AFRI 0001. From Octavia Butler to N.K Jemisin, Black Feminist and Queer Theories in Science-Fiction and Fantasy.

Through the analytical lenses offered by Black feminist and queer theories, this course engages works of Black speculative fiction as modes of theorizing questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, environmental justice, interpersonal politics and more. Through course readings, seminar discussions, and creative writing projects, students will critically analyze works of speculative fiction written by Black authors and broaden their knowledge of Black speculative literature, with a particular focus on science fiction and fantasy.

AFRI 0005. Resistance in Black Popular Culture.

This course examines the terrain of black popular culture and its enduring yet shifting relationship to forms of social and political resistance employed by African-Americans in the US. This course offers a deep dive into two complex, related questions central to the field of Black Cultural Studies: 1) what is "black popular culture" and what can we learn by studying it in a social context? 2) How do black popular cultural forms both reproduce the status quo as well as enable black people to resist the status quo? In this course, we will engage with major texts and key theoretical concepts from Black Cultural Studies to help us analyze black popular cultural works via in-class listening and viewing of popular media to consider both the normative and resistive dimensions of black popular culture in a social context.

AFRI 0005A. Resistance in Black Popular Culture.

This course examines the terrain of black popular culture and its enduring yet shifting relationship to forms of social and political resistance employed by African-Americans in the US. This course offers a deep dive into two complex, related questions central to the field of Black Cultural Studies: 1) what is "black popular culture" and what can we learn by studying it in a social context? 2) How do black popular cultural forms both reproduce the status quo as well as enable black people to resist the status quo? In this course, we will engage with major texts and key theoretical concepts from Black Cultural Studies to help us analyze black popular cultural works via in-class listening and viewing of popular media to consider both the normative and resistive dimensions of black popular culture in a social context.

AFRI 0090. An Introduction to Africana Studies.

This course introduces students to the vibrant and contested field of Africana Studies by critically exploring and analyzing the links and disjunctures in the cultural, political, and intellectual practices and experiences of people of African descent throughout the African diaspora. Beginning with a critical overview of the history, theoretical orientations, and multiple methodological strategies of the discipline, the course is divided into three thematic units that examine intellectuals, politics, and movements; identity construction and formation; and literary, cultural, and aesthetic theories and practices in the African diaspora.

AFRI 0110B. The Last Professors.

Addresses the profound effects of contemporary economic, political, and social changes on the role and function of the university in the 21st century. A primary concern of the seminar is to critically analyze how and in what ways the transformations in the broader society challengs, constrain, and, at times, frustrate critical intellectual activity. The seminar will draw on a broad and diverse set of readings ranging from classic statements by Cardinal Newman and W.E.B. DuBois to contemporary critical analyses by Henry Giroux and Adolph Reed, Jr. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AFRI 0110C. Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement.

Most of the rich written history of the civil rights movement originates from first-hand accounts documented in oral histories and autobiographies. This interdisciplinary course plots the milestones of the civil rights movement through the lens of several autobiographies. The aim is to critique autobiography as a historical document as well as use it to tell the stories of the civil rights movement. We will compare and contrast different texts, analyze content and map a history of the era. Students will work with a writing fellow to develop one critical paper and one autobiographical paper. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AFRI 0120. Philosophy of Race and Gender.

Prejudice of many kinds, such as racism and sexism is so embedded in our modern social institutions, and so traditional and pervasive that we often fail to notice it. Furthermore, race and gender have been used repeatedly to explain differences. This course is a rigorous examination of the philosophical meanings of race and gender, from a variety of historical, anthropological and feminists perspectives.

AFRI 0130. This is America: Reimagining the American Saga.

History offers us a framework to appraise the forces and conditions that have formed people’s shared experiences. Because of this, the histories we tell are often explanatory. They delineate how we arrived at this moment and tell us which people and what events were most consequential. But what happens when the people who look like you are not part of the story? Or if their inclusion amounts to cameos in support of a larger narrative that ultimately minimizes or ignores their contributions? This course reimagines American history by placing in the foreground the people and events often marginalized or forgotten in traditional appraisals of the past. Through a review of historical sources, literature, oral histories, and evidence found in popular culture, this class offers a more inclusive retelling of the American saga.

