Black Studies (BLKS)

This course is an introduction to Black Studies. Black Studies is a discipline that is firmly rooted in the social sciences, humanities and the arts. Our focus in this class will be on the ways in which race has impacted history, culture, institutions, ideas, and politics as seen from within African American experience(s). This course is about people of African descent, their shared experiences, contributions, victories, and struggles.

A basic socio-historical examination of the African and/or Black Experience in the Caribbean. The course intends to give perspectives on selected political, economic, and social problems facing the region, emphasizing specific events and the influence of social, cultural, and economic behaviors. Language is especially used as a regional and cultural classification, with over seven official languages, more than twenty nations, and five centuries of post-Columbian contact history. This course must admit to being an essential and strategic foundation for understanding the African Diaspora. Students will gain a holistic understanding of the region and examine scholars' and outsiders’ representations of the region. Specific topics include: the role of slavery and its impacts on racial/ ethnic identities and categories and select events and their impact on economies, food production, and trade. Following this, we examine the region’s rich and diverse, expressive culture: religion, music, visual arts, gender roles, and Carnival. We end the course examining patterns in socio-political and economic aspects, including development, tourism, globalization, transnationalism, and migration.

Students will engage in the history of the Black church from its inception to the present and examine the strengths and weaknesses of this radical theological movement. Throughout this course, we will examine, compare and contrast the theologies and resulting programmatic actions taken by persons espousing and promoting Black Christian spirituality. Though the field of Black Liberation Theology received its name in the 1960s, the course will broaden the definition of its history and practitioners to include Womanist Theologians and we will look at the theology of Liberation of earlier eras. African American leaders and preachers used the teachings of Christianity and/or the vehicle of the Black Church as foundational to their efforts for securing a self-determining existence for Africans at home and/or abroad.

This course traces the creation and evolution of Hip Hop Culture from the early 1970s to the present. Specifically, it will chart the growth of a unique youth culture from the streets, parks, and playgrounds of America’s most important city to the streets, beaches, pubs, dance halls, and parks across the globe. The class will explore the transition of rap music from a counter-culture, to a sub-culture, to mainstream culture. Although the instructor will place much emphasis on rap music, the class also will examine the development of the myriad aspects of Hip Hop Culture, including graffiti writing, breakdancing (and its related forms such as “rockin’ and “pop-lockin”), and fashion.

This course presents an Afrocentric perspective on psychology, from its historical roots in ancient Egypt, through slavery, and into modern times. The course will review ethnocentrism, the misuse of Western psychology to marginalize African Americans and reasons for scientific abuses against people of color, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The course will focus on topics such as the Black family, racism, cultural mistrust, stereotype threat, Black-White relations, and Black mental health. Also discussed are spirituality, the gifted, sexuality, youth culture, common misconceptions about African Americans, and within-group differences related to gender, class, age, and sexual orientation. A diversity of viewpoints is welcomed and encouraged throughout the semester. Topics we discuss will be, at times, controversial, sensitive, and maybe uncomfortable. We will set ground rules for how to respectfully engage with each other at the start of the semester. As you make comments and ask questions, please be mindful of the diversity of opinions and experiences that may be reflected in the virtual room. Introduction to Black Psychology is designated as a Psychology cluster course, part of the Black Studies Minor.

This is an interdisciplinary reading and discussion-based course focused on the history of social justice and liberation movements started by Blacks in the United States. During our time together, we will aim to accomplish several goals. First, we will construct a shared vocabulary about diversity, identity, and social justice. We can’t have a constructive conversation when we aren’t speaking the same language. (Please remember, though, that sharing the same language doesn’t mean we must share the same ideas—we are just using the same language to discuss them.) We will build this frame of reference from articles written by experts in this field—but expertise is cultivated in a variety of ways; thus, we will hear from a wide range of voices. We will then investigate a series of social justice concerns in the U.S., diving into the historical context of many modern debates and tracing how those debates changed throughout this nation’s past. Social Justice and Liberation movements should be conceptualized as a series of interconnected but distinct “waves,” as opposed to one continuous movement; we will examine the critical roles of African Americans and their allies in building, sustaining, and leading movements across spatial and temporal boundaries.

This course surveys the history of race throughout the French Empire, from roughly 1600 through the twentieth century. Throughout the course, we will focus on how groups constructed racialized categories that supported and undermined French rule in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We will particularly emphasize the connections between race and science, labor, and cultural forms.

