cathedrals. Bronze casting, gold work, terracotta and wood sculpture, and monumental architecture - the course takes a multi-media approach to understanding the rich foundations of African cultures and their deep interconnection with the rest of the world before the disruptive interventions of colonialism. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 4400 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6401 1 Course Unit
AFRC 4404Black Geographies and the Meaning of Land Rights
This course will interweave issues of land dispossession and land rights, both in Africa and in the Americas, with endogenous concepts and practices of space and place. Specifically, this course will trace the the concept of property, as developed among Europeans and European descendants, and explore how this concept interacted with the formation of the concept of race in order to established forms of social control and domination. The first part of this course will focus on Africa generally using Kenya as a case study. The material will cover the impact of colonialism and its legacy on land rights after independence. This first part will also explore contemporary forms of land dispossession happening through international land investments, often termed land grabs. The second part of the course will turn to the experiences of African descendants in the Americas. Using a few case studies, this section will examine different countries, histories, and rural and urban areas to unravel how different types of control over land interact with social relationships and specifically with the formation of race and racism. In both sections, we will also look at forms of resistance and resilience as local populations demand not only access to and control over land, but also impose their own ideologies of what it means to occupy space. By the end of this course, students should be able to more fully articulate the significance of control over land as it impacts and effects social relationships and specifically how it relates to the formation and continuation of inequalities along racial lines. Students will apply the concepts learned throughout the course to their own independent research done on an area in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit
Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.
What does it take to create a biography that is academically credible, narratively compelling, and comprehensively inspirited? How do we collect the events of someone’s existence and situate them in time and space? How do we attend to experiences of upbringing, professional aspirations, love(s), joy, loss, and adversity according to socioeconomics, gender, race, travel, and religion or spirituality? And how do we determine what is appropriate or not for an honest biography to disclose, address, or downplay in an individual’s narrative? Students in this seminar will determine exemplary approaches to researching, theorizing, memorializing, and assembling “soulful” life stories from archives, oral histories, interviews, and multimedia production by engaging a set of prominent biographies in African American history that address these dimensions. This course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are interested in the research and craft of biography.
AFRC 4431Mobilizing Decolonial Arts and Practice in the Black Atlantic
and Beyond This course will define CHOICE by looking at the transnational linkages connecting artistic,atter is related to African, African American, or other curatorial, personal, and political choices. An overarching question of the course will be "how do artists, activist, curators, and communities, question, select, translate, and disseminate the information needed to incite large-scale movements and global change and how can we, as a class, do the same through our own choices?" Students will examine the significance of theories arising from museum studies, curatorial studies, global social justice movements, as well as dance and diaspora studies. As a way of emphasizing the perspectives, artistic practices, the political engagement of marginalized groups, and the work of activists in the global south, this class will explore rituals, performances, and visual and expressive cultures. Looking closely at altar-making practices, ritual performances, religious coalitions, and resistant narratives, we will learn how artists, activists, and communities seek economic gain, resist oppression, express political opinions, and create tenable lives in difficult situations. The class is divided into sections including: Geographies, Bodies, Spaces, Words, Futures so that students can begin to deconstruct the colonial frameworks that structure their thinking in these areas. The assignments of the class will also afford students opportunities to learn from the work of local curators, activists, artists, exhibitions, and initiatives, including those at the Penn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Assembled.
AFRC 4480Neighborhood Displacement and Community Power
This course uses the history of black displacement to examine community power and advocacy. It examines the methods of advocacy (e.g. case, class, and legislative) and political action through which community activists can influence social policy development and community and institutional change. The course also analyzes selected strategies and tactics of change and seeks to develop alternative roles in the group advocacy, lobbying, public education and public relations, electoral politics, coalition building, and legal and ethical dilemmas in political action. Case studies of neighborhood displacement serve as central means of examining course topics.
AFRC 4500Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources
in Africa This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource- rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.
This course examines the field of Black Feminism—or, the political, social, and economic forces that shape Black diasporic people’s gendered lives. Exploring iterations of Black feminism over time, it necessarily pluralizes feminism, paying attention to its meanings, uses, and applications across the African diaspora. Together, we'll ride the three waves of Black feminism to explore the ways Black women and Black femme’s political and cultural work has been consequential to notions of citizenship, belonging, culture and liberation. Drawing from Black Studies, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies we will ask: — How do Black women and Black femme's lives, labor, and cultural productions lay bare the limits of maleness and whiteness as dominant frames? — How have/do their lives suggest other modalities of living, knowledge production, relations of being, and critiques of power/ violence? — How might we learn from the past in order to envision and build nourishing spaces for Black femmes today?
