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.

The objectives are to continue to strengthen students' knowledge of speaking, listening, reading, and writing Swahili and to compare it with the language of the students; to continue learning about the cultures of East Africa and to continue making comparisons with the culture(s) of the students; to continue to consider the relationship between that knowledge and the knowledge of other disciplines; and using that knowledge, to continue to unite students with communities outside of class. Level 3 on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale.

At the end of the course students will be at Level 2 on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale.

In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. Previous versions of this course have included "African American Autobigraphy," "Backgrounds of African American Literature," "The Black Narrative" (beginning with eighteenth century slave narratives and working toward contemporary literature), as well as seminars on urban spaces, jazz, migration, oral narratives, black Christianity, and African-American music. See Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.