Course Listing

Critique of theoretical, methodological, and aesthetic models in critical ethnography, drawn mostly from race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and feminisms.  Use of these models in students’ own research practice.

An introduction to major twentieth-century poets and movements.  Works by Frost, Eliot, Moore, Brooks, Hughes, Hayden, and others.  Relations between poetic traditions, stylistic innovations, and historical changes.

The development of Caribbean literature from the 1930s to the present.  Authors include V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, Maryse Conde, and Patricia Powell.

This course will examine major exponents of “Third World,” transnational, and black feminist, and queer of color theorization and praxis.  We will employ a trans-disciplinary perspective, including anthropology, literature, film, and experiential learning.

This course explores the history of American slavery, its destruction during the nineteenth century, and its significance for us in the twenty-first century.

Survey of Spike Lee’s films and writings, in the contexts of African American cultural movements and American independent films.

Examination of black women’s literary texts, with a focus on the post-civil rights era.  Exploration of the ways writers construct and contest the cultural, ideological, and political parameters of black womanhood.  Topics include narrative strategy, modes of representation, and textual depictions of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, color, ethnicity, nationality, class, and generation.  Texts placed within the context of black women’s literary legacies.

The literary reaction to slavery; the evolution in form from slave narratives to autobiographies and fictions; the incorporation of folk and popular materials into formal literature.  Authors include Phyllis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chestnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson.

This course will examine how racial ideology informs contemporary debates about American culture, politics, and social life by reading political writing about race that has appeared in the post-Civil Rights era.  The goal of this course is not to trace the history of these texts but to explore in what ways public policy advocates, journalists, academics, filmmakers, and legal
analysts write about race as a feature of American life.  We will consider the complex question of racial identity and explore how writing and reading about race can both reflect and challenge racial categories, hierarchies, and perceptions.

From the garreting of Harriet Jacobs to Tyler Perry as Madea, this course introduces students to applied religious ethics through an exploration of black faith and sexuality in the United States.  Students will learn basic foundational models for understanding religious ethics in philosophical, theological, and social terms while engaging the intersections of race, gender,
sexuality, and faith.  This course explores ethical frameworks functioning within cultural theory, historical accounts, film, and works of fiction.  Students will be guided in a consideration of the roles of creativity and imagination in the formations of race, faith, and sexuality.  Topics include sexual violence and exploitation, respectability and the black family, reclaiming the
erotic, and new spiritualities.

The influence of nationalist frameworks on American artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s.  The treatment of gender expression in nationalist sentiments.  Focus on writings by and about the Black Arts Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Young Lords Party, Asian American nationalism, and feminist and queer organizing.  Works by Arturo Islas, Alice Walker, Frank Chin, Gloria Anzaldua, Amiri Baraka, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Survey of major twentieth-century Caribbean poets.  Poets may include Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Aime Cesaire.

Introduction to the social and artistic history of photography in Black Atlantic contexts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.  Uses of the photographic image in shaping understandings of race relations and black identities.  Codes and conventions by which photographs are evaluated in terms of truth, reflection, testimony, expressivity, and construction.

The dynamic relationship between the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement from 1940 to the present.  When and how the two movements overlapped, intersected, and diverged.  The variety of ways in which African Americans and women campaigned for equal rights.  Topics include World War II, freedom summer, black power, the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights.

Introduction to Black British visual artists and cultural theorists, with a focus on those of African, Caribbean, and South Asian descent.  Postcolonial perspectives on diaspora identities and cross-cultural aesthetics in art, film, and photography from 1945 to the present.

This seminar will address myriad modes and methods of describing, imaging, illuminating and eliding, performing and filming black women’s bodies emphasizing the ways in which these bodies have acquired particular cultural meanings.  It will be taught in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery, Center for British Art, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  It will be transnational in scope and draw upon the work of a wide variety of creative artists from multiple sites in the Black Atlantic.

African American dramatic literature and theater history from the nineteenth century to the present.  Key events in black theater history, including the emergence of black musical comedy, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Black Arts movement.  Plays by Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and others.

An interdisciplinary approach to two nations that share a name, a river, and elements of culture but that are divided by colonial heritage (one Belgian, one French).  Focus on literature, with references to history, anthropology, art, politics, music, and sports.  Views from outside the two countries (Heart of Darkness; Tintin; The Poisonwood Bible) and inside (E. Dongala, Sony
Labou Tansi, H. Lopes, V. Y. Mudimbe, A Mabanckou).  The 1974 Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match.

Prerequisite:  reading knowledge of French.

Sexual imagery and content in African American literature and popular culture.  Ways that artists and social critics understand the relationship between sexual identity and racial identity.  Writers and artists include Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Spike Lee, Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Patricia H. Collins, Mark Anthony Neal, and Audre Lorde.