AFRC 4650Race and Racism in the Contemporary World
This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: LALS 4650, PSCI 4190 1 Course Unit
AFRC 4880Topics: Culture, Sexuality and Global Health
What does it mean to claim that "Homosexuality is un-African"? This course explores the linked histories of race, nation, gender and sexuality in Africa that such an ideological claim invokes, yet effaces. The polemics that produce statements like this play out through the disciplinary tensions that exist between African and sexuality/queer studies. These tensions have as much to do with the role played by the relation between sexuality and race within cultures of European colonization, as they have with the role of gender and sexuality within postcolonial power relations in Africa. Such antagonisms are sustained through the marginalization of gender and sexuality perspectives within postcolonial scholarship on Africa, as well as the bracketing of African perspectives in queer and feminist studies. This course will deconstruct these impasses by exploring scholarship at the margins of each area of study. Students will be encouraged to ask questions about how issues of race, ethnicity, nation, gender and sexuality are produced as suppressed presences in a range of texts, films and other materials. The course will include readings from postcolonial, gender, sexuality and African studies, anthropology, history, literary studies and Marxism, giving students a grounding in historical and contemporary perspectives at the intersection of African, queer and feminist studies.
The degree and major requirements displayed are intended as a guide for students entering in the Fall of 2026 and later. Students should 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
Consult the Africana Studies Department Undergraduate Chair or Undergraduate Coordinator for instructions. Suite 331A, 3401 Walnut, or visit the department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu.
In the senior year, the student, working with a faculty advisor, must complete a substantial Honors Thesis paper of no less than 40 pages on a topic of the student’s choice within the chosen Concentration. Consult the Africana Studies Department for instructions. Submit an application in Suite 331A, 3401 Walnut, or visit the department’s website at https:// africana.sas.upenn.edu.
AFRC 5015Black Social Movements: A Transnational Perspective
This course invites graduate students and advanced undergraduates with prior authorization to explore scholarship and primary materials on the transnational dimensions of black social movements. Recent phenomena such as the world- wide protest against the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd and the political assassination of Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco are two examples of the ways in which events involving black death in one locale resonate in multiple sites across the globe. Uprisings and demonstrations seemingly divided by language, culture and nation-state find common cause in collective action in response to patterns and instances of injustice and inequality. Course materials provide documentary evidence and analysis of the transnational circuitry of black social movement networks that have arisen in response to racisms targeting black and brown population. Members of scheduled castes in India, aboriginal populations in Australia and New Zealand, and Afro-descendent populations in the Americas and Europe, have become agents of change and forged substantive alliances and strategic coalitions with other social movement tendencies. Scholarship from social movement theory, Black Studies, comparative history and political theory help constitute the core reading for this course. Film, documentary narrative and autobiography will supplement reading assignments.
In this course, we will examine historical, scholarly and community narratives about race and racialized communities in Latin America. Course texts and discussions will center Black and Indigenous histories and contemporary identities across the region. Our journey this semester will span from the pre-Columbian era to the present day, and will cover multiple Latin American geographies: the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. While we will focus most closely on the Spanish- speaking populations, we will also incorporate texts and discussion about populations speaking other languages in the region (Portuguese, French, Quechua, Kreyól, and English, for example). Finally, the diasporas of Latin America, particularly in the United States, will also figure in the discussions as sites of Latin American convergence, community and interaction in which race functions in various ways. As such, we will engage with a wide range of texts including books, articles (scholarly and popular), video, primary sources, and interviews. Also Offered As: LALS 5030 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 1009
This advanced seminar places contemporary Black spiritualities at the center of the study of African-descended peoples. Through recent books in the ethnography of Africana religions, spiritual communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that have established communities in the United States will constitute the focus of our course readings and anchor our weekly discussions. As an advanced seminar, our meetings will allow participants to interrogate the authors of these ethnographies. We will assess how these accounts have conceptualized the African diaspora and the vantages (“insiders” and “outsiders”) from which they describe religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Beyond considering the commonalities and distinctions in form and practice that characterize various African diasporic religious practices, participants will also work to understand the constructions of race and belonging, ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location that affect the lives of Black religious adherents.
Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom, self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.
This seminar covers aspects of the arts and visual/material cultures in Africa, including the global African diaspora, throughout the continent's history. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Also Offered As: ARTH 5090 1 Course Unit
Selected topics in African American History as determined by the instructor. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: HIST 5100 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
The Indian Ocean region represents an area with interwoven centuries of interactions, politically, historically, geographically and culturally. Th area has witnessed continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The Indian Ocean world has served as an epicenter of global economy in pre- modern world and as such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. As part of the Indian Ocean World, the eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from Asia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions and the rest of the Indian Ocean world are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalent of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between the Indian Ocean world and the African shores are apparent in several archeological sites, as well as in the cultural practices of religion language, architecture and modes of dress. The European colonial expansion, has allowed the populations in the Indian Ocean world to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and in addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.
From Marvin Gaye, to Tammy Faye Baker, to Sarah Palin and James Baldwin, Pentecostalism has influenced many, including politicians, preachers, writers, and the media. One of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, Pentecostalism continues to have a profound effect on the religious landscape. Pentecostalism's unique blend of charismatic worship, religious practices, and flamboyant, media- savvy leadership, has drawn millions into this understudies and often controversial religious movement. This course will chronicle the inception and growth of Pentecostalism in the United States, giving particular attention to beliefs, practices, gender, ethnicity, and Global Pentecostalism. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: RELS 5170 1 Course Unit
Using an Afro-centric philosophical understanding of the world, this is course will focus on psychological issues related to African Americans, including the history of African American psychology, its application across the life span, and contemporary community issues.