This course traces the lives and experiences of women of African descent in the Western world from the 1700s to the present.  We will examine significant people, ideas, moments and events, as well as the following themes: the concepts of “INTERSECTIONALITY,”  “social vulnerability,” and their ability to help us understand oppression; the development of democracy and global economies through the eyes of Black women; gender and the lives of workers;  the effects and consequences of human migration, forced and voluntary; Black women’s responses to Reconstruction, Jim Crow racial segregation, and the needs of Black families; the great “push and pull” of the 1960s; the interaction between race, class, and gender and its impact on the meaning of womanhood/manhood; and the rise of the new conservatism.  Moreover, this course examines the foundations, ideas, concerns, and implications of Black feminism within the context of the Black Atlantic. A major goal of this class is to foster dialogue and critical discussion about Black feminism as a site of theory and practice emphasizing social, political, and personal transformation.

Welcome to Brazilian Cordel Literature! This is a course designed to help students get an in-depth view of Brazilian culture with an emphasis on Cordel, Brazilian popular poetry, and engage in reading and writing it, and think critically about social issues in Brazil and all over the world. This course will introduce students to the critical frameworks of Latin American Studies, including Queer Latinex Feminism, and Decolonial Pedagogies, with a selection of readings in English to engage together with the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed written by Paulo Freire in 1968. We will also connect Freire’s social justice scholarship with The Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Darder, 2018) a companion book to further contextualize Freire’s work. 

A course that deals with significant issues related to Black, African American, or African diaspora history, politics, technologies, culture, identity, and language. May be repeated when topics vary.

This course examines African American history from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. In this course, students will be able to follow a people in motion, from their forced migration and enslavement to literary explorations and social justice movements. We will focus on ideas of race and the complex nature of race relations throughout these periods. By looking at the writings of Langston Hughes to the organizing drives of Ella Baker, and from the trans-Atlantic peregrinations of W. E. B. Dubois to the gender and race crossings of Pauli Murray, this class presents African Americans in late nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as those who moved – by choice and by force – and who moved others. Rather than a tangent to the American story, African American history is treated as a central strand in the reunification, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization of the United States. Through a lens of motion, students will examine change and continuity in the African American experience, the fight against Jim Crow, the Great Migrations, the struggle for civil rights, and post-civil rights economic, political, social, and cultural developments and challenges.

is a dynamic and comprehensive course that delves into the critical examination of race within the context of news media. This course explores how race shapes news production, framing, and dissemination and examines the influence of news media on shaping public perception and understanding of race-related issues. Through an interdisciplinary approach that draws from communication studies, journalism, sociology, and critical race theory, students will analyze the complexities of race representation, racial biases, and the role of news media in perpetuating or challenging racial stereotypes, systemic racism, and social inequality.

In this course, we will examine the historical encounters, shared struggles, cultural connections as well as moments of tension between Black and Asian diasporic groups in the United States. Building on the recent scholarly efforts to uncover the long roots in Afro-Asian struggles and the important voices from these communities, this course explores questions of identities, the specter of interethnic/interracial conflicts, and the promise of cross-racial coalitions. From the outset of American history, Africans and Asians have been linked in a shared tradition of resistance to class and racial exploitation and oppression. The era of slave emancipation witnessed the arrival of Asiatic coolie laborers, a historical transition that has presumably symbolized progress from the barbaric slave trade to racially coded immigration laws. This course will explore how these sites of encounters have created or undermined the Afro-Asian community buildings, from the racial formation of the coolie laborers to new forms of culture and politics. In particular, the emphasis will be placed on the questions of identities and the legacy of cross-racial solidarities that range from the racial formation of coolies, black radicalism’s relationship with the Japanese Empire, the 1960s Civil Rights Movements, the LA Uprisings in 1992, and the contemporary Black Lives Matter and Anti-Asian Hate Movements.

Black women’s relationship to the politics of gender identity has been a subject of both interrogation and theorization since the 18th century when Black women first began publishing on matters of both race and gender. Beginning here, this interdisciplinary course in Black Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality course will allow students to explore contemporary and emerging topics related to race, gender, class, and sexuality. This course will trace the long history of Black Feminist thought, arguing primarily for Black women as theorists of their own experience. This class will seek to explain how Black women are defined in a variety of cultural contexts, as well as examine how race, class, gender, and sexuality are central to the analysis of Black Feminist Theory. This course will utilize a variety of texts to define womanhood and examine how social and institutional mechanisms of power and privilege and a variety of everyday practices impact Black women.