AFRI 0140. First Lady of the Struggle: Mary McLeod Bethune and Global Black Freedom.

This course will focus on the life and legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune through an examination of her activism in the areas of education, politics, women's rights issues, civil rights issues, and world affairs. Throughout the course of her 79 years, she rose from humble beginnings in South Carolina, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, to work with presidents and world leaders. She was born during the period of Reconstruction, and passed away the same year as the ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education was made, which will allow for a study of her participation in laying the foundation for the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Students will also gain experiential learning by visiting historic sites which preserve the legacy of Bethune, including the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House-National Historic Site and the Carter G. Woodson Home-National Historic Site.

AFRI 0160. Twentieth-Century Africa.

Twentieth Century Africa delves into the complex and problematic narratives surrounding Sub-Saharan Africa, examining how the continent has been historically misrepresented, misunderstood, and "mistaken" in various contexts. We critically analyze the notion of "Mistaking Africa" focusing on deconstructing stereotypes, challenging misconceptions, and promoting a more nuanced understanding of Sub-Saharan Africa's diverse cultures, histories, and contemporary realities. Students will read literature, analyze popular culture, and examine primary sources to study European imperialism and racism; colonial systems of forced labor and wage labor; African resistance and collaboration; the Christianizing and westernizing effects of colonial education; the transformation of gender, class, and ethnic identities, and African nations’ struggle for political autonomy.

AFRI 0170. Afro-American History and Society Before 1800.

Focuses on the history of Africans and persons of African decent in the part of North America that now constitutes the U.S. Centers on the 18th century, but gives some attention to the 17th and 19th centuries as well. Most of the readings are devoted to the English colonies, but some concern themselves with Dutch, French, and Spanish settlements.

AFRI 0190. Caribbean History and Society Before 1800.

Examines some of the themes important in the multiracial societies of the Caribbean from the 17th through the early years of the 19th century. Explores Creole societies, plantation economies, ethnicity, maroon societies, class and racial divisions, acculturation, syncretic religions, and patterns of slave resistance. Danish, Dutch, English, French, and Spanish settlements are studied.

AFRI 0200. Modern Caribbean History and Society.

This course will critically examine five themes in modern Caribbean history and society: What is the Caribbean? Nationalism, religion, economic development, and popular culture. These themes will be discussed with reference to the different geographical, racial, cultural and political spaces, which comprise the Caribbean.

AFRI 0205. Race and Labor: Black Workers and the Transnational Labor Movement.

This is a discussion-based, seminar-style class on the relationship between race and labor globally from the age of emancipation through the Civil Rights Movement. While this course will focus on the labor struggles of Black American workers and activists, we will also examine movements from throughout the African Diaspora in order to incorporate a Diasporic, comparative lens. Beginning with an interrogation of race and labor history within fields of historical study, the course will move along chronological and thematic axes to investigate the changes in wage labor structure, the nature of plantation economies, agricultural and industrial production, domestic and service work. It centers the experiences of Black workers through a critical Black feminist lens that centers the role of Black women’s knowledge production in the construction of modern labor movements.

AFRI 0210. Afro Latin Americans and Blackness in the Americas.

This course focuses on the position of Blacks in the national histories and societies of Latin America from slavery to the present-day. Emphasis is on a multidisciplinary engagement with issues and the exposure of students to the critical discussion of national images and realities about blackness and Africa-descended institutions and practices. The role of racial issues in national and transnational encounters and the consequences of migration of people and ideas within the hemisphere are explored.

AFRI 0220. From Emancipation to Obama: Journeys in African American History.

This course explores African American History through the lens of black freedom struggles. The struggles take all forms, between black and white from local to national levels, within and between black communities, and between men and women. This course assumes some familiarity with basic U.S. History and will utilize a variety of primary sources from autobiographical material to visual art and music as well as the usual monographs and articles. Aside from reading, students will be required to work with a writing fellow on 2 papers. There are also 2 exams.