There is little question that inequality along the lines of race and ethnicity remain a constant problem in American society. And over time, the federal government has implemented several policy initiatives to address these inequities. However, less well understood is the success of these federal policies or the process in which they emerge from government as a viable solution. This course will provide an overview of the link between federal government action and changes in minority inequality. We will analyze , several issue spaces that cover health, crime and incarceration, social policy and equal rights, education, welfare, and economics. We will take a multi-method approach to exploring the success of federal policies by conducting historical assessments and statistical analysis. Advanced undergraduates are welcome to take the course with permission. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: PSCI 5290 1 Course Unit
AFRC 5270Market Women, Madames, Mistresses and Mother Superior
Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.
AFRC 5272Graduate Seminar in Black Women's History
This graduate seminar is an examination of the scholarship on Black women in the United States, as well as the development of the field of Black women’s history, in order to interrogate canon formation, shifts in academic and public history, and changes in source material and research tools. Also Offered As: GSWS 5272 1 Course Unit
In his 1995 documentary "Black Is, Black Ain't", Marlon Riggs traces a black cultural tradition while simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of blackness itself. He testifies that: Black is black, and black is blue. Black is bright. Black is you. Black can do you in. In Riggs configuration, black is a color, black is a feeling, black is a sound, black is materiality, and black is a life sentence. In an effort to raise critical questions around blackness, performance, race, and feeling, this course follows in the tradition of Riggs work. In other words, this graduate level course examines the notion of blackness through theorizations of performance. It pursues the following questions: What is blackness? How is blackness embodied, felt, heard, represented, and seen through performance? How is black performance political? Discussions and written work will interrogate the slipperiness of, desire for, and policing of blackness in order to trouble conceptions of race as a biological essence. Organized by keywords in the field of Black Performance Theory - and exploring varying performance forms (the play, the dance, the film, the photograph, the performance of everyday life, the television program, the exhibit, and even the tweet) - This course foregrounds the micro- politics through which black racialized subjects are shaped in the realm of culture. Performances will be consulted each meeting which we will use to interpret and complicate the day's readings. In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through black bodies.
AFRC 5310Mobilizing Decolonial Arts and Practice in the Black Atlantic
and Beyond This course will define CHOICE by looking at the transnational linkages connecting artistic,atter is related to African, African American, or other curatorial, personal, and political choices. An overarching question of the course will be "how do artists, activist, curators, and communities, question, select, translate, and disseminate the information needed to incite large-scale movements and global change and how can we, as a class, do the same through our own choices?" Students will examine the significance of theories arising from museum studies, curatorial studies, global social justice movements, as well as dance and diaspora studies. As a way of emphasizing the perspectives, artistic practices, the political engagement of marginalized groups, and the work of activists in the global south, this class will explore rituals, performances, and visual and expressive cultures. Looking closely at altar-making practices, ritual performances, religious coalitions, and resistant narratives, we will learn how artists, activists, and communities seek economic gain, resist oppression, express political opinions, and create tenable lives in difficult situations. The class is divided into sections including: Geographies, Bodies, Spaces, Words, Futures so that students can begin to deconstruct the colonial frameworks that structure their thinking in these areas. The assignments of the class will also afford students opportunities to learn from the work of local curators, activists, artists, exhibitions, and initiatives, including those at the Penn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Assembled.
Race and ethnicity are, above all, both converge as system of ideas by which men and women imagine the human body and their relationships within society. In this course we will question the concept of race and ethnicity and their place in modern society (1500 - 2020). While the course reviews the pre-1500 literature our focus will be on the last 500 years. This course reviews the research that has contributed to the ideas about ethnicity and race in human society. The review covers the discourse on race in political propaganda, religious doctrine, philosophy, history, biology and other human sciences. Also Offered As: DEMG 5330, SOCI 5330 1 Course Unit
What does it take to create a biography that is academically credible, narratively compelling, and comprehensively inspirited? How do we collect the events of someone’s existence and situate them in time and space? How do we attend to experiences of upbringing, professional aspirations, love(s), joy, loss, and adversity according to socioeconomics, gender, race, travel, and religion or spirituality? And how do we determine what is appropriate or not for an honest biography to disclose, address, or downplay in an individual’s narrative? Students in this seminar will determine exemplary approaches to researching, theorizing, memorializing, and assembling “soulful” life stories from archives, oral histories, interviews, and multimedia production by engaging a set of prominent biographies in African American history that address these dimensions.
