This seminar covers aspects of the arts and visual/material cultures in Africa, including the global African diaspora, throughout the continent's history. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom, self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.

This course invites graduate students and advanced undergraduates with prior authorization to explore scholarship and primary materials on the transnational dimensions of black social movements. Recent phenomena such as the world- wide protest against the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd and the political assassination of Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco are two examples of the ways in which events involving black death in one locale resonate in multiple sites across the globe. Uprisings and demonstrations seemingly divided by language, culture and nation-state find common cause in collective action in response to patterns and instances of injustice and inequality. Course materials provide documentary evidence and analysis of the transnational circuitry of black social movement networks that have arisen in response to racisms targeting black and brown population. Members of scheduled castes in India, aboriginal populations in Australia and New Zealand, and Afro-descendent populations in the Americas and Europe, have become agents of change and forged substantive alliances and strategic coalitions with other social movement tendencies. Scholarship from social movement theory, Black Studies, comparative history and political theory help constitute the core reading for this course. Film, documentary narrative and autobiography will supplement reading assignments.

This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.

This course uses the history of black displacement to examine community power and advocacy. It examines the methods of advocacy (e.g. case, class, and legislative) and political action through which community activists can influence social policy development and community and institutional change. The course also analyzes selected strategies and tactics of change and seeks to develop alternative roles in the group advocacy, lobbying, public education and public relations, electoral politics, coalition building, and legal and ethical dilemmas in political action. Case studies of neighborhood displacement serve as central means of examining course topics.

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.

After an examination of the philosophical, legal, and political perspectives on Human Rights, this course will focus on US policies and practices relevant to Human Rights. Toward that end, emphasis will be placed on both the domestic and the international aspects of Human Rights as reflected in US policies and practices. Domestically, the course will discuss (1) the process of incorporating the International Bill of Human Rights into the American legal system and (2) the US position on and practices regarding the political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights of minorities and various other groups within the US. Internationally, the course will examine US Human Rights policies toward Africa. Specific cases of Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, as well as other cases from the continent, will be presented in the assessment of US successes and failures in the pursuit of its Human Rights strategy in Africa. Readings will include research papers, reports, statutes, treaties, and cases.

Urban development has been influenced by religious conceptions of social and economic justice. Progressive traditions within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Baha'i, Humanism and other religions and systems of moral thought have yielded powerful critiques of oppression 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 poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction have generated new forms of resistance and development.

The course will focus on the city of Salvador, located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Popularly known as the “Black Mecca,” the city has the largest concentration of African descendants in the world, second only to Lagos, Nigeria. Salvador was the country’s first capital, and as one of the most important slave ports in the Americas, it holds special significance for the country’s connection to Africa and the broader Black Atlantic. While the city is celebrated as a place where Afro-Brazilian culture has flourished, Black people continue to suffer from widespread marginalization and racial violence.
Salvador, like other cities across Brazil, Latin America, and the Global South, is undergoing rapid redevelopment aimed at modernizing public spaces (markets, streets, sidewalks) and heritage sites (old mansions, forts, parks) for domestic and international tourism. Over the past three decades, the City Center (popularly known as the Pelourinho [whipping post] located in the central square) has been targeted for restoration of its historic mansions that have existed since the colonial period. This process has involved the violent displacement of sex workers, street vendors, and residents who have occupied the buildings for over a century. This has impacted the surrounding areas in the city-center such as the coastal fishing community of Gamboa de Baixo that now leads a resistance movement against these removals. The course will explore the relationship between urbanization and dispossession and how race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect to reinforce spaces of domination as well as to create spaces of resistance.
Keisha-Khan Perry has authored a book about Salvador as part of a global circuit of dispossession that threatens Black and poor residents in the city and has been a longtime collaborator of Gamboa de Baixo activists who are mostly poor Black women. Anne-Marie Veillette has completed a dissertation focused on Rio de Janeiro, another Brazilian city with a long history of resistance to removals. We have both observed in our work on Brazilian cities that the preservation of collective memory of Black spaces, culture and people represents a key issue in these urban struggles. Thus, the course will explore the myriad ways in which Black urban communities in Salvador have resisted dispossession and its interconnected forms of violence (policing, inadequate public health, and poor schooling). More importantly, we will work in collaboration with activists in Salvador to archive the rich history of political activism around housing and land rights from a grassroots perspective.
Throughout the semester, we will use a digital classroom to meet weekly with Bahian activists, to discuss key concepts, and to share media. During the Spring Break, we will travel to Salvador for one week to tour the city, to work with activists in person, and to present our ongoing work to community members.
Overall, the course will provide Penn students with theoretical and methodological training for research and engaged work in urban studies. We hope to attract both humanists and design/planning undergraduate and graduate students interested in integrating theoretical rigor, ethnographic fieldwork, archiving, and cartography in their work on cities. More importantly, students will gain practical experience in collaborative methodologies, which will necessarily encourage us to grapple with critical questions of transnational solidarity, political ethics, and the relationship between universities and social movements.

This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.*