AFRI 0280. Race, Slavery, Modernity and Knowledge.

This course will review some of the central texts that constitute the different meanings of modernity and discuss how these texts became part of our framework for thinking about modernity, the human self and its different representations. The course will also engage texts that make attempts to complicate the meanings of modernity through a set of engagements with the issues of slavery, colonialism and race. Some key words in the course are: modernity, knowledge production, double-consciousness, social construction of race, racial slavery, coloniality.

AFRI 0300. Performing Ethnography and the Politics of Culture.

This course introduces students to the practice of fieldwork observation (ethnography) as a research method to investigate how culture is enacted and communities are formed and sustained. Regular opportunities to observe and participate in Black cultural events and institutions in and around Providence. Opportunities to sample local cuisines and to visit community gardens, religious institutions, and other cultural sites will develop students' capacity to conduct research. These experiences, combined with the course readings and other assignments, will teach students how to analyze and disseminate their findings in writing and through a final creative project.

AFRI 0400. Badmen and Blues Women Explorations in African American Culture.

This course is designed to demonstrate to students the importance of Black interiority and the interpersonal in the struggle for Black liberation in America. It will offer students an opportunity to familiarize themselves with a variety of texts from across the Black radical tradition. What makes this course unique, however, is the parts of these texts that will be emphasized. Where others might prioritize politics and public spectacle, this course will direct students towards the personal – love lives, childhoods, personal awakenings, etc. – to show how these parts of the Black lived experience informs the development of politics and consciousness.

AFRI 0410. After the Uprisings: Abolition and Black Studies.

This small, discussion-based seminar will examine the concept of “abolition” and its relationship to Black Studies. In the aftermath of the uprisings of 2020, abolition has become part of popular discourse in ways hardly imagined by some of its theorists and practitioners. The framework is most often aimed at carceral structures such as police, prisons, and surveillance, yet some interpretations of abolition take aim at the state, borders, and even the world. This seminar will explore the varied discourses of abolition and invite students to wrestle with the theoretical and practical difficulties the framework is confronted with, such as questions of law, politics, gender, and temporality. A key site of inquiry will be the methods of struggle proposed to get from the present to the anticipated abolitionist future. What “pathways to abolition” are prioritized, while others fall off the table?

AFRI 0500. Globalization, Media and Culture.

This course is designed to examine the changing global landscape and its impact on society, culture and will draw on analytical tools from the social sciences to make sense of the rapidly changing nature of global society. In the past three decades the flows of commodities, ideas, people, norms, resources across international borders has accelerated exponentially. Driving these dynamics are not only market forces, but also the media, social networks, cultural diffusions, institutional transformations. This course focuses on the social structures, institutional and organizational forms, political processes and cultural practices that mediate the encounter of the global and the national.

AFRI 0520. The Making of Ghana: The Life & Times of a Black Nation.

This course investigates the relationship between history, memory, and Blackness in the making of the West African nation, Ghana. This is a study abroad course, that will include a trip to Ghana. Topics will include the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the “Scramble for Africa” and the early colonial era, the achievements of Ghanaian Independence in the 1950s and 60s and the constructions of national and racial identities in contemporary Ghana. We will also examine how such moments have been and continue to be performed in the public sphere. While in Ghana, we will hear lectures by leading Ghanaian scholars and artists, tour relevant historical sites, and attend performances in a variety of cultural locales.

AFRI 0540. Health, Healing, and Resistance.

This course explores the interconnected themes of health, healing, and resistance within Black communities across history and the African Diaspora. Focusing on how Black communities have navigated systemic health inequities, medical racism, and oppression, we will examine their resilience, healing practices, and forms of resistance through literature, art, music, history, and activism. The course emphasizes both historical and contemporary perspectives, drawing from fields such as public health, Africana studies, and health humanities.

AFRI 0550. African American Health Activism from Emancipation to AIDS.

