This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.

This introduction to African American literature will begin with contemporary, groundbreaking texts such as Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyric and Toni Morrisons A Mercy. These twenty-first century texts will lead us to the questions about freedom, beauty, struggle, pleasure, and resistance that shape the origins of African American literature. The course will be shaped around circles of influence (not a linear mapping of a literary tradition). These circles of the changing same become the art of flow, layering, and rupture. We will dive into the multidirectional flow of slave narratives/neo-slave narratives,black modernism/black postmodernism,black respectability politics/ black radicalism, and mastery of form/deformation of mastery. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Beginning with discussion of various perspectives on social change and law, this course then examines in detail the interdependent relationship between changes in legal and societal institutions. Emphasis will be placed on (1) how and when law can be an instrument for social change, and (2) how and when social change can cause legal change. In the assessment of this relationship, emphasis will be on the laws of the United States. However, laws of other countries and international law relevant to civil liberties, economic, social and political progress will be studied. Throughout the course, discussions will include legal controversies relevant to social change such as issues of race, gender and the law. Other issues relevant to State-Building and development will be discussed. A comparative framework will be used in the analysis of this interdependent relationship between law and social change.

The music form of scat deeyoodaaadayodeedaadeedaaa is the answer to the repea question Who are we? Where are we going? What are we here for? in the 1960s Hip Generation. This course will explore the role of music in shaping the most innovative formsAfrican American literature. Forms such as jazz poetry, blues poetry, and the frupture of Hip Hop will be as central to this course as the jam sessions that sliterary movements such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. The interplay between listening and reading will shape each layer of the co Langston Hughes Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) will be our starting p likely assigned texts include Gayl Jones Corregidora, Kevin Youngs To Repel G Remix, Sherman Alexies Reservation Blues, Paul Millers Sound Unbound, and The Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

Continuation of AFST 598.

Language specific sections for students interested in doing country-specific research in a target language. Courses cover project-based skills for AFST research.

Intermediate level courses in a variety of African languages: Igbo, Shona, WoloWololof, Malagasy, Chichewa, Setswana, Manding, Afrikaans, Setswana. on oral proficiency and productive language skills. All course are langauge specfic and follow ACTFL proficiency guidelines.