This course will deal with Law and Society in Africa. After surveying the various legal systems in Africa, the focus will be on how and to what extent the countries of Africa re-Africanized their legal systems by reconciling their legal systems that are used as instruments of social change and development. Toward this end, the experiences of various African countries covering the various legal traditions will be included. Specific focus will be on laws covering both economic and social relations. This emphasis includes laws of marriage, divorce and inheritance, laws of contracts and civil wrongs and African's law of investments and International Relations, among other laws. Throughout this course a comparative analysis with non-African countries will be stressed. Readings include research papers, reports, statutes, treaties, and cases.

This course has two objectives. On the one hand, we will explore the character and evolution of the strategic political discourse of black Americans. We will examine central debates among black American intellectuals and activists with focus on: 1. identifying issues considered and positions taken; 2. locating those debates in relation to American political and intellectual history and the changing situation of the black population; 3. analyzing characteristic principles that have undergirded political discourse among civically attentive black Americans; 4. examining the connections of social theory and political behavior among black Americans and, perhaps most important, 5. trying to establish links between debates in the past and the present political and ideological configuration in ways that can inform strategic thinking. On the other hand, we will pursue a more formalistic objective as well. The study of black American thought as an academic field by and large has avoided concerns about the practice of interpretation in the history of political thought or the history of ideologies. (The fact that this subfield has retained its interpretive naivet¿ is itself an intellectually and ideologically significant circumstance, as we shall see.)


Our second objective, therefore, will be to work toward establishing a foundation for a more historically careful scholarly discourse about Afro-American thought. Toward that end, we shall give substantial consideration to interpretive issues -- keeping the integrity of historical contextualization uppermost -- in the early weeks, when we discuss methodological questions directly. Those early discussions should set the stage for, and structure engagement with, subsequent assignments. The course is organized chronologically. Although systematic expression of political ideas by civically attentive black individuals and within discourse communities is evident at least as early as the Second Party System, the discursive and ideological origins of what we might call modern black thought took shape in the late 19th and early 20th century period defined most consequentially by disfranchisement, the consolidation of the segregationist regime in the South, and the emergence of an elite stratum within the black population who were inclined to articulate programs and agendas for the race. We will begin with examining that fin-de-siecle context and reconstruct the trajectory of black political debate to the present.

Spring 2018: The aim of this seminar can be described as trying to figure out how poetry and poetics figure into the effort to theorize the African American subject in the 21st Century. At a time when the sheer number of African American poets publishing today (to say nothing of the major prizes they are winning) has exploded exponentially, why does poetry continue to be so marginalin African American literary and cultural studies? As we make our way through recently published anthologies of African American poetry, then turn to works of individual poets, we will consider issues of influence,intertextual periodization, stylization, and tradition as they impact approaches to form, structure, and craft. Ultimately, however, we will focus on the question of why are these poets writing these poems at this particular time? Technologies like PennSound and You Tube will provide time? Technologies like PennSound and You Tube will provide important critical tools in our endeavors and at various points during the term, guest lecturers will join our discussions.

The Accelerated Elementary Zulu course is intensive, and can be taken to fulfill a language requirement, or for linguistic preparation to do research on South Africa, Southern Africa/Africa-related topics. The course emphasizes communicative competence to enable the students to acquire linguistic and extra-linguistic skills in Zulu. The content of the course is selected from various everyday life situations to enable the students to communicate in predictable common daily settings. Culture, as it relates to language use, is also part of the course content.


Students will acquire the speaking, listening, and writing skills at the ceiling of low intermediate level and floor of high novice level, based on the ACTFL scale. The low intermediate level proficience skills that the students will acquire constitute threshold capabilities of the third semester range of proficiency to prepare students for Intermediate Zulu I course materials.

Offered through the Penn Language Center

Continuation of Elementary Amharic I.

This course is cross-listed when the subject matter is related to African, African American, or other African Diaspora issues. Courses recently offered are, "Political Culture and American Cities, Social Movements and Social Change, Critical Race Theory. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.


This course brings together the vantage points of urban political economy, history and urban anthropology. Readings and discussions will cross those literatures, folding in considerations of race, ethnicity and gender in the American city life, with a focus on the relation between culture and political economy. We will reconstruct the history of the different tracks of urban studies in the U.S., beginning with its roots in sociology and anthropology in the Chicago School and in political science in reform-oriented studies of public administration. We will revisit the community power debate of the 1950s-1970s, which shook out significantly along disciplinary lines, and will examine the development of the urban political economy perspective in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as developments within U.S. urban anthropology since the 1960s. We will employ local case study materials, and at every point we will try to understand the intellectual trajectories of the urbanist discourses in relation to dynamics contemporaneously shaping urban politics and policy. Course requirements are seminar preparation which includes each student's leading discussion around specified reading assignments -- and a research paper, the topic of which must be approved by week 5.

SPRING 2017: Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.

Using the Afro-centric philosophical understanding of the world, this course will focus on psychological issues related to African Americans, including the history of African American psychology, its application across the life span, and contemporary community issues.