INTRODUCTN TO AFRICAN STUDIES

Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the study of Africa, moving from pre-colonial through colonial and post-colonial periods to contemporary Africa. Focus will be on its history, societal relations, politics and the arts. The objective is to provide a critical survey of the history as well as the continuing debates in African Studies.

• MW 11:40 a.m.-12:55 p.m.
• Instructor: Abosede A George
  CULPA: 14 Wikipedia Info
• 3 points

THE AFRICANA COLLOQUIUM

BLACK FUTURES

The Africana Studies Department offers special topics courses every year as colloquia. These colloquia provide opportunities for students to explore areas of particular interest within African Diasporic Studies in a seminar environment. Students earn 4 credits for these courses. There are multiple colloquia offered by the department every year. Some of the topics for these colloquia have included Critical Race Theory, Indian Ocean Diaspora, The New Black, Caribbean Women, and Black Shakespeare. As the topics change, students should check with the Chair of the Africana Studies Department if they have any questions about the topics for a particular academic year.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Maleda Belilgne
  Info
• 4 points

THE AFRICANA COLLOQUIUM

COLL:BLACK EUR CULTRL STUD

The Africana Studies Department offers special topics courses every year as colloquia. These colloquia provide opportunities for students to explore areas of particular interest within African Diasporic Studies in a seminar environment. Students earn 4 credits for these courses. There are multiple colloquia offered by the department every year. Some of the topics for these colloquia have included Critical Race Theory, Indian Ocean Diaspora, The New Black, Caribbean Women, and Black Shakespeare. As the topics change, students should check with the Chair of the Africana Studies Department if they have any questions about the topics for a particular academic year.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Monica L Miller
  CULPA: 10 Info
• 4 points

Heading South: Voyages to Latin America

This course is concerned with two interrelated topics: 1) the long, complicated history of voyages to Latin America; and 2) the myriad and evolving ways voyagers to the region have portrayed its landscapes, people, food, festivals, and more. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a type of voyage characteristic of a given era, including:


conquest voyages undertaken by figures such as Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés

settler-colonial voyages undertaken by Iberians seeking new lives in the New World

captive voyages undertaken by Africans destined for enslavement in households, cities, and rural environs

freedom voyages undertaken by African Americans escaping from slavery

sex-tourism voyages undertaken by North Americans and Europeans


We will view these topics through a combination of different forms of media (such as letters, travel accounts, features, and films) and traditional scholarly sources that will help contextualize them.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Tamara Walker
  Info
• 4 points

Fanon s Psychology of the Oppressed

Frantz Fanon’s ideas have been influential for decades among theorists, practitioners, and activists alike.  This seminar is focused on understanding Fanon’s particular perspective on the psychology of the oppressed and its relevance for examining the experience of past and present racialized inequality and its effects in society. The course is divided into four sections, which build cumulatively.

I). An introductory section introduces Fanon’s central ideas (e.g., dialecticism, existentialism, post-colonialism) in their intellectual and socio-historical context (e.g., the Algerian revolution, African decolonization, South African Apartheid, the US civil rights and women’s rights movements).

II). A second section locates Fanon in psychological theory and therapeutic theory and practice.  The cultural and political (Eurocentric?) roots of psychological theory and practice are examined as are notions of oppression causing psychological and physical violence as well as psychopathology / psychological disorder.

III). A third section examines Fanon and others psychological approaches to identity with particular attention to the presumed “inferiority complex” of oppressed peoples, nationalist and other reconstructions of identity in opposition to oppression, sociological psychological conceptualizations of stigma, and Dubois’s influential ideas regarding double consciousness.

