Course	AFR / ANTH 148 African Encounters and Diasporas
Professor	Jesse Shipley
CRN	16038
Schedule	Mon Wed 12:00 -1:20 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: History / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: ANTH, GISP, History, Human Rights, SRE

This course introduces a global socio-historical framework within which to examine multiple modern African Diasporas. Considering the historical contexts of contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, we examine cultural, economic, and philosophic aspects of African peoples around the globe. We will examine how ideas of what it means to be African culturally, racially, and politically are continually produced and contested. The moment of independence of many African nation-states from European colonial rule in the mid 20th century operates as a centering point from which we will consider economics, race, politics, and artistic expressions. We will explore ideas of “tradition” and “modernity,” representations of Africa, more recent processes of commodification, as well as various cultural and political responses to them. We will consider bodily practices, aesthetics, and social movements in the creative production of African modern worlds and their relationship to contemporary movements of African peoples to the Americas and Europe. In this sense we consider different socio-historical movements in the context of Caribbean and North American history. We also explore African peoples and practices in their continuing dialogues and returns to the African continent. We will use historical, literary and ethnographic texts as well as popular musical and visual forms to understand contemporary and historical dynamics of the continent and its global reach. We will consider the nature of historical and anthropological inquiry and examine the practices through which history is continually re-produced in the present. On-line

Course	AS 102 Introduction to American Culture and Values
Professor	Donna Grover
CRN	16045
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 305
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Humanities

This course is an introduction to the multidisciplinary study of American culture. We will examine both the problematics and the fruits of a national culture. Weighed down with the authority of custom, a national culture imposes a sense of obligation to all who belong to a society, but it affects groups and individuals differently, according to the variables of gender, race and class. This course will compare and contrast visions of American culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will study the works of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B DuBois, Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald among others. On-line

Course	ANTH 265 Race and Nature in Africa
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
CRN	16470
Schedule	Tu Th 10:30 -11:50 pm OLIN 305
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Environmental Studies, Global & Int’l Studies, Human Rights, SRE

Western fantasies have historically represented Africa as the embodiment of a mythical, primordial wilderness. Within this evocative imagery, nature is racialized, and Africans are constructed as existing in a state closer to nature. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness perhaps best exemplifies this process, through its exploration of the ‘savage’ dimensions of colonialism in the African interior. Imperial discourses often relied on these tropes of savagery and barbarism to link understandings of natural history with ideas about racial difference. Similarly, by blurring the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, colonial policies created a zone of anxiety around racialized domestic relationships, particularly in the context of employers and their servants. Many of these representations were contradictory, as evidenced by Rousseau’s image of the noble savage: indigenous people who lived as gentle custodians of the environment, while at the same time preying upon the resources desired for exclusive colonial use. After investigating the racialization of nature under imperial regimes, we will consider the continuing legacies in post-colonial situations. How have certain ethnic identities, for example, been linked to nature? How do these associations reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities? In what ways is race invoked in struggles for land and resource rights? Through an exploration of ethnographic accounts, historical analyses, and works of fiction based in Africa, this course offers a new way of deciphering cultural representations of nature, and the fundamentally political agendas that lie within them.

Course	ANTH 325 Environment, Development and Power
Professor	Yuka Suzuki
CRN	16043
Schedule	Wed 9:30 – 11:50 am PRE 110
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: Social Science

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, Environmental Studies

In an age of apocalyptic narrative, the environment has taken center stage in what is constructed as an unprecedented global ecological crisis. The endemic urgency of these discourses often serves to justify dramatic interventions imposed from the center to the periphery, from ‘developed’ nations to ‘developing’ nations, and from affluent capital cities to the marginalized hinterlands. Taking its cue from political ecology and the principle that all resource struggles are fundamentally political, this course explores the complex, dynamic interplay between conservation, development, and power. The first part of the course traces the historical underpinnings of contemporary inequity by examining the logics of colonial sciences in relation to ‘nature’, as well as the use of exotic species of flora and fauna as tools of imperial conquest. We then turn to the shaping of modern environmental discourses: how environmental ‘problems’ are identified, how interventions are rationalized, and how development ‘failures’ are swept under the rug without delegitimizing the paradigm of development itself. Finally, we examine the politics of displacement, the emergence of ‘environmental refugees’, and the imperative need for the conceptualization and practice of an environmental justice. The course will draw on ethnographic case studies from Brazil, India, Guinea, Indonesia, and Tanzania among other nations, in both historical and contemporary contexts. On-line