A study of autobiographical writings from Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative (1682) to the present.  Classic forms such as immigrant, education, and cause narratives; prevailing autobiographical strategies involving place, work, and photographs.  Authors include Franklin, Douglass, Jacobs, Antin, Kingston, Uchida, Balakian, Als, and Karr.

An interdisciplinary, thematic approach to the study of race, nation, and ethnicity in the African diaspora.  Topics include class, gender, color, and sexuality; the dynamics of reform, Pan-Aricanism, neocolonialism, and contemporary black nationalism.  Use of a broad range of methodologies.

Visual art in African American books since 1900.  Artists include Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, E. S. Campbell, Tom Feelings, and the FSA photographer of the 1940s.  Topics include Harlem  Renaissance book art, photography and literature, and children’s books.  Research in collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery is encouraged.

An examination of “pulp” fiction written by African American authors from the early twentieth century to the present day.  Examination of the historical contexts and cultural politics that shape black novelists’ use of sensationalist techniques and technologies in their prose works. Authors may include:  Pauline Hopkins, Claude McKay, Chester Himes, Octavia Butler, Terry
McMillan, and Walter Mosely.

A comparison of two media and their powers of representation.  Contrasting depictions of the former French colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia in texts and films produced by “insiders” and “outsiders.”  Discourse and imagery, political and cultural contexts, and emergence of new vernaculars.  Works by Rouch, Zobel, Palcy, Duras, and Denis; focus on
the novels and films of Sembene.

Prerequisite:  reading knowledge of French.

Independent research under the direction of a member of the department on a special topic in African American studies not covered in other courses.  Permission of the director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor directing the research is required.  A proposal signed by the instructor must be submitted to the director of undergraduate students by the end of the second week of classes.  The instructor meets with the student regularly, typically for an hour a week, and the student writes a final paper or a series of short essays.

Independent research under the direction of a member of the department on a special topic in African American studies not covered in other courses.  Permission of the director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor directing the research is required.  A proposal signed by the instructor must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes.  The instructor meets with the student regularly, typically for an hour a week, and the student writes a final paper or a series of short essays.

A seminar on issues and approaches in African American studies.  The colloquium offers students practical help in refining their senior essay topics and developing research strategies. Students discuss assigned readings and share their research experiences and findings.  During the term, students are expected to make substantial progress on their senior essays; they are required to submit a prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and a draft of one-quarter of the essay.

Independent research on the senior essay.  The senior essay form must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes.  The senior essay should be completed according to the following schedule:  (1) end of the sixth week of classes:  a rough draft of the entire essay; (2) end of the last week of classes (fall term) or three weeks before the end of classes (spring term):  two copies of the final version of the essay.

Independent research on the senior essay.  The senior essay form must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes.  The senior essay should be completed according to the following schedule:  (1) end of the sixth week of classes:  a rough draft of the entire essay; (2) end of the last week of classes (fall term) or three weeks before the end of classes (spring term):  two copies of the final version of the essay.

The rise, development, and philosophic achievement of the world of New York mambo and salsa.  Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon.  Examination of parallel traditions, e.g., New York Haitian art, Dominican merengue, reggae and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira.

The discovery, public memory, and commemoration of African Canadian history from the seventeenth century to the present. Enslavement under the French, First Nations, and British; the Underground Railroad; later migrations from the United States, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

SKills: WR. Permission of the instructor required.

The history of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas, from the first African American societies of the sixteenth century through the century-long process of emancipation.

An examination of the African American experience since 1861.  Meanings of freedom and citizenship are distilled through appraisal of race and class formations, the processes and effects of cultural consumption, and the grand narrative of the civil rights movement.

The causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War.  A search for the multiple meanings of a transformative event, including national, sectional, racial, constitutional, social, gender, intellectual, and individual dimensions.

Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations south of the Sahara—Mali, Asante, Dahomey, Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongo—and their impact on New World art and music, especially rock, blues, North American black painting of the past ten years, and black artists of Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil.

Political economy of contemporary social welfare policy as it has been affected by economic restructuring, the development of the underclass, and the effects of immigration on the economy and its social structure.

Prerequisite:  introductory microeconomics.

 A survey of African American literature since 1970.  Authors include Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Anna Deavere Smith, Danzy Senna, and others. Topics include black feminist literature, black gay and lesbian literature, developments in literary criticism and theory, and contemporary black drama.

A required course for all first-year students in the joint Ph.D. program in African American Studies; also open to students in American Studies.  This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field.

At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the “American Renaissance” to the present.  Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship.  Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence,
relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation.

