This course treats some important aspect of African American and Afro-Diasporic literature and culture. Some recent versions of the course have focused on the emergence of African-American women writers, on the relation between African-American literature and cultural studies, and on the Harlem Renaissance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Africa has interwoven linkages for centuries with the Arabian Peninsula, and India, politically, historically, geographically, and culturally. These linkages were represented in continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The ancient world of Africa, Arabia, and India had served as an epicenter of the global economy in the pre-modern world. As such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. The eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from India and Arabia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions, India, and Arabia are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalence of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between these three regions are also apparent in several archeological sites and in the expansion that allowed the populations in these areas to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.
The objectives of this course are to achieve the followings:
• Explore the geographic and historical interconnectedness between Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and India.
• Examine the history of the different forces that have shaped the cultural landscape of the African shores with reference to India and the Arabian Peninsula.
• Examine the political, economic, and cultural interconnections between Africa, Arabia, and India and the impact of Europe's colonial expansion.
•Explore the historical concept of globalization and the challenges of inter-disciplinary study and research in the study of Africa and its neighbors.

This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present.

This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course is designed to explore major themes and events in early American legal history. Because of the richness of the subject matter and the wealth of sources available, we will be selective in our focus. The course will emphasize several core areas of legal development that run throughout colonial and early national history: 1) the state: including topics such as war and other military or police action, insurrection, revolution, regulation, courts, economic policy, and public health; 2) labor: including race and racially-based slavery, varied forms of servitude and labor coercion, household labor, industrialization, unionization, and market development; 3) property: including property in persons, land, and business, and the role of lawyers in promoting the creation of wealth; 4) private spaces: including family, individual rights, sexuality, gender, and private relations of authority; 5) constitutionalism: various methods of setting norms (rules, principles, values) that create, structure, and define the limits of government power and authority in colonial/imperial, state, and national contexts; 6) democracy and belonging: including questions of citizenship, voting rights, and participation in public life. By placing primary sources within historical context, the course will expose students to the ways that legal change has affected the course of American history and contemporary life. The course will be conducted primarily in lecture format, but I invite student questions and participation. In the end, the central aim of this course is to acquaint students with a keen sense of the ways that law has operated to liberate, constrain, and organize Americans. Ideally, students will come away with sharper critical thinking and reading skills, as well. *This course is a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor (LSHM).*

In this course, students will examine the origins of the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, biographies of the March organizers, and the ways the March has been memorialized over the past six decades. By exploring the dynamics that contributed to the demonstrations, students will delve into primary source documents, read secondary literature, and write their own article-length research papers based on the course material. The course will also examine the ways documentary film footage, photography, music, and media coverage of the March has contributed to understandings and misreadings of this moment in Civil Rights history.

This course provides an introduction to the study of Africa in all its diversity and complexity. Our focus is cultural, geographical, and historical: we will seek to understand Africa s current place in the world political and economic order and learn about the various social and physical factors that have influenced the historical trajectory of the continent. We study the cultural formations and empires that emerged in Africa before European colonial invasion and then how colonialism reshaped those sociocultural forms. We ll learn about the unique kinds of kinship and religion in precolonial Africa and the changes brought about by the spread of Islam and Christianity. Finally, we ll take a close look at contemporary issues such as ethnic violence, migration, popular culture and poverty, and we'll debate the various approaches to understanding those issues.

This seminar presents African Americans who have created religious and spiritual lives amid the variety of possibilities for religious belonging in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. By engaging an emerging canon of memoirs, we will take seriously the writings of Black spiritual gurus, theologians, hip hop philosophers, religious laity, activists, LGBTQ clergy, religious minorities, and scholars of religion as foundational for considering contemporary religious authority through popular and/or institutional forms of African American religious leadership. Themes of spiritual formation and religious belonging as a process—healing, self-making, writing, growing up, renouncing, dreaming, and liberating—characterize the religious journeys of the African American writers, thinkers, and leaders whose works we will examine. Each weekly session will also incorporate relevant audiovisual religious media, including online exhibits, documentary films, recorded sermons, tv series, performance art, and music.

Race and ethnicity are, above all, both converge as system of ideas by which men and women imagine the human body and their relationships within society. In this course we will question the concept of race and ethnicity and their place in modern society (1500 - 2020). While the course reviews the pre-1500 literature our focus will be on the last 500 years. This course reviews the research that has contributed to the ideas about ethnicity and race in human society. The review covers the discourse on race in political propaganda, religious doctrine, philosophy, history, biology and other human sciences.

The founder(s) of this course wondered, in an overtly and covertly racist society: “What if we engaged practitioners, educators and researchers in training (social work, policy, criminal justice, counseling, education, health care, etc.) to develop a more empathic imagination and reflection of the Black male before they encounter them in practice?” Core tenets underlying this class are that racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are ignorant of this reality. Students will learn how to help the Black boys and men they engage to identify and challenge the effects of racial oppression on their academic, occupational, relational and cultural well-being, and to promote post-traumatic growth.