This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

A study, under faculty supervision, of a problem, area or topic not included in the formal curriculum.

Consult the Africana Studies Department for instructions. Suite 331A, 3401 Walnut or visit the department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu to submit an application.

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century.

A study of the major events, issues, and personalities in Afro-American history from Reconstruction to the present. The course will also examine the different slave experiences and the methods of black resistance and rebellion in the various slave systems.

This course examines the nature and dynamics of the state and civil society in Africa and how these determine the career of democracy, democratization and democratic rule in the continent. It considers different accounts of the state in Africa (or the African state), civil society and democracy in elaborating an informed understanding of the political, economic and social processes in the continent. How does the nature of the state in Africa account for the nature of the civil society and vice versa? How can the career of democracy in the continent illuminate our understanding of the nature of state-society relations? How robust is the relationship between civil society and the state? How can we account for the relationships among civil society, the state and democratic institutions and processes? What are the local, regional, and global forces that nurture and/or hinder democratic practices, including electoral democracy? These questions are confronted in light of their implications for, and complex interactions with, different social formations, institutions, groups, and social practices including gender, ethnicity, nationalism, race, religion, social protest, political institutions, economic formations, etc., etc.

This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

This new course will explore multiple dimensions of Africa’s environmental history, drawing upon literature in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. It is one component of a pilot project supported by Penn Global and directed by the instructor on ‘Local Histories of Climate Change in the Horn of Africa”, though we will cover topics and case studies from the entire continent. The course takes an historical perspective on environmental change in Africa, with an eye to engaging current debates on climate change and its impact on contemporary urban and rural communities. Students will read and discuss key works on the African environment, conduct their own literature reviews on selected topics, and prepare case studies of communities which have been impacted by severe climate events in the past half-century. The format combines lectures and seminar-style discussions, and we will draw upon the expertise of guest lecturers in a variety of disciplines which have contributed to the study of environmental change.

Part II of the Luganda language course

This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day. BAM artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, producers, directors, and teachers, shared a goal to develop an alternative theatre based in Africanist and Black aesthetics combining poetry, music, and dance in a non-linear fashion allowing stories to emerge through alternative and abstract structures that are activist in nature. We will ground our examination of the period in a growing global black consciousness, as well as the relationship between black aesthetics and self-determination. The course will explore a breadth of mid twentieth century Black experimental theatre ranging from Jean Genet’s The Blacks and Imamu Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, to Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoems, and the performance poetry Jayne Cortez. The course culminates in the work of present-day performance artists that have taken up and evolved the form.
The course is designed to incorporate theory and practice through play and poetry readings, movement investigations, student presentations of Theatre/Performance Artists, and viewing performances either virtually or in person. Students will develop either a choreopoem of their own or curate an imagined Black Arts Movement theatre festival or season.