Urban development has been influenced by religioius conceptions of social and economic justice. Progressive traditions within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Humanism have yielded powerful critiques of opression and hierarchy as well as alternative economic frameworks for ownership, governance, production, labor, and community. Historical and contemporary case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be considered, as we examine the ways in which religious responses to poverity, inequality, and ecological destruction have generatged new forms of urban development.

This course explores the lost worlds of sinners, witches, sexual offenders, rebellious slaves, and Native American prophets from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the trouble-makers, the criminals, and the rebels, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century.

This course explores the lost worlds of sinners, witches, sexual offenders, rebellious slaves, and Native American prophets from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the trouble-makers, the criminals, and the rebels, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century.

This course explores the lost worlds of sinners, witches, sexual offenders, rebellious slaves, and Native American prophets from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the trouble-makers, the criminals, and the rebels, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century.

This course explores the lost worlds of sinners, witches, sexual offenders, rebellious slaves, and Native American prophets from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the trouble-makers, the criminals, and the rebels, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century.

Blackness Across Media - How is blackness produced, disseminated and received across sonic, visual and written media? It is understood as a racial category, a cultural aesthetic, or a politics? Can it ever be considered a color amongst other colors? This course is situated at the conceptually unstable but intellectually productive intersection of sound, optics and text. It seeks to use this intersection to speculate on the question of blackness within media, artistic and political practice. The intention is interrogate how the category of blackness animates and disrupts many of the sensory experiences of the world within global capitalism.

This is a topics course: Topics in Women and Literature. The course is cross-listed with ENGL 290 (Black Women and Literature) when the title is "Black Women and Literature." See the Department of Africana's website at www.sas.upenn.edu/africana for a description of the current offereings.

This course presents four 20th Century writers whose literary careers were shaped by their unique experiences as Southerners. While each of these writers has gained a considerable reputation as an American writer whose writing transcents regional distinctions, the South resonates in their voices and mediates their vision. What each writer finally confronts is Southern history as burden and souce, convention and curse. This course will begin by exploring the myths and cultural codes shaping life in the South (particularly after the Civil War). We will then proceed towards an examination of how the writers in the course frame Southern experience, given their differences in race, class, and gender, as they portray lives lived within and across a variety of socially recognized boundaries. Works to be read include Absalom, Absalom. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Uncle Tom's Children, Black Boy, The Wide Net and Other Stories, and Losing Battles. There will also be screenings of the films The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Coursework will consist of two critical essays and final group project.


See the Africana Studies Program's website at www.sas.upenn.edu/africana for a description of the current offerings.