In this course we analyze black feminisms as both political space and scholarly choice.  This framework enables us to examine the continuities between black feminist and womanist theorizing in diverse locations, and to explore how different embodied experiences—including genders, histories, geographies, and genealogies—condition divergent perspectives.  Themes explored include slavery, colonialism, diaspora consciousness, multiple genders and sexualities, class difference and inequities of power within black communities; representation in popular culture; state violence; poetics and resistance.  We employ a transdisciplinary perspective—including anthropology, history, sociology, literature, and film—and challenge notions of “theory” as the province of the West (and North) and the middle class.

Survey of Spike Lee’s films and writings, in the contexts of African American cultural movements and American independent films.

Projects chosen from the post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined.  Research seminar.

A survey of African American cinema from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919) to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and beyond.  Topics include the concept of a black aesthetic, the relationship between commercial and independent filmmaking practices, and the question of genre.  

Starting with an intensive study of the main organizing principles in African dance and their variations among four key civilizations, Mandé, Yorùbá, Igbo, and Kongo, the seminar systematically compares these traits and gestures first with key black American dancing and then with action styles in black American sport. Emphasis is given to the transformation of soccer by the black superstar Pelé, and black influence in the reshaping of NFL football.

Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations south of the Sahara—Mali, Asante, Dahomey, Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongon—and their impact on the rise of New World art and music.
  

Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations of the world of New York mambo and salsa.  Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon.  Examinations of panel traditions such as New York Haitian art, Dominican merengue and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira.

This reading course examines the histories and historiographies of the slave systems of the Americas from about 1500 to 1800.  The course has a broad geographical scope, moving away from national histories and engaging with hemispheric, Atlantic, and world history paradigms.

Film aesthetics and intellectual history of African American cinema.  Shifting views on race/ racism and gender/sex/sexism within the overall context of the Hollywood industry.  American independent/experimental filmmaking practices and African Diaspora aesthetics.  African American cinema as a case of cross-cultural contact, complicity, and creativity.  Issues of stereotypes, authorship, and performance.  Shared problematics and passions between African American film and literature.  Film positioned less as a window and more as a palimpsest, a refracting medium with its own aesthetics and, within its own traditions, working over “race” and perceptions of particular cultures through plot devices, lighting, and sound, in particular,
often in unexpected ways.  Films alongside materials drawn from film, drama, literature, social history, journalism, television, and photographs, painting, dance and other arts.  Special unit on Josephine Baker, embodying the crucial conceptual bridge between black modernism and primitivism and between American race films and European colonial films.  Baker through
the lens of a recast Harlem Renaissance that emphasizes the modernist concerns of the body, life as art, migration, memory, and intercultural collaboration in a multidisciplinary canon. Readings from canonical, controversial, and recent publications in African American studies, film and media studies and gender/sexuality studies.  Oscar Micheaux and his circle, the L.A.
Rebellion, “New” Black Cinema, and beyond.

Introducing methods from cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and psychoanalysis, this seminar examines representations of black bodies in modern art and visual culture.  Abolitionist, Orientalist, and primitivist painting and sculpture are investigated through concepts of fetishism, fantasy, and the gaze, and in light of post-1960s artistic practices addressing inter-racial border zones as sites of cross-cultural hybridity.  Artists include Carl Van Vechten, Wilfredo Lam, Adrian Piper, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kara Walker, and Renee Cox; tests include Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Griselda Pollock.

This course will explore the diversity of African American women’s lives from the colonial era through the late twentieth century.  Using primary and secondary sources we will explore the social, political, cultural, and economic factors that produced change and transformation in the lives of African American women.  Through history, fiction, autobiography, art, religion, film, music, and cultural criticism we will discuss and explore the construction of African American women’s activism and feminism; the racial politics of the body, beauty, and complexion; hetero- and same-sex sexualities; intra-racial class relations; and the politics of identity, family, and work.

The impact of a midcentury dance on novels, films, aesthetic criticism, photography, and painting from 1949 to 2011.  Discussion includes the novels of Jack Kerouac, Carlos Fuentes, and Gonzalo Martre; the films of Almodovar and Fellini; and the history of mambo dance in Havana, Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and London.

The visual art, decoration, and illustration of African American books (prose and poetry) since 1900.   Topics include book art of the Harlem Renaissance (with special attention to Aaron Douglas and Charles Cullen), art imported to book production (e.g., Archibald Motley’s paintings used as book art), children’s books (e.g., I Saw Your Face by Kwame Dawes with drawings by Tom Feelings; Ntozake Shange’s Ellington Was Not a Street, illus. by Kadir Nelson), photography and literature (e.g., Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Cabin and Field, with Hampton Institute photographs; Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices).  The seminar includes sessions at Beinecke Library and encourages research projects in the Beinecke’s holdings, especially the James Weldon Johnson collection.

