This graduate seminar entertains the history of African American cultural production primarily in the twentieth century through foundational and emerging works in the field. This seminar focuses on African American religious history, with a focus on the material, visual, auditory, and literary religious constructions of everyday worlds, lives, and professions. Our readings attend to intersectional dimensions of African American religious life, highlighting the connections of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, alternative religious identities, and region.
A focus on Black cultural production and its producers enriches African American religious history. Seminar participants will engage the theoretical concerns and methodological approaches that illuminate the ways that Black women and men capture and (re)shape the meaning of their worlds in a variety of domestic, professional, social, and political settings. The seminar’s primary aims are to help participants define interests within the field to pursue further study, to consider potential areas of research, and to aid preparation for doctoral examinations.

The founder(s) of this course wondered, in an overtly and covertly racist society: “What if we engaged practitioners, educators and researchers in training (social work, policy, criminal justice, counseling, education, health care, etc.) to develop a more empathic imagination and reflection of the Black male before they encounter them in practice?” Core tenets underlying this class are that racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are ignorant of this reality. Students will learn how to help the Black boys and men they engage to identify and challenge the effects of racial oppression on their academic, occupational, relational and cultural well-being, and to promote post-traumatic growth.

In his 1995 documentary Black Is, Black Ain t Marlon Riggs traces a black cultural tradition while simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of blackness itself. He testifies that: Black is black, and black is blue. Black is bright. Black is you. Black can do you in. In Riggs configuration, black is a color, black is a feeling, black is a sound, black is materiality, and black is a life sentence. In an effort to raise critical questions around blackness, performance, race, and feeling, this course follows in the tradition of Riggs work. In other words, this graduate level course examines the notion of blackness through theorizations of performance. It pursues the following questions: What is blackness? How is blackness embodied, felt, heard, represented, and seen through performance? How is black performance political? Discussions and written work will interrogate the slipperiness of, desire for, and policing of blackness in order to trouble conceptions of race as a biological essence. Organized by keywords in the field of Black Performance Theory - and exploring varying performance forms (the play, the dance, the film, the photograph, the performance of everyday life, the television program, the exhibit, and even the tweet) - This course foregrounds the micro-politics through which black racialized subjects are shaped in the realm of culture. Performances will be consulted each meeting which we will use to interpret and complicate the day's readings. In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through black bodies.

There is little question that inequality along the lines of race and ethnicity remain a constant problem in American society. And over time, the federal government has implemented several policy initiatives to address these inequities. However, less well understood is the success of these federal policies or the process in which they emerge from government as a viable solution. This course will provide an overview of the link between federal government action and changes in minority inequality. We will analyze several issue spaces that cover health, crime and incarceration, social policy and equal rights, education, welfare, and economics. We will take a multi-method approach to exploring the success of federal policies by conducting historical assessments and statistical analysis. Advanced undergraduates are welcome to take the course with permission.

From Marvin Gaye, to Tammy Faye Baker, to Sarah Palin and James Baldwin, Pentecostalism has influenced many, including politicians, preachers, writers, and the media. One of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, Pentecostalism continues to have a profound effect on the religious landscape. Pentecostalism's unique blend of charismatic worship, religious practices, and flamboyant, media-savvy leadership, has drawn millions into this understudies and often controversial religious movement. This course will chronicle the inception and growth of Pentecostalism in the United States, giving particular attention to beliefs, practices, gender, ethnicity, and Global Pentecostalism.

This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.

This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource-rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.

This advanced undergraduate course examines women’s role in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, with an emphasis on women’s activism, impact, and gender dynamics in social movements. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of women’s experiences in major organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.

This undergraduate seminar places contemporary Black spiritualities at the center of the study of African-descended peoples. Through recent books in the ethnography of Africana religions, spiritual communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that have established communities in the United States will constitute the focus of our course readings and anchor our weekly discussions. As an advanced seminar, our meetings will allow participants to interrogate the authors of these ethnographies. We will assess how these accounts have conceptualized the African diaspora and the vantages (“insiders” and “outsiders”) from which they describe religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Beyond considering the commonalities and distinctions in form and practice that characterize various African diasporic religious practices, participants will also work to understand the constructions of race and belonging, ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location that affect the lives of Black religious adherents.

This course is an examination and analysis of the changing images and achievements of African Americans in motion pictures and television. The first half of the course focuses on African-American film images from the early years of D.W. Griffith's "renegade bucks" in The Birth of a Nation (1915); to the comic servants played by Steppin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and others during the Depression era; to the post-World War II New Negro heroes and heroines of Pinky (1949) and The Defiant Ones (1958); to the rise of the new movement of African American directors such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Charles Burnett, (To Sleep With Anger) and John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood). The second half explores television images from the early sitcoms "Amos 'n Andy" and "Beulah" to the "Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," and "Martin." Foremost this course will examine Black stereotypes in American films and television--and the manner in which those stereotypes have reflected national attitudes and outlooks during various historical periods. The in-class screenings and discussions will include such films as Show Boat (1936), the independently produced "race movies" of the 1930s and 1940s, Cabin in the Sky (1943), The Defiant Ones (1958), Imitation of Life (the 1959 remake) & Super Fly (1972).