This historical survey course examines African American activism and social movements from Emancipation to the contemporary period through the lens of African American access to health resources. By paying close attention to how social and cultural aspects of medicine impact access and quality of care by race, gender, and sexuality, the course examines how segregation, poverty, incarceration, and policing shaped activism and healthcare. The course develops a sense of how African American activists crafted responses to different historical crises including Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the War on Drugs by the demands they made for specific resources.

AFRI 0560. Psychology of the Black Experience.

This course is designed to facilitate understanding of African American psychological experiences. We begin by critically reviewing historical approaches to the psychological study of Black people. We then shift to an examination of the themes, and research currently being generated by those involved in the quest for scholarly self-definition and for redefinition of the psychological fabric of the Black experience.

AFRI 0570. 20th Century Black Feminist Thought and Practice in the U.S.

This course will explore the ways that black women in the U.S. have experienced racial and gendered discrimination as well as what sorts of strategies (e.g., political, intellectual, narrative, and creative) black women have devised in response. We will be especially concerned with elements of African-American feminist thought and its articulation in writings, music, literature and practice/activism in the 20th century U.S. Enrollment limited to 80.

AFRI 0580. Black Theology.

"In this era of Black Power... theology cannot afford to be silent." This lecture course will plumb the depths of James H. Cone's statement by critically interrogating the cultural, political, and theoretical dimensions of the development and evolution of Black Theology. The course will consider the nature and task of theology with particular reference to its contested role in American public life, the complex relation between theology, race, and radical politics, and the connections and disjunctures between Black Theology and the fields of history, literature, and philosophy.

AFRI 0600. Race, Gender, and Urban Politics.

This course will introduce students to the methods and practice of studying black urban life with a primary focus on US cities. We will critically examine the urban cultural studies debates concerned with race, gender, class and sexuality. The approach of the course will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon works from anthropology, literature, history, music, and film. Topics include tourism, immigration, poverty, popular culture, gentrification, violence, and criminalization.

AFRI 0610. Black Student Protest from Jim Crow to the Present.

This is a history-driven class about black student protest. It puts this history in direct dialogue with other kinds of student protests over the long twentieth century. The point of the class is to ground conversations about contemporary protest culture in an historical context that extends well beyond Brown, that moves into the deep history of higher education and education more generally, and that reveals the intersection of protest with other global, national, and local plotlines. It is, as well, meant to think about how all of these histories have been represented popularly and politically in the very recent past.

AFRI 0620. African-American Life in the City.

This course examines the social and cultural history of black urban communities by examining the foundation of black communities in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. We will examine how migration and the intersections of race, class, culture and gender shape life in urban places, reveal the structural forces that define black urban communities, and explore urban African-American expressive forms. Enrollment limited to 45.

AFRI 0630. Drama and War in Africa: New Voices.

This course is an historical, political and topical examination of the subject of War on the African continent as seen through the lens of artistic response. Class discussions will be based on the different Stage, Screen and Radio Dramas that will serve as course materials. We will analyze reflections by African artists and scholars on the violent conflicts that have characterized the region's recent history, as well as closely related international perspectives, such as those evident in Hotel Rwanda and The Last King of Scotland. We will also explore how political actors have used peformative techniques, and will specifically examine the ways that other members of society (especially women and children) deal with such crises. Canonical African dramatists like Fugard, Ngugi, Soyinka and Ousmane will be referred to, but emphasis will be laid upon the New Voices emerging from a range of African nations, including Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Senegal, Sudan and South Africa, that have engaged with the subject of war.

AFRI 0640. Contemporary Issues in African Politics and Culture: Thinking Africa Differently.

Using an interdisciplinary methodology this course will examine three current issues in African societies: War, Violence and Sovereignty; the Politics of Gender in the African postcolony and the meanings of History, Trauma and Public Memory in some African societies. We will undertake this examination by "thinking about Africa differently," that is by thinking about these three issues outside of the dominant set of images, tropes and ideas that have conventionally constructed a particular version of Africa.

AFRI 0660. Activist Scholarship: Research and Writing for Social Change.

