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.

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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.