IV). A fourth and final section focuses on resistance and rebellion.  The focus here is on the psycho-moral implications of (violent, peaceful, non-disruptive) action against oppression with reference to the distinct perspectives of Fanon in comparison to influential figures like Gandhi and M.L.K Jr.  These issues are linked to a post-Fanon approach to the psychology of the oppressed called Liberation Psychology.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Colin Leach
  CULPA: 4 h-index: 41 Info
• 3 points

BEFORE 'BLACK LIVES MATTER':READING INSU

Black Lives Matter is an American phenomenon. This course situates BLM in relation to other and earlier movements in the Global South and elsewhere. Through textual analysis and critical reading, we take up the discursive, rhetorical, and poetical strategies of opposition to marginalization, criminalization, and racial othering.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Yvette Christianse
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

Environmental Humanities in the Global S

ENVIRO HUMANITIES GLOBAL

"This interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to make sense of the ‘sense of an ending’ that underlines all warnings about environmental crisis and climate change. Our interdisciplinary course has a doubled foundation out of which our readings and discussions will grow: communal understanding and knowledge about local environments, on one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and the data and information gathered by scientists."

"We therefore begin with a simple question: what is the relation between the Humanities and the work of scientists? Scientists undertake painstaking, necessary research to provide communities and their governments with vital, necessary information. Individuals and communities interpret and translate this information, often affectively. An organization of scientists studying carbon levels across Africa can list the progressive increase in temperatures across Africa over a period of years and calculate anticipated increases. An image based on this data may visualize the projected rise:"

"A glance reveals something dire based on the way we associate red with danger. Our course is oriented towards who lives beneath the surfaces of data and images that ‘draw a picture’ for us. We read for how communities and individuals explain and communicate their relation to the historical and changing environments. In other words, we attend to narration, in different forms—fiction, poetry, song, travelogue—to grasp how experiences are rendered comprehensible. There is a broad ‘where’ as well, and a fluid ‘when.’ ‘Where’ takes us into the portmanteau category of ‘The Global South.’ We bracket the scope of this category to focus upon specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa and diasporic African communities. ‘When’ permits us to think of time, the time of the world, the times of change and the times of aftermaths. Go into an archive, open a history book, a sacred text and you will encounter ‘endings.’ We enter British colonial archives to see how signs of  ‘When’ also allows us to face an underlying dread that might be called a ‘sense of an ending’ and to see just how many such ‘endings’ have come to pass. This is how we enter the diasporic histories of environmental change related to colonialism and the enslavement and transportation of whose descendants live in the

• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Yvette Christianse
  Wikipedia Info
• 4 points

SENIOR SEMINAR

A program of interdisciplinary research leading to the writing of the senior essay. All Africana majors must complete the one-semester Africana Studies Senior Seminar in the fall and submit a senior essay as one of the requirements for this course. A student who has successfully completed the Africana Studies Senior Seminar, has demonstrated the ability to complete a senior thesis, and has obtained approval from the faculty member teaching the Senior Seminar may take an Independent Study with a Barnard or Columbia faculty member or a second thesis seminar in another department in order to complete a senior thesis in Africana Studies in the spring semester.

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Celia E Naylor
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 4 points

Afro-Latin America in the Artistic Imagi

AFRO-LATIN AMER IN ART IM

How have painters, filmmakers, novelists, and other artists portrayed the history of Africans and their descendants in Latin America? How do those portrayals – of the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, abolition, and contemporary social movements, to name a few examples – compare to scholarly approaches to those same subjects? To answer these and other questions, this class brings together a wide array of materials covering more than five hundred years of Afro-Latin American history. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a topic relevant to the history of Afro-Latin America in a given era, as viewed through both artistic and scholarly sources. Students will come to class prepared to consider what each has to offer to our understanding of the past. We will also debate the possibilities of using art to disseminate historical knowledge, and whether there any dangers to privileging artistic over scholarly approaches to history (or vice versa). In addition, because NYC is home to so many museums, archives, and cultural institutions relevant to our subject, it will serve as an experiential laboratory where we will spend several of our class meetings. Learning outcomes. By the end of the semester, students will be skilled at the following:

 analyzing artistic and scholarly sources on their own terms

 discussing them in relation to one another

 evaluating the utility of these diverse materials to the process of understanding the past.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Tamara Walker
  Info
• 4 points