How can research advance the global social justice struggle? This course will emphasize the idea that education has never been a politically neutral undertaking. Students’ research can have social impact in the university and beyond. We will engage a variety of disciplinary fields to theorize key concepts such as intersectionality of oppression and resistance, power, hegemony, social justice, and activist research. Students will be required to carry out an original research project that tackles a pressing societal problem we face today.

AFRI 0670. Global Black Radicalism.

The decade from the mid-Sixties until the mid-Seventies witnessed the rise of Black Radicalism as a global phenomenon. The emergence of Black Power in the US, Brazil and the Caribbean, the consolidation of liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa and the rise of a Black Consciousness trend in Apartheid South Africa all represent key moments. What led young activists to embrace “Black Power?” What led to the emergence of Marxist movements in Portuguese Africa? What events in the Caribbean gave ascendancy to radical tendencies? And what forces contributed to the decline of these movements? This course seeks to answer these questions.

AFRI 0690. Gospel Titans, Divas, and Dynasties.

The course will explore some of contemporary black gospel music’s most celebrated artists, as a lens into gospel music history and the challenges of commercializing religious folk music. This course will explore gospel music performance and commerce as defined by artists such as The Clark Sisters, who were recently celebrated in the biopic The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel, which first aired on the Lifetime network Sunday, April 12, 2020. The course will also explore other gospel music-making families, such as The Winans, The Staples Singers, Mary Mary, and The Crouches.

AFRI 0700. Freedom Films.

"Freedom Films" is a First Year Seminar which will focus on historical documentary films related to the Southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We will analyze how these films reflect, change, and inform our views of the traditional Civil Rights Movement and how some offer contrasting narratives of that movement. We will also examine how and in what ways the films accurately and adequately reflect the historical realities of the Southern Civil Rights Movement based on readings and research. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

AFRI 0710A. Racial and Gender Politics in Contemporary Brazil.

Brazil is commonly understood as an example of a "racially democratic" nation, but as scholars have recently shown, racism permeates all aspects of Brazilian society. This course traces the development of the theorization of race, racial identity and race relations in contemporary Brazil. The approach of the course will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon works from anthropology, literature, history, music, and film. Topics will include colonialism and enslavement, nationalism, social activism and popular culture. We will also consider how Brazilian social relations differ from or conform to other racialized patterns in other nation-states in the Americas. Particular attention will be placed on the interrelationship between race, gender, class, and nation.

AFRI 0710B. Ethics of Black Power.

In his now classic text Blood in My Eye, George Jackson writes "All revolution should be love inspired". This course will plumb the depths of Jackson's remark by critically interrogating the ethical dimensions of the Black Power concept and the cultural, ideological, and political interventions influenced by the conceptual revolution. We will assess the ethical parameters of the various ideological tendencies that influenced the conceptual formulation and political articulation of Black Power including Black Nationalism, Feminism, Liberalism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and Pan-Africanism.

AFRI 0720. More Than Words: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Fiction and Culture.

This lecture/seminar course delves into Brazil's Black legacy through contemporary creative productions. We will focus on how the dimensions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are portrayed in Brazilian literature and cultural expression forms. Through the lens of Brazilian Black feminism, we will examine how race relations have influenced Brazil's national identity. The curriculum integrates theoretical and critical readings from Black Brazilian female intellectuals, intersecting with various mediums such as fiction, graphic novels, films, music, and visual arts. These mediums serve as powerful tools to confront Brazil's history of slavery, challenge the notion of racial democracy, and foster positive transformations in Afro-Brazilian representation.

AFRI 0750. Race and Political Theory.

This course examines how the investigation of race in political theory impacts the subfield’s conception of democracy, freedom, justice, equality, citizenship, political representation, the public sphere, and the political in general. To this end, the course will survey classic and contemporary works that interrogate race with the aim of better understanding the normative and descriptive political knowledge within the field, while shaping our own.

AFRI 0760A. Rastafari Studies.