AFRC 5420Archiving Jazz: Visuality And Materiality In The Phila Jazz
Community 1945-2019 This seminar will be organized around three distinct pathways. First, it will serve as an introduction to Jazz Studies and thus be attentive to the ways that jazz music has sparked an interdisciplinary conversation that is wide-ranging and ongoing. Second, we will be partnering with the African American Museum of Philadelphia to consider jazz within the realm of visual art. In light of efforts to map the "black interior," how have visual artists (e.g. painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and photographers) sought to represent jazz? Third, we will endeavor to develop partnerships with the Philadelphia (and beyond) jazz community, especially as it pertains to creating and sustaining an archive that serves as way to understand jazz as an instrument of placemaking and also as a vehicle for jazz musicians to take ownership of their narratives. The seminar will meet at the African American Museum of Philadelphia and be team taught with members of the Museum staff. The course will culminate with a virtual exhibit of visual works and archival materials centering on Philadelphia's jazz community and (if funding is available) a free concert to be held at AAMP. Undergraduates are welcome to register for the course with permission of the instructor. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 5190, URBS 5420 1 Course Unit
This course deals with various religious topics, such as Mass Religious Conversion. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: RELS 5470 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
"This graduate course introduces students to theories, practices, and critiques of critical ethnography. Ethnography -- an approach to the study of culture which anthropologist James Clifford described as a process that "translates experiences into text" - will have our full attention. This process of translation, although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance. We wrestle with notions of "the self" and "the other" at the intersection of imbricated cultural and performance worlds. Together we'll ask: How is ethnography both critical and performative? What is the relationship between theory and method? How can we evaluate ethnographic work? And finally, what kinds of ethnographers do we want to be? This course considers a range of ethnographic examples in order to analyze both the craft and the stakes of "translating experiences into text." Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 5500 1 Course Unit
AFRC 5573Psychoeducational Interactions with Black Males
The founder(s) of this course wondered, in an overtly and covertly racist society: “What if we engaged practitioners, educators and researchers in training (social work, policy, criminal justice, counseling, education, health care, etc.) to develop a more empathic imagination and reflection of the Black male before they encounter them in practice?” Core tenets underlying this class are that racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are ignorant of this reality. Students will learn how to help the Black boys and men they engage to identify and challenge the effects of racial oppression on their academic, occupational, relational and cultural well-being, and to promote post-traumatic growth. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: EDUC 5573 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 5700Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources
in Africa This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource- rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.
AFRC 5701Topics in Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture
This course treats some important aspect of African American and Afro- Diasporic literature and culture. Some recent versions of the course have focused on the emergence of African-American women writers, on the relation between African-American literature and cultural studies, and on the Harlem Renaissance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 5700, ENGL 5700 1 Course Unit
AFRC 5702African and African Diasporic Material Culture in the Black
Atlantic before 1800 This class delves into the multifaceted role of African and African diasporic material culture, particularly sacred artifacts and relics, which have been preserved and transformed across the Black Atlantic. Students will explore the profound relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade and material culture, examining how these objects reflect African contexts and have served as instruments of resistance against religious intolerance while affirming cultural continuity. The course integrates diverse historical sources, including written records, oral traditions, museum collections, and archaeological discoveries. Through detailed case studies of specific artifacts and their symbolic meanings, students will analyze their presence in textual and visual sources, museum collections and engage in critical discussions on approaches to heritage preservation, resistance movements, and cultural continuity within diasporic communities. This interdisciplinary seminar aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significance of African material culture in the Black Atlantic, offering students a critical lens to evaluate its impact and legacy.
This seminar will focus on a project that views history as a result of our contemporary society in which biographical truths are constantly shifting. So the historical biographers write about the way they remembered and visualize the past, and not about the way that it happened. We will take Du Bois's biography in his own words and interrogate his narrative with the visual narratives of his life and influenc produced by others. "Visualizing W.E.B Du Bois" focuses on photographic, film, and video representations intended to present some aspect of Du Bois's reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. Such projects include photos, materials originally shot on film stock, and digital images that can be either displayed in a book or magazine, and moving images made into a film or video for a TV show or released for screening in cinemas, or other broadcast mediums like YouTube and Vimeo. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: SOCI 5710 1 Course Unit
This course explores the relationship between art, religion, and power in pre-colonial Africa from 1500 to 1850, focusing on regions from Senegambia to Angola. Drawing on travelers’ accounts, missionary reports, Portuguese Inquisition documents, and early ethnographic records—alongside museum objects—students will examine how African communities used material culture to express spiritual beliefs, construct political authority, and resist external pressures. A central theme of the course is the study of amuletic bundles that circulated across West Africa and the Atlantic world. These objects serve as a case study for understanding broader African religious systems and the meanings ascribed to sacred materials across diasporic contexts. Students will work directly with primary sources and museum collections, including a visit to the Penn Museum, and will develop object-based analyses grounded in historical and critical methodologies.
Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process. Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture. During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 5792, CIMS 5792, GSWS 5792, LALS 5792 1 Course Unit
An introduction to major literary movements and authors from five areas e of Francophonie: the Maghreb, West Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean and Quebec. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 5900, FREN 5900 1 Course Unit
Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 5910, FREN 5910 1 Course Unit
AFRC 6140Tutankhamun’s Tomb: Its Treasures and Significance
This course examines the short life of the young boy king and what the discovery of his tomb and its contents mean in terms of Egypt’s long history and accomplishments. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: AAMW 6141, MELC 6140, NELC 6140 Mutually Exclusive: MELC 2140 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
In recent years, long-disinvested cities have become the site of renewed investment, population growth, and economic development in a phenomenon often described as gentrification. Nonetheless, socioeconomic inequality between races, ethnicities, genders, and places within the larger metropolitan area continue to persist, suggesting that a rising tide does not raise all boats. Planners must grapple with these issues of inequality and inequity, particularly the implementation of plans and policies that may in theory provide benefits to all, but in practice continue to accumulate benefits for a select few. This course examines the construction of race, the making of a place, and the persistence of poverty in racialized places in the city. This course will engage in a critic discussion of the aforementioned themes, such that the normative notions of race, capitalism, urbanism, gender, power, and space are upended to privilege more marginalized perspectives of these processes.
