Course |
ANTH 111 Archaeological Field Methods: Native Americans on the Bard Lands |
|
Professor |
Christopher Lindner |
|
CRN |
95280 |
|
Schedule |
Fr 10:00 am -3:00 pm Grouse Bluff / or ROSE 108 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: C/E |
NEW: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, Environmental Studies, Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Field Methods offers an introduction to prehistory
by basic hand excavation, using GIS technology (Geographic Information Systems)
to situate our discoveries, and through laboratory processing of artifacts.
Grouse Bluff provided temporary encampment for people in a series of 10
distinct cultural expressions that end 925 years before present, according to
three radiocarbon assays. Sediment analyses of several fireplaces identify fish
remains, burnt hickory nuts, and charred huckleberry seeds. Quartz crystals
could reflect spiritual practices, while fragments of exotic carved soapstone
vessels suggest feasting. Grouse Bluff is the largest and most intensively
occupied site, scientifically known in New York and adjacent states, from
several centuries approximately 3,000 years ago. Chipped stone projectile
points or knives along the Hudson River shore indicate foraging nine millennia
in the past. We hope also to find evidence of the Esopus Indians, who camped
not far away after their wars with the Dutch of Kingston around 1660. Lunchtime
discussion will contextualize our findings with archaeological and
ethnohistorical comparisons.
Enrollment limited to 12, by permission.
Course |
AFR / ARTH 140 Survey of Islamic Art |
||
Professor |
Susan Aberth |
||
CRN |
95376 |
|
|
Schedule |
Tu Th
2:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 102 |
||
Distribution |
OLD: A |
NEW: ANALYSIS
OF ARTS / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
|
Survey
of Islamic art in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, North Africa, Spain, China,
India, Indonesia and other regions, from the death of Muhammad in AD 632 up
until the present. The course will include architectural monuments, their
structural features and decoration as well as the decorative arts in all the
various media – pottery, metalwork, textile and carpet weaving, glass,
jewelry, calligraphy, book illumination
and painting. There will be visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view
their Islamic collection. This class is open to students at all levels.
\
Course |
AFR / LIT 2155 African American Autobiographical Narrative |
|
Professor |
Mathew Johnson |
|
CRN |
95056 |
|
Schedule |
Wed Fr 9:00 -10:20 am OLIN 204 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW: LITERATURE
IN ENGLISH
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
The goal of this course
is to gain an understanding of the autobiography as not only the core medium of
black American literature for its first two centuries, but also as a vehicle of
both artistic and political power through the Civil Rights Movement and into
the modern era. We will start with Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano
and follow the evolution of the slave narrative through the works of Harriet
Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. Using Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery
as a bridge between the worlds of bondage and freedom, we will continue on
through the Renaissance with Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea and into the
big black autobiographies of the mid-century, Richard Wright’s Black Boy
and Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promise Land. From there, we will
look at the autobiographical narrative’s continuation into the Black Power era
with Assata Shakur’s Assata. Finally, we’ll conclude with the
contemporary memoir, as exemplified by John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and
Keepers.
Course |
AFR / MUS 171 Jazz Harmony I |
|
Professor |
John Esposito |
|
CRN |
95328 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Fr 12:00 -1:20 pm BLM N211 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: F |
NEW: PRACTICING
ARTS
|
Cross-listed: Africana
Studies
This course will include acquisitions
of the basic skills that make up the foundation of all Jazz styles. We will
also study the Jazz language from ragtime to the swing era. This course
fulfills a music theory requirement for music majors.
Course |
AFR / MUS 211 Jazz in Literature I |
|
Professor |
Thurman Barker |
|
CRN |
95329 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Wed 10:00 - 11:20 am BLM N210 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW: ANALYSIS
OF ARTS
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies
This course presents some of the short stories and
poems by Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, and Julio Cortazar. The
text used in this section is “Hot and Cool” by Marcela Briton and the “Harlem
Renaissance Reader”, edited by David Lewis.
Course |
AFR / LIT 2152 Francophone African Literature |
|
Professor |
Emmanuel Dongala |
|
CRN |
95088 |
|
Schedule |
Wed 1:30 -3:50 pm OLIN 302 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B/D |
NEW: FLLC /
RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
Even though African
literature from francophone Africa is not yet a century old , it has already
produced many important and enduring works.
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the books which are now
considered classics of that literature.
The course will be given in English and the books will be read in
translation. However, those who want to take it as part of the French program
will read the texts in the original French and will have special tutoring. The primary aim of this course is to help
students read closely some of the classics of African Francophone literature
within their historical, social and political contexts.
Course |
AFR / SOC 255 Rights, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship |
|
Professor |
Amy Ansell |
|
CRN |
95259 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm OLIN 204 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: C |
NEW: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
Cross-listed: Human Rights and SRE
The course is intended to introduce students to current debates
and controversies about the changing boundaries of rights and citizenship in
multicultural societies. It begins with an exploration of the origins and
development of ideas about multiculturalism. We then move on to consider the
implications of multiculturalism for contemporary political and policy agendas.
Special attention is paid to problems concerning the implementation of
multicultural policies and to critical evaluation of their impact. Drawing on
conceptual debates as well as trends and developments in specific societies
(primarily the United States, Britain, the European Union and South Africa),
the course aims to increase appreciation for the divergent perspectives that have
emerged in relation to issues of cultural diversity in different parts of the
world. The course concludes with reflection on the question of what kind of
agendas need to be developed in future to deal with the dilemmas of
multiculturalism policy and practice identified throughout the semester.
