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).

This co-taught course examines films with thematic and epochal focus on some of the major political and historical events of the 20th century that have resulted in revolutions. In this course, Brink and Revolution will be given equal emphasis, as many film makers document, or render plausible through fiction, failures as well as successes, new vistas as well as blind spots, in attempts at revolution. We seek to explore the arc of revolutions, their beginnings, conflicts, and propulsion as people in movement attempt to create new social, cultural and economic orders, and the efforts of film makers to chronicle their actions, manifestos, popular mobilization, conflicts and constraints. Marx’s dictum “Men make history, but not as they choose” is evident in many films that capture cinematically the dialectical tensions between institutions and people seeking to maintain an existing order, often with high doses of repression, and those social movements and actors with oppositional imaginaries of the political present and future. Yet we are expanding Marx’s dictum to encompasses people of all genders who make, act in, produce and serve as models for cinemas on the brink of revolution.

A thorough panorama of contemporary Caribbean societies and their diasporic communities, this course enhances the students' knowledge of the region's main historical, political, and sociocultural trends. We will examine Caribbean multiple narratives of survival and resilience within a global context, through the study of 20th and 21st-centuries literary, cinematographic, musical, visual and performative works. The cultural analysis will be supported by a theoretical framework encompassing critical Caribbean theories on identity and identification.

This course explores theories, debates, and frameworks in African American popular culture. Drawing on Africana, Gender and Sexuality, Communications and Performance Studies, it examines histories of Black representation across a number of performance forms. Television, film, dance, theater, music and more will be explored to interrogate the ways blackness has been defined, framed, and disseminated. What are the micro-politics through which racial difference is produced? How have Black people redefined and wrestled with questions of authenticity and "the real"? What are the capacities and the limits of popular culture to both render and shape Black life? In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the creative labor that Black people produce, and the processes of racialization produced through Black bodies.

This course is designed to introduce students to the religious experiences of Africans and to the politics of culture. We will examine how traditional African religious ideas and practices interacted with Christianity and Islam. We will look specifically at religious expressions among the Yoruba, Southern African independent churches and millenarist movements, and the variety of Muslim organizations that developed during the colonial era. The purpose of this course is threefold. First, to develop in students an awareness of the wide range of meanings of conversion and people's motives in creating and adhering to religious institutions; Second, to examine the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in the expansion of religious social movements; And third, to investigate the role of religion as counterculture and instrument of resistance to European hegemony. Topics include: Mau Mau and Maji Maji movements in Kenya and Tanzania, Chimurenga in Mozambique, Watchtower churches in Southern Africa, anti-colonial Jihads in Sudan and Somalia and mystical Muslim orders in Senegal.

This writing workshop will explore the craft of young adult literature. Students will focus on concerns crucial to writing about and for teens, such as voice, point of view, immediacy, and pacing, and will draw on the many possibilities available in YA literary fiction: blurred genres, unreliable narrators, surrealism, retellings, and issues of identity and self-discovery. We will look beyond straightforward prose into forms such as epistolary and verse novels and other experimental mashups. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities?
In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongside a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art.