This course will examine demographic and statistical methods used to capture the impact of racial stratification in society. This course covers the skills and insights used by demographers and social statisticians in the study of racial data. A key challenge facing researchers is the interpretation of the vast amount of racial data generated by society. As these data do not directly answer important social questions, data analysis and statistics must be used to interpret them. The course will examine the logic used to communicate statistical results from racial data in various societies. We will question the scientific claims of social science methodology by extending the critical perspective to biases that may underlie research methods. We will discuss good and bad practices within the context of the historical developments of the methods. Also Offered As: DEMG 6320, SOCI 6320 Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 3230 1 Course Unit
This course examines critical issues, problems, and perspectives in multicultural education. Intended to focus on access to literacy and educational opportunity, the course will engage class members in discussions around a variety of topics in educational practice, research, and policy. Specifically, the course will (1) review theoretical frameworks in multicultural education, (2) analyze the issues of race, racism, and culture in historical and contemporary perspective, and (3) identify obstacles to participation in the educational process by diverse cultural and ethnic groups. Students will be required to complete field experiences and classroom activities that enable them to reflect on their own belief systems, practices, and educational experiences. This is a Masters level course. Also Offered As: EDUC 6323 1 Course Unit
This course examines the flourishing civilizations of the African continent between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the "Age of Discovery." Although material remains of the complex cultures that created exceptional works of art are rare, current archaeology is bringing much new information to the fore, allowing for the first time a preliminary survey of the burgeoning artistic production of the African continent while Europe was building its cathedrals. Bronze casting, gold work, terracotta and wood sculpture, and monumental architecture - the course takes a multi-media approach to understanding the rich foundations of African cultures and their deep interconnection with the rest of the world al before the disruptive interventions of colonialism. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 6401 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 4400 1 Course Unit
Using the lenses of labor, violence, gender, religion, and race, we will examine slavery in the Atlantic World, including Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States, from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
This seminar is suitable for graduate students in any discipline in which historical research may be relevant. We will work with both secondary and primary sources, and students will have the opportunity to visit and undertake research in an archive.
This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 6542 1 Course Unit
AFRC 6550Black Political Thought: Difference And Community
This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century. Also Offered As: GSWS 6550, LALS 6550 1 Course Unit
AFRC 6552The State, Civil Society, and Democracy in Africa
This course examines the nature and dynamics of the state and civil society in Africa and how these determine the career of democracy, democratization and democratic rule in the continent. It considers different accounts of the state in Africa (or the African state), civil society and democracy in elaborating an informed understanding of the political, economic and social processes in the continent. How does the nature of the state in Africa account for the nature of the civil society and vice versa? How can the career of democracy in the continent illuminate our understanding of the nature of state-society relations? How robust is the relationship between civil society and the state? How can we account for the relationships among civil society, the state and democratic institutions and processes? What are the local, regional, and global forces that nurture and/or hinder democratic practices, including electoral democracy? These questions are confronted in light of their implications for, and complex interactions with, different social formations, institutions, groups, and social practices including gender, ethnicity, nationalism, race, religion, social protest, political institutions economic formations, etc., etc.
AFRC 6554Black Political Thought in Times of Crisis
Heightened authoritarianism, neo-liberal austerity and intensifying geo- political conflict in the contemporary moment provides an opportunity to reflect on how prior generations of thinkers, activists, artists, governments, formal political actors, and everyday people understood and responded to the economic, political, and cultural crises of their era. This course provides an opportunity to situate our epoch in a dhistorical and structural context, to understand black responses to fascism, imperialism, apartheid, ecological degradation, genocide, and other maladies produced by humans. These and related phenomena provide the backdrop to reflect on several key texts from the 20th and 21st century, and why such texts remain important outside their moment. The objective of this course is to examine several black liberal and left responses to highly unequal economic and political orders: solidarity movements, national sovereignty, and their limitations. One of the enduring, recurrent features of movements such as environmentalism, non-nuclear proliferation, anti-racism, feminism, and adjacent movements across time and space is their emphasis on ethical and moral suasion. These and other movements have not (could not) relied on powerful armies, technologies of destruction, and vast amounts of capital to make common cause for justice, equality, reparation, or retribution. In the third decade of the 21st century we can consider whether the ethico-political posture of liberal and left movements (residuals of 19th century thinking) remain viable discursive strategies in an era of post-truth.
This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MELC 6620, NELC 6620 1 Course Unit
AFRC 6665Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the
embodied archive Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 6665, GSWS 6665 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3665 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 6740 Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2740 1 Course Unit
Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists wil provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ANTH 6770, ENGL 6770 1 Course Unit
This course surveys the most important and interesting art produced in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) up through the 1950s. This period encompasses the history of both early and modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances to its rise to prominence and institutionalization. While tracking this history, the course examines art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and the cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community- building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity? Also Offered As: ANTH 6804 Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3804 l 1 Course Unit
The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the self and how to represent it developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the visual practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the birth of photography, colonial masquerade, impressionism, symbols of power in royal arts, , cubism, mass marketing and colonial self-fashioning, West African studio photography, world's fairs and the Musee de l'Homme, Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, anti-aesthetics, colonial arts education, National art schools in the age of African independence, humanism and South African photography under Apartheid. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 6850 1 Course Unit
AFRC 6910Transatlantic Black Feminisms in Francophone Literatures
This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French- writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux- Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English. Also Offered As: COML 6910, FREN 6910, GSWS 6910 1 Course Unit
In-depth analysis of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. The course opens with a general examination of the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas, through the study of fundamental historical, political and sociocultural processes. This panoramic view provides the basic tools for the scrutiny of a broad selection of literary, musical, visual, performance, and cinematic works, which leads to the comprehension of the different ethical-aesthetic strategies used to express the Afro-diasporic experience. Essential concepts such as negritude, creolite, and mestizaje, as well as the most relevant theories on identity and identification in Latin America and the Caribbean, will be thoroughly examined, in articulation with the interpretation of artistic works. Power, nationalism, citizenship, violence, religious beliefs, family and community structures, migration, motherhood and fatherhood, national and gender identities, eroticism, and sexuality are some of the main issues discussed un this seminar. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 7971, LALS 6971, SPAN 6971 1 Course Unit
Readings in African American Religion: Traditional narratives of African American Religion go from slavery to civil rights to "freedom" without taking into account the complex religious lives and intellectual production of people of African descent in the Americas. This course will focus on African American Religion and the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the study of this field. Readings will cover religious studies, anthropology history, and African American studies in order to provide an understanding of the varieties of religion and religious experiences with this particular segment of the African Diaspora. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit
AFRC 7060Introduction to Africa and African Diaspora Thought
This course examines the processes by which African peoples have established epistemological, cosmological, and religious systems both prior to and after the institution of Western slavery.
AFRC 7200Graduate Prospectus and Grant-Writing Seminar
This course is intended to help students to write a strong dissertation proposal/prospectus. A proposal is a detailed plan for a long journey of of conceptualization, research, and writing that will lead to the first major, independent scholarly contribution. Students will work closely with advisors, peers, and the professor in the course, to develop the questions, methodological approaches, and theoretical perspectives that will guide their research and writing. At the end of the semester, each student will have completed a proposal, and will be ready to defend it.
This course examines critical issues, problems, and perspectives in multicultural education. Intended to focus on access to literacy and educational opportunity, the course will engage class members in discussions around a variety of topics in educational practice, research, and policy. Specifically, the course will (1) review theoretical frameworks in multicultural education, (2) analyze the issues of race, racism, and culture in historical and contemporary perspective, and (3) identify obstacles to participation in the educational process by diverse cultural and ethnic groups. Students will be required to complete field experiences and classroom activities that enable them to reflect on their own belief systems, practices, and educational experiences.
Seminar on selected topics in African American Music. See department website (under course tab) for current term course description: https:// music.sas.upenn.edu Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: MUSC 7400 1 Course Unit
Topics in Ethnomusicology. Open to graduate students from all departments. See department website (under course tab) for current term course description: https://music.sas.upenn.edu Also Offered As: MUSC 7501 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
In 1925, Alain Locke published The New Negro: an Interpretation, an anthology of literary and artistic works by leading figures associated with a movement in Black culture that would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. This year’s 100-year anniversary of the event has prompted new scholarship and numerous commemorations. This seminar will focus on the Harlem Renaissance and its resonances across time and space by engaging material from the end of the US Reconstruction (1880s) to the present to explore what, when, where, whose, and why the Harlem Renaissance. The syllabus will include poetry, essays, long and short fiction and criticism. Students will work with archival materials, newspapers and periodicals, as well as film, music,artwork, and photography in exhibition catalogues and local collections. Required coursework will include the presentation of a chapter from a scholarly monograph or article associated with the theme of the course for discussion and a seminar paper, along with weekly assignments. For more information, please visit: https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/ graduate. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 7705, ENGL 7705, FIGS 7705 1 Course Unit
This course will explore heterogeneous responses to ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literature, art, and political thought of Africa and the Black Diaspora, ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present day and encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. We will analyze how African and black diasporic writers, artists, and thinkers have engaged with and re-imagined Greco-Roman Classics, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and as a source of radical self-expression. Throughout, we will consider the reciprocal dynamic by which dialogues with ancient Greek and Roman classics contribute to the polyphony of black texts and these same texts write back to and signify on the Greek and Roman Classics, diversifying the horizon of expectation for their future interpretation. Writers and artists whose work we will examine include Romare Bearden; Dionne Brand; Gwendolyn Brooks; Aimé Césaire; Austin Clarke; Anna Julia Cooper; Rita Dove; W.E.B. Du Bois; Ralph Ellison; Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona; C.L.R. James; June Jordan; Toni Morrison; Harryette Mullen; Marlene Nourbese Philip; Ola Rotimi; William Sanders Scarborough; Wole Soyinka; Mary Church Terrell; Derek Walcott; Booker T. Washington; Phillis Wheatley; and Richard Wright. We will study these writers in the context of national and transnational histories and networks and in dialogue with relevant theoretical debates. Work for assessment will include a 15-page research paper and the preparation of a teaching syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black Classical Receptions. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CLST 7708, COML 7708 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
This graduate seminar offers an intensive, critical, and collaborative study of contemporary African film and media production. The past three decades have seen an unprecedented shift in the African media landscape. Not only has the wide availability of satellite media across the continent made international film and television programing part of African popular culture, but moreover the growing film industries within the continent, most notably Nollywood, have altered how Africans are carving an image of themselves on the big and small screens. In partnership with local, regional, and international film and media centers, we will study a range of films—features, shorts, documentaries, and television shows—paying close attention to the means and sites of production as well as the formal qualities that distinguish these works. Many of the films we will analyze stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social themes. But we will also think about trash: what counts as trashy media, and for whom? Who watches it, where, and why? Other questions we will ask include: What particular indigenous modes of storytelling do African films employ? What categories begin to emerge under the umbrella category of "African film and media," and where do diasporan film and media practitioners and critics fit in this landscape? How are these films tackling some of the urgent questions of our times, including migration and globalization; ethnic, political, and economic polarization; gender and sexuality; and massive urbanization and industrialization sweeping Africa and other parts of the Global South? What role do festivals in various countries play in shaping media production and distribution? How important is the concept of authorship in this context? And how do these films challenge the dominant western trope of Africa as a spectacle, instead offering novel ways of picturing everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse in western media? To explore these questions, we will consider multiple sites of film production, distribution, exhibition, and education, and collaborate especially with The Africa Institute in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, an interdisciplinary academic research center dedicated to the study, research, and documentation of Africa and the African diaspora. As the only institution of its kind located in the Gulf—the historical nexus of African-Arab cultural exchange—The Africa Institute is uniquely positioned to expand understanding of African and African diaspora studies as a global enterprise. Location and knowledge production are inextricably connected, and by considering African media production from multiple sites, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders, this course offers a directly engaged pedagogy of the complex artistic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of African audiovisual creation. The travel component of this course entails a week-long trip to Sharjah, UAE during spring break (students applying for this course should be prepared to travel March 7, 2026—March 15, 2026). Ultimately, this course aims to use film and media production to intervene in a larger discourse on how Africa is figured in the global humanities, not as an absent or passive actor but one actively engaged in producing art and humanistic knowledge that has much to teach us and the world. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: CIMS 7770, ENGL 7770 1 Course Unit
This seminar examines the literary, historical, and visual matter of the archive in order to generate new methods of creating, deconstructing, and reading across archival formations in comparative race and ethnic studies. In alignment with recent feminist and queer of color critiques and theorizations of the archive, we will ask: how do we encounter, assemble, and disassemble archival matter? What haunts the archives that we work within, and who do we become in the process of doing archival research? Our readings will foreground the imperial archive as an epistemological and material formation, but we will also attend to the uses and value of personal and familial archives. In so doing, we will consider what it means to intimately engage with archival matter such as dust, ephemera, and decay. Our objective is to develop practices of research and reading that counter Derrida’s “archive fever.” Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 7903, ENGL 7903 1 Course Unit
AFRC 7904New Directions in Black Thought and Literature
This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will incl concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 7904, ENGL 7904, GSWS 7904 1 Course Unit University of Pennsylvania Catalog 1019
This graduate seminar offers an intensive, critical, and collaborative study of contemporary African film and media production. The past three decades have seen an unprecedented shift in the African media landscape. Not only has the wide availability of satellite media across the continent made international film and television programing part of African popular culture, but moreover the growing film industries within the continent, most notably Nollywood, have altered how Africans are carving an image of themselves on the big and small screens. In partnership with local, regional, and international film and media centers, we will study a range of films--features, shorts, documentaries, and television shows--paying close attention to the means and sites of production as well as the formal qualities that distinguish these works. Many of the films we will analyze stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social themes. But we will also think about trash: what counts as trashy media, and for whom? Who watches it, where, and why? Other questions we will ask include: What particular indigenous modes of storytelling do African films employ? What categories begin to emerge under the umbrella category of "African film and media," and ude where do diasporan film and media practitioners and critics fit in this landscape? How are these films tackling some of the urgent questions of our times, including migration and globalization; ethnic, political, and economic polarization; gender and sexuality; and massive urbanization and industrialization sweeping Africa and other parts of the Global South? What role do festivals in various countries play in shaping media production and distribution? How important is the concept of authorship in this context? And how do these films challenge the dominant western trope of Africa as a spectacle, instead offering novel ways of picturing everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse in western media? To explore these questions, we will visit multiple sites of film production, distribution, exhibition, and education, including Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, Sankofa Films in Washington, D.C., and the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Location and knowledge production are inextricably connected, and by considering African media production from these multiple sites, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders, this course offers a directly engaged pedagogy of the complex artistic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of African audiovisual creation. The travel component of this course entails a day trip to Washington, D.C. during the semester (tentative date: April 2, 2020) and a week-long trip to Addis Ababa at the end of the spring term (students applying for this course should be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa May 30, 2020-June 7, 2020). All expenses for travel, accommodation, and food will be covered, but students will need to hold a passport. Ultimately, this course aims to use film and media production to intervene in a larger discourse on how Africa is figured in the global humanities, not as an absent or passive actor but one actively engaged in producing art and humanistic knowledge that has much to teach us and the world. Admission to the course will be by permission only and students are required to submit a short statement of interest (max. 250 words) to dagw@english.upenn.edu and redkaren@sas.upenn.edu. Students must be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa and Washington D.C. as described in the syllabus, and must hold a passport. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ARTH 7910 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
If ubiquity confers significance, the manifesto is a major literary form, and yet it has been relatively marginalized in genre studies, where attention to the manifesto has been largely devoted to anthologies. In this seminar we will focus on the manifesto as a genre by exploring its histories, rhetorics, definitions and reception from a Black Studies framework. Associated with politics, art, literature, pedagogy, film, and new technologies, the manifesto involves the taking of an engaged position that is tied to the moment of its enunciation. The manifesto's individual or collective authors seek to provoke radical change through critique and the modeling of new ways of being though language and images. Included on the syllabus will be anticolonial, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ manifestos of the 18th through 21st centuries from throughout the Black world . In addition to leading class discussion, students will be responsible for a seminar paper or a final project to be developed in consultation with the instructor. Also Offered As: COML 7920, ENGL 7920 1 Course Unit
This course will analyse the forms, contexts, and politics surrounding anticolonial, left and dissident print cultures of the global south. Course materials will draw on the archive of political magazines, party newspapers, cultural journals, and pamphlets to study how these print forms shaped the cultures, institutions, and communities of revolutionary politics. Engaging the global south revolutionary periodical as form, the course will analyze its role as a forum for political debate, a tool for political organizing, and a crucial medium for literary and aesthetic experiments. We will examine revolutionary periodicals from contexts ranging from colonial India to Apartheid-era South Africa to Pinochet- ruled Chile to appreciate the ways in which periodicals often served as sites for articulating political theory and literary activism ‘from below’. W will focus on movements and political concepts that decisively shaped 20th-century struggles against colonialism, and those that followed in the wake of formal decolonization, including but not limited to Afro-Asianism, Marxist internationalism, black internationalism, Third Worldism, and Tricontinentalism. Classes will be conducted in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and a large part of the course will be dedicated to workshopping archival material from the collections. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: COML 7941, ENGL 7941, LALS 7941, SAST 7741 1 Course Unit 2026-27 Catalog | Generated 08/03/26
AFRC 8001The Craft of Dissertation Writing in Africana Studies
Black thought, culture, history, socio-economic conditions, and politics worldwide matter. How we tell the stories about the vastness of Black lives in our scholarship matter even more greatly. The course will focus on the craft of writing the dissertation in the interdisciplinary field of Africana Studies with a focus on producing innovative scholarship as emergent scholars. Targeting students who have advanced to doctoral candidacy, the primary intent is to learn from African diaspora scholars who write about writing as well as to admire the writers in our field who craft stories about Black lives that we want to read. We will devote some class time to discussing some prominent writers (Alice Walker, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, bell hooks, Claudia Tate, Binyavanga Wainaina) who have discussed their craft of writing to shine a light on Africa and the diaspora. However, the main aim of the course is to give advanced PhD students the time and physical space to write their dissertations in community with students. In this workshop style course, the focus will be on supporting students through the challenging task of completing dissertations in ways that illustrate their innovative and critical approaches to research and writing. The course objectives include: 1. To provide advanced doctoral students with the consistent time and physical space to complete at least one chapter of their dissertations. 2. To introduce students to discussions about the craft of writing about Black lives in global contexts. 3. To teach students how to craft detailed outlines and writing plans for significant bodies of work such as a dissertation and a book. 4. To teach how to organize original research data and archival materials to write narratives that give significant attention to those materials. 5. To learn how to balance theoretical engagement with existing scholarship and offering new insights drawn from the dissertation research. 6. To provide students with the tools for processing substantive feedback on the writing and organizing critiques for revision of the dissertation, and how to turn the e dissertation into articles and a book. Prerequisite: Doctoral candidates in the Department of Africana Studies and students who have received the Certificate in Africana Studies who are actively writing the dissertation.
AFRC 9005Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race, Class and Gender
This writing workshop explores the influence of identity, primarily race, class, gender, and sexuality, on the ways we convey our personal truths to the world. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 9005, GSWS 9005, MLA 5005, URBS 9005 1 Course Unit
This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta- Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art. Also Offered As: ENGL 9006, GSWS 9006, MLA 5006, URBS 9006 1 Course Unit
AFRC 9016Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender
In this workshop, we will address the ways race, class, and gender impact our lives, our work, and our culture. As a class, we will create connection and community by practicing deep listening, daily writing, deep reading, and the sharing of ideas and observations. Not Offered Every Year Also Offered As: ENGL 9016, GSWS 9016, MLA 5016, URBS 9016 1 Course Unit
Department of Africana Studies Dissertation Status for Graduate Students who have completed course work. Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either 3 Course Units American Sign Language (ASLD)