Course |
AFR / ANTH 262 Colonialism, Law, and Human Rights in Africa |
|
Professor |
Jesse Shipley |
|
CRN |
95281 |
|
Schedule |
Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 am OLIN 202 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: A/C |
NEW: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
Cross-listed: Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights
This course examines the colonial and missionary
legacies of contemporary discourses of human rights and development. We will
take a rigorously critical eye to examining how why and to what effect Western
donor agencies, states, and individuals unwittingly draw on centuries old
tropes of poverty, degradation, and helplessness of non-Western peoples.
Specifically we will use historical descriptions of the encounters between
Europeans and Africans in West Africa and South Africa to show how Western
assumptions about African societies reveal the contradictions at the root of
liberal discourses of aid and development. In this way we will interrogate how
“aid” implies the idea of a Western individual, rights-bearing economic subject
which has implications for the development of global capitalism. We will also
look at case studies from Ghana, Nigeria, and post-Apartheid South Africa to
examine the real legacies of human rights and development causes for the people
involved. We will look at the dual legacy of British colonial law, and the
relationship between customary law and state courts as a primary site for
understanding conflicts over rights, citizenship, and the role of the
individual in society. We will posit
complex historical and cultural ways of understanding particular cases.
Course |
AFR / MUS 266B Jazz Repertory:American Popular Song |
|
Professor |
John Esposito |
|
CRN |
95332 |
|
Schedule |
Mon Fr 3:00 -4:30 pm BLM N211 (class) Mon Fr 4:30 -6:00 pm BLM N211(ensemble) |
|
Distribution |
OLD: F |
NEW: PRACTICING
ARTS
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies
This performance-based course is a survey of the
major American popular song composers of the Tin Pan Alley era, whose work
forms the core of the jazz repertoire. Composers studied will include Gershwin,
Berlin, Porter, Ellington, Warren, Rodgers, and others. The course will include
readings, recorded music, and films. The students and instructor will perform
the music studied in a workshop setting. Prerequisite: Jazz Harmony II
or permission of the instructor.
Course |
AFR / MUS 331 Jazz: The Freedom Principle I |
|
Professor |
Thurman Barker |
|
CRN |
95336 |
|
Schedule |
Mon 1:30 -3:50 pm Blum N210 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: F |
NEW: ANALYSIS
OF ARTS
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE
A jazz study of the cross-pollination between
Post-Bop in the late fifties and Free Jazz. The course, which employs a
cultural approach, is also designed to look at the social climate surrounding
the music to examine its effects on the music from 1958 to the mid-sixties.
Emphasis will be on artists and composers such as Cecil Taylor, Ornette
Coleman, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Max Roach,
Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and Horace Silver. Illustrated with recordings,
films, and videos.
Course |
AFR / ANTH 327 Ritual, Performance, and Symbolic Practice |
|
Professor |
Jesse Shipley |
|
CRN |
95283 |
|
Schedule |
Wed 9:30 -11:50 am OLIN 201 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: A |
NEW: SOCIAL
SCIENCE / RETHINKING DIFFERENCE
|
Cross-listed: Anthropology, Global & Int’l Studies
This course examines public performance
and various types of theatricality. Our goal will be to analyze how lived
experience relates to politics, change, and social power. The course addresses
the tension between these theories to highlight key philosophical issues
within anthropology and social thought more generally: power and its illusory
enactment; the relationship between personal experience and broader social
processes; the nature of consciousness; structure versus agency; stasis and
change. We begin by examining classic anthropological conceptions of ritual,
symbolic meaning, and social transformation. We will then explore
various linguistic, sociological, poststructuralist, and theatrical
theories. We will look at different ways to think about space and the social
body. The second half of the course draws on particular ethnographic,
theatrical, philosophic, and literary examples from West Africa that address
the relationships between historical memory, specific kinds of performance, and
the local experience of power. We will ask in particular how African theories
of performance reflect their social and personal contexts. We will examine the
social processes through which certain symbols and practices become central
locations for the production and contestation of meaning and identity. Students
will be encouraged to consider the tension between "performance" as a
theoretical frame and an "object" of analysis. The course is
designed for students with a background in anthropology/sociology, history,
performance studies, ethnic studies, or literary and social theory. This
course can be taken in conjunction with HIST 3103 as complementary issues will
be addressed.
Course |
AFR / LIT 3902 The Mask & its Metaphors |
|
Professor |
Donna Grover |
|
CRN |
95142 |
|
Schedule |
Tu 1:30 – 3:50 pm OLIN 306 |
|
Distribution |
OLD: B |
NEW: LITERATURE
IN ENGLISH
|
Cross-listed: Africana Studies
The push in America to “make it new” meant a break
with the past, with convention. For many writers, this break was
facilitated by the use of an “Other.” For instance, critic Michael North
argues that in the work of Gertrude Stein and Picassso “the step away from
conventional verisimilitude into abstraction is accomplished by a figurative
change of race.” With Stein this meant the use of the African-American
voice and with Picasso his African masks. The mask as both a literal and
figurative device runs through modern literary works. In this course
we will examine how this looking at oneself through a mask impacts modernist
narratives and how the mask subverts conventional definitions of race and
gender. We will read Stein’s Three Lives, Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood
Royal, Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday, Frantz Fanon’s Black
Skin, White Masks, Freud’s Totem and Taboo among others and some
literary theory and criticism.