Course	ARTH 122 Survey of African Art
Professor	Susan Aberth
CRN	16474
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm OLIN 102
Distribution	OLD: A/C	NEW: Analysis of Arts

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

This introductory course surveys the vast array of art forms created on the African continent from the prehistoric era to the present, as well as arts of the diaspora in Brazil, the Americas, Haiti, etc. In addition to sculpture, masks, architecture and metalwork, we will examine beadwork, textiles, jewelry, house painting, pottery, and other decorative arts. Some of the topics to be explored will be implements of divination, royal regalia, the role of performance, music and dance, funerary practices, and the incorporation of western motifs and materials. All students welcome.. On-line

Course	HIST 371 The Civil Rights Movement
Professor	Myra Armstead
CRN	16031
Schedule	Mon 9:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: History

Cross-listed: Africana Studies

The intense decade of political ferment surrounding the struggle for black rights in the United States, stretching roughly from 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) to 1964 (Civil Rights Act), will be contextualized in this course. This period will be explored longitudinally—against a longer history of Constitutionally-based precedents and legislation—and against the backdrop of such other pertinent developments following World War II as the rise of a human rights movement, the Cold War, decolonization of Africa and a growing Pan-African sensibility, northward migration, and simultaneous domestic social movements. The course will also address explanations for the attenuation of the Movement. Readings consist of a variety of primary sources including autobiographies, speeches, legal documents, memoirs and secondary material by several historians who have produced important monographs on the Movement. Students will be expected to produce a long research paper in this course. On-line

Course	LIT 2154 Dark Comedy: Humor in African American Literature
Professor	Mathew Johnson
CRN	16141
Schedule	Wed Fr 10:30 - 11:50 am OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, American Studies, SRE

In Dark Comedy, students will examine the use of humor, particularly satire, as a tool in African American literature for identifying and deconstructing the absurdities of race, assimilation, and historic memory. We will begin with the newly emboldened writers of the Harlem Renaissance, reading both George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman’s distorted, fly-on-the-wall critiques of the movement, and then see how their political comedy was furthered by Ralph Ellison with Invisible Man. Through the humorous mythic yarns of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, as well as Charles Johnson’s Ox-Herding Tale, we will identify how African and southern American folklore informed the modern comic tradition. Using Chester Himes’s Pinktoes and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, we’ll explore the relation of gender and status to the choice of satire. With Trey Ellis’s Platitudes, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and Percival Everett’s Erasure, we will attempt to identify not only why a disproportionate percentage of Black America’s strongest writers have continued to be drawn to the satiric form over the last three decades, but also what similarities their messages might have.

Course	SOC 246 Race & Ethnicity: The Key Concepts
Professor	Amy Ansell
CRN	16051
Schedule	Tu Th 1:00 -2:20 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: A	NEW: Social Science / Rethinking Difference

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, SRE

Although it is popular today to celebrate the existence of a “post-racial” world, many in the academy concur that it is a world still in the making. Race continues to affect the social world and the people who inhabit it in multiple ways. Given the unfulfilled promises of a post-racist world and the sheer ubiquity of race matters, it is more crucial than ever to carefully understand the variety and particularity of meanings and uses with which the concepts have been historically associated. The course aims to situate the study of race and ethnicity within its own historical and intellectual context and, in so doing, expose students to the broad diversity of scholarship in the field and convey the excitement and challenge of the enterprise. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of the conceptual evolution of key terms, the variety of meanings with which the concepts have been historically associated, and the differing ways in which the concepts are deployed or remain pertinent in current debates. Key concepts surveyed include: race formation, ethnic identity, assimilation, racism, race and science, racial categorization, race and politics, gendered racism, segregation, discrimination, and whiteness. On-line

Course	SST 214 Black Thought in the Francophone World
Professor	Tabetha Ewing
CRN	16024
Schedule
Distribution	OLD: C	NEW: History

Cross-listed: Africana Studies, SRE

Titled after the famous C.L.R. James essay, this course reviews ideas that push the boundaries of nation, race, and identity held by influential 20^th-century writers who considered themselves to be subjects of the African diaspora. Their works, including those of James, Franz Fanon, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and Maryse Condé, have shaped whole schools of political and social thought in the later 20^th century. As the debates around the politics of race, identity, gender, and empire shift, do these once- canonical figures still have relevance today? We will read scholars and polemicists commenting on the complexion of the new world order to assist us in drawing conclusions to this question. On-line