The fundamental query underlying this course is what is the relationship between dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring and race, specifically blackness? This course will draw upon a number of disciplines and fields including history, performance theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies to examine how blackness is fashioned, and refashioned within the United States and globally. Throughout the course we will investigate how not only race--but attendant issues of gender, sexuality and citizenship have all been constructed and contested through dress. Finally, we will explore what new and more nuanced insights might fashion, dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring offer us for understanding black subjectivities more broadly.

The end of colonial rule was the springboard for the start of cold wars in various regions of Africa. Where peace could not be maintained violence erupted. Even where secession has been attained, as in the new country of South Sudan, the threat of civil war lingers. While domestic politics have led to the rise of armed conflicts and civil wars in many African countries, the external factors should also not be ignored. Important in all current conflicts is the concern to international peace and security. Overall this course will: (1) investigate the general nature of armed conflicts in Africa (2) provide in-depth analysis of the underlying factors (3) and discuss the regional and the international responses to these conflicts and their implications. Special emphasis will be placed upon African conflicts and civil wars in: great Lakes area, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

This seminar course will examine how sub-Saharan Africans have interpreted and dealt with issues of health, healing, and medicine under colonial and postcolonial regimes. It will also look at how various social, economic, religious, and political factors have impacted health and healing on the continent and shaped African responses. Class discussions will center around both general themes affecting health and healing in Africa as well as case studies drawn from historical and anthropological works.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, and medicine, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.

SPRING 2018: In 1989, as she reflected on her magnum opus, Beloved, Toni Morrison declared "There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of,or recollect the absences of slaves. She went on, There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no bench by the road." And because such a place doesn't exist...the book had to." Today, there are significantly more markers of slavery in the public sphere as well as new novels, films, and television shows that directly take up the history and remnants of slavery in our lives. Looking at Colson Whitehead's novel, The Underground Railroad and WGN's tv series "The Underground," the remaking of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana as well as considering the debates about confederate flags and monuments in places like New Orleans, Virginia, and South Carolina, this course will examine the meaning and movements behind these contemporary engagements with American slavery today. See the Africana Studies Program's website at www.sas.upenn.edu/africana for a description of the current offerings.