This course will introduce students to the theoretical frameworks, methods, and practice based application of engaging with the Rastafari movement. We'll critically examine literature produced about Rastafari & the community-based activism of the movement in the context of African & African Diasporic movements from the 1930s to the present. Approach of the class is interdisciplinary and thematic, drawing upon works from Africana studies, literature, history, music, and film. Students will be able to engage with Rastafari guest speakers and read the most recent literature in Rastafari studies. Special emphasis will be placed on gendered anti-Black racism and Rastafari woman’s community activism.

AFRI 0760B. Raggae, Rastafari and Revolution.

Bob Marley in the song Revolution declares, "Revolution Reveals." Beginning from this frame this course will examine the history of Rastafari since it was formed in the late 1930s as an Afro-Caribbean religious practice. It will examine how the emergence of raggae music in Jamaica in the late 1960s mixed and then became one central ingredient of what has been called "conscious music" in the period of the flowering of anti-colonial and black radicalism in the 20th century. The course will explore how raggae music became a form of subaltern language rethinking questions of nation and history in the Caribbean and Africa.

AFRI 0800. Theorizing Racism.

Why does racism persist in the twenty-first century? How has racism changed over time? Are the vast majority of Americans racist? Or does racism largely exist without racists? Is racism a problem we can overcome? Or is it a permanent feature of American democracy? This lecture course will examine these questions through a critical reconstruction of the most prominent theories of racism in the social sciences and humanities, identifying the concept’s central problem space, while simultaneously opening up the question, what, if anything, can be done to intervene on this stubbornly persistent problem. Along the way, we will also interrogate related concepts like racial injustice, racial prejudice, race relations, racial inequality, white supremacy, antiblack racism, and herrenvolk democracy.

AFRI 0807. Racism, Segregation, Poverty and Public Education in the United States.

Using film, podcasts, legal history, memoir, sociology and social history, this course focuses on the past and present state of education in the United States as it both produces and ameliorates social inequality. The course explores how both primary schools, as well as colleges and universities both reflect and reproduce inequalities of opportunity along race and class lines.

AFRI 0830. How Structural Racism Works.

This lecture course is an exploration of structural racism: the normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. With a special focus on African-Americans in the post Civil Rights Era, we will explore how structural racism “works” intersectionally and in compounded ways in housing, criminal justice, education, employment, and media. We will also consider cultural, political and social challenges to structural racism as well as the the role and impact of colorblind ideology and behavioralism as dominant countervailing explanations for racial disparities.

AFRI 0840. Monuments, History, and Memory in the United States.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, monuments tied to the violent histories of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy have received renewed interest and debate. Protestors and individuals have defaced, toppled, and petitioned for the removal of Confederate monuments and statues to the white male power elite. This symbolic retributive violence and sometimes ritual care signals a challenge to the long-lived monument. This reading course explores public monuments and the ways in which artists and communities have negotiated history and the politics of memory and remembrance in the United States. We will evaluate the meaning and purpose of monuments that define American public spaces, investigating the problematic narratives and historic controversies surrounding such objects. The removal of monuments asks us to question whose histories have been forgotten, ignored, or suppressed, and what monumental justice might look like.

AFRI 0850. Queerness in Caribbean Literature.

This course examines 20th & 21st century Caribbean Literature with an emphasis on how histories of gender and sexuality contest and confirm understandings of diaspora, personhood, and colonialism.

AFRI 0860. Home and Homecoming.

What can home mean? What does it look like to leave, to search for, and to return, home? What kind of thinking is prompted by the experience of homecoming? What other topics come to mind when we think about home? In this undergraduate seminar, we will address the foregoing questions by studying poems, essays, memoirs, films, travelogues, short stories, and novels by Black thinkers from across the globe.

AFRI 0880. Hip Hop Music and Cultures.

This course will explore both the history of the emergence of Hip Hop and the heated debates that surround it: aesthetics, censorship, sexism, violence, musical theft, originality, authenticity, the politics of cross-racial exchanges, urban black nihilism, and corporate influences on culture. These debates will be framed by our consideration of urban black life, African-American cultural formations, gender, representation, technology, commodification, pleasure and politics. Enrollment limited to 200.

