SPRING 2017 - UNDERSTANDING AFRICA: This course will explore the economic, social, and political realities facing sub-Saharan Africa today by placing them in historical and global contexts. Key themes will include colonial and precolonial history, nationalist movements and cold war politics, economic development and foreign aid, ethnic and political conflicts, media representation and popular culture. The course will focus on local and global dynamics that have a role in shaping the present day Africa.

African American women performers from blues woman Bessie Smith to Paris revue star Josephine Baker, from jazz darling Billie Holiday to rock legend Tina Turner, and from hip hop giant Lauryn Hill to millennial star Beyonc¿, have constantly redefined and expanded American popular music. Using the long 20th century as our historical marker, this course will explore how African American women performers, across genres and time, have consciously and sometimes contradictorily navigated the racial and sexual limits of American popular culture in order to assert their own particular narratives of artistic and political freedom.

In this course, we will work both chronologically and thematically to examine laws, constitutional provisions, and local and federal court decisions that established, regulated, and perpetuated slavery in the American colonies and states. We will concern ourselves both with change over time in the construction and application of the law, and the persistence of the desire to control and sublimate enslaved people. Our work will include engagement with secondary sources as well as immersion in the actual legal documents. Students will spend some time working with Mississippi murder cases from the 19th century. They will decipher and transcribe handwritten trial transcripts, and will historicize and analyze the cases with attention to procedural due process as well as what the testimony can tell us about the social history of the counties in which the murders occurred. The course will end with an examination of Black Codes that southern states enacted when slavery ended.

East Africa has been linked culturally, economically, and politically to the wider Indian Ocean world for centuries. In historical scholarship, the Indian Ocean is often portrayed in overly romanticized terms-as a hybrid, cosmopolitan space. This course, which brings together some of the best work on East Africa and the Indian Ocean, will provide a more nuanced view of the region. By critically examining a variety of primary and secondary sources (including novels, photography exhibits, music, and historical texts),students will learn about the legacies of slavery, conquest, and inequality as well as the ways in which the region became a space of multicultural exchange and intercontinental interaction. We will explore the idea of African diasporas in their plurality and examine whether the theoretical tools used to study the Atlantic World can be applied to the Indian Ocean.

In 1955, delegates from the Gold Coast, which would soon become the independent nation of Ghana, attended the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference alongside representatives from Indonesia, India, China, and other nations. The Bandung Conference is just one example of the importance of international linkages in the era of decolonization. This course will address decolonization in Africa within an international context and examine how African nationalism was forged in an interconnected world. Students will learn how African political thinkers engaged with, contributed to, and were shaped by intercontinental currents of thought, including Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, communism, socialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Images and beliefs about Jesus have always been a compelling part of American life. This course seeks to examine the social, political, religious and artistic ways that Jesus has been appropriated and used in American life, making him a unique figure for exploring American religious life. Special attention will be given to how Jesus is used to shape social and political concerns, including race, gender, sexuality, and culture.


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

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.