Surveying developments by which African American and Black Atlantic artists have questioned the core tenets of twentieth-century modernism, this seminar explores aesthetic strategies alongside contextual shifts from multiculturalism to globalization, thus introducing contemporary conceptions of diaspora.  Artists include Alison Saar, Kerry James Marshall,
Glenn Ligon, Keith Piper, Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson, Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas; texts include Guy Brett, Okwui Enwezor, Jean Fisher, Nikos Papastergiadis, Michele Wallace, Judith Wilson.

This course examines black politics and performance from the New Negro Renaissance to the Los Angeles Uprising.  Bringing together methods from history and performance studies, this course focuses on questions of race, citizenship, memory, and movement within the framework of black cultural politics.  The course moves across many modes of cultural and artistic
production, from the Federal Theater Project to the essays of James Baldwin to the verbatim theater of Anna Deavere Smith.

Some class sessions focus on matters or craft:  research techniques, styles of writing narrative and analysis; judging scholarly work; and philosophical dimensions of doing history in the early twenty-first century.  The primary focus of the course is for each student to complete his/her own major research paper.  Students in any field of American history are welcome.

The course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century:  sectionalism; expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and
Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas.

The ethnographic interpretation of urban life and culture.  Conceptual and methodological issues are discussed.  Ongoing projects of participants are presented in a workshop format, thus providing participants with critical feedback as well as the opportunity to learn from and contribute to ethnographic work in progress.  Selected ethnographic works are read and assessed.

The ethnographic interpretation of urban life and culture.  Conceptual and methodological issues are discussed.  Ongoing projects of participants are presented in a workshop format, thus providing participants with critical feedback as well as the opportunity to learn from and contribute to ethnographic work in progress.  Selected ethnographic works are read and
assessed.

In this course we will survey works that have shaped current research and critical debates in African American literary studies.  What categories and methods of analysis presently structure the field’s critical imaginary?  What texts—or, more precisely, what kinds of texts—comprise the canon of African American literary studies, and what theoretical cases are made for those works of art?  Finally, how might these projects lead you to shape your own critical pursuits? Studies we read may include:  Elizabeth McHenry on the literary societies and reading practices amongst free Blacks during slavery. Daphne Brooks on trans-Atlantic “performances of freedom” during the late-19th and early 20th centuries; Brent Edwards on the Harlem Renaissance’s translation to (and configuration in) the scene of 1920s Paris, France; Lawrence Jackson’s “narrative history” of mid-20th-century African American writing; Candace Jenkins on the “politics of respectability” in contemporary Black women’s writing; Madhu Dubey on the anxieties and aesthetics that animate Black postmodern fiction; Kenneth Warren on the politics of canon formation and periodization.  Also, since the “Birmingham School’s” cultural studies approach has proven decisive to the field’s development in the past two decades, we will discuss its migration from England to the U.S. academy through select work’s by Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, and Paul Gilroy.  As this outline suggests, we will read mostly monographs.  Article-length works will be defined through independent reading shaped by students’ research interests.  For written work, students will write three short book reviews, lead class discussions, and submit a longer review essay.

In this course, we will explore the rise of the carceral state in America and its implications for minorities, particularly the black urban underclass.  We will examine how punishment and surveillance and crime discourse have changed over time, debate the explanations for black mass incarceration, and consider its effects for the political lifeworlds of black communities.

Readings are drawn from twentieth-century Caribbean literature (fiction and poetry), written or translated into English, as well as cultural and literary theory and recent work on visual cultural and ecology.  The course poses questions about the various inventions, imaginings, and mappings of bodies and locations; representations of nature, land, island, and archipelago; the architectures offered by literature; and the relation between ecology and war in the greater Caribbean region.

A comprehensive study of the novel—its discourse, aesthetics, and history—in colonial and postcolonial francophone Africa.  Authors include Lamine Senghor, Ousmane Soce, Ousmane Sembene, Ferdinand Oyono, Ahmadou Kourouma, Yambo Ouologuem, Mariama Ba, Aminata Sow Fall, Fatou Diome, Calixthe Beyala, Alain Mabanckou.  Readings in French; course conducted in English.

This course surveys existing research and theories in the social sciences on a variety of topics pertaining to the notion of a “black community,” including family, politics, urban change, and migration.  Texts include a mix of empirical and theoretical insights from the social sciences (i.e., history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science).

Utilizing collections held in the Yale Art Gallery, the Center for British Art, and the Beinecke Library, this course juxtaposes literary texts and visual culture to create inter-disciplinary conversations about the representation of the black female body with particular emphasis on issues of sexuality, gender, and racial formation.

By arrangement with faculty.

By arrangement with faculty.