AFRI 0890. Narratives of Power.

Close readings and critical discussion of some of the most influential discussions of power in the past two centuries. Seeks to develop an appreciation of the complexity and elusiveness of discourses of power.

AFRI 0900. More than the game: An Episodic Study of Sports and Agency in U.S. History.

Did you know that William Edward White—a first baseman on Brown's 1883 national championship team—was and likely the first person of African descent to play major league baseball? White hit the field as a member of the Providence Grays 68 years before Jackie Robinson suited up for Brooklyn. This course examines the history of athletes activism and considers how sports reflected and sometimes helped to shape cultural, social, political, and economic realities in the U.S. By examining certain pivotal episodes, this class appraises how individual—and sometimes collective—acts of athleticism helped traditionally marginalized peoples to critique and challenge exclusionary systems and mores.

AFRI 0950. History, Literature and the Caribbean Novel.

This course examines the ways in which literature is influenced by major historical events with special reference to the literatures of the Caribbean. Students will undertake a critical examination of the fictional representation of Europe's encounter with Africa and Asia in the Americas.

AFRI 0980. Fela Kuti: African Freedom from Afrobeat to Afrobeats.

Miles Davis famously described Fela Kuti (1938-1997) as “the future of music.” Beyoncé’s attempt “to do something that sounds like Fela” saw her compose an unpublished 20-track album. Arguably Africa’s most prolific and controversial artist of the twentieth century, Fela continues to be invoked as musical genius and as icon of popular struggle. This course invites students to explore the complexities of Fela’s art and activism. We mobilize his life/work as a springboard for examining emergent debates about African identity—from postcolonial masculinity to the creative logics of African cities, from contemporary African youth culture to the gendered politics of cultural memory.

AFRI 0990. Black Lavender: Black Gay/Lesbian Plays/Dramatic Constructions in the American Theatre.

Study of plays with African-American LGBTQ+ content, primarily manuscripts, with a focus on thesis paper development. Creative writing option. Participation in the Black Lavender Experience required. Cross-listed with TAPS. Gender and Sexuality.

AFRI 1010C. Race, Gender, Ethics and Environmental Justice.

African Americans, Gender, Ethics and Environmental Justice examines the role of African Americans in the larger environmental history conversation. It utilizes a gendered lens to investigate how African American interpreted their natural surroundings and contributed to the development of 20th century American environmental consciousness. This course is reading and writing intensive.

AFRI 1020A. Black Cultural Studies.

No description available.

AFRI 1020B. Freedom in Africana Political Thought.

This course will be a comparative analysis of freedom as a central value in political thought. It will do this by comparing the knowledge and practices of freedom to slaves in the Haitian Revolution, the ideas of freedom in the Civil Rights Movement, and then finally, the conceptions of freedom in South AFrica. Enrollment limited to 30.

AFRI 1020C. The Afro-Luso-Brazilian Triangle.

Examines three historical components of the South Atlantic in terms of history, culture, and contemporary political and economic consequences. European colonialism in Africa and Brazil constitutes the baseline for this exploration, but the long and tardy nature of Portuguese colonialism in Africa in comparison with other European colonial powers, especially in its post-World War II manifestations, is our starting point. Enrollment limited to 40.

AFRI 1020D. Race, Rights and Rebellion.

Provides an in-depth examination of different kinds of social movements. Emphasis will be placed on the theoretical and methodological distinctions among the various kinds of social protests and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, key concepts will include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics and consciousness.

AFRI 1020E. Race and Visual Culture.

This is a sophomore seminar on race and visual media, including everything from high art on canvas to lowbrow film, from the comic book superhero Blank Panther to the Black Panther Party, from the avant-garde to the burlesque, from the web to graffiti to homemade t-shirts. People who sign up for the class should be prepared to read a lot and talk a lot, to regularly get to the RISD museum, to watch a lot of stuff on OCRA, and to maybe take a field trip or two to Boston's MFA and some similar sort of place. Curiosity is required.

AFRI 1030. Contesting the Carceral State.

This course introduces students to the study of crime and