African-American & African Studies

Cultural Perspectives: Introduction to Black Studies This course will investigate the origins and experiences of Africans upon their arrival in North America. Using historical accounts, narratives, autobiographies, and fiction, we will broaden our understanding of the black experience. Our course will utilize the works of writers including Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles W. Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and James Weldon Johnson to access the major themes, tropes, and issues faced by darker peoples in America during the period ending with the conclusion of the First World War. Critical writers on this period and its written history, including, Michelle Wallace, Houston A. Baker, Trudier Harris, and Henry Louis Gates will provide us with diverse lenses with which to better understand what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist Presence” in America.

Cultural Perspectives: African-American Experience Through Literature and Film This course offers students with little or no exposure to African-American study an overview of the African experience in America through literature, film, discussions, debates, and writing exercises. Some of the topics that are encompassed under these vast subject headings and that receive special attention in class include: racial stereotyping, intraracial racism, intraracial gender issues, the significance of class in race study, and the development of Black political agendas and social movements. Students are encouraged to use the discussions to develop their own “agendas” for shifting or altering racial dynamics in their campus community, home community, or other communities to which they belong. Also, oral presentation gives students a chance to raise topics that are of particular interest to them. While this course offers a historical overview in the form of readings and lectures, the “historical indicators” that provide the backdrop for our discussions are contemporary, primarily the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement. The course materials are contemporary nonfiction texts and film documentaries, including Bell Hook’s Killing Rage, Cornel West’s Race Matters, Alice Walker’s Anything Can Be Saved, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, Alfred Moss’ Slavery to Freedom, and Dick Gregory’s Nigger.

Cultural Perspectives: Revolts, Protest, and Movements in African-American Experience This course looks at calls for freedom—slave insurrections and revolts, social protests, and political and religious movements—that define the tumultuous relationship between the African and America. From the Underground Railroad to Garveyism, the Civil Rights movement to the Black Power movement, students examine traditions of leadership and philosophies of freedom in African- American life. Special attention is given to the redefining of terms such as “civil disobedience,” “liberty,” and “homeland” as they take on new meaning in the context of African-American life.

Cultural Perspectives: Black Writing of the 1960s This course looks at the autobiographical, fictional, and political writings of African-Americans in the 1960s. We consider these writings alongside historical material to gain a sense of the literary response to racial crises in America. “Writers,” in the context of this course, include literary artists in the traditional sense, as well as political figures and community spokespersons.

Cultural Perspectives: Postcolonial African Issues Through Literature and Film After more than three decades of independence, Africa is still struggling with the problems of building nations out of the legacies of colonialism. Many political essays and books have been written about these problems, but how do writers of fiction (novelists and poets) and filmmakers confront these issues? How, despite political censorship and material hardship, do these writers and filmmakers manage to show us in a more pressing way, the most intimate realities of their societies through their work, whether realistic or allegorical, whether satiric or fablelike reinventions? The purpose of this course is to address these problems. Works of fiction and films are read or viewed critically with special attention given to the political and social issues of contemporary postcolonial Africa and to its search for a cultural identity. The emphasis of the course bears on the former French colonies, but forays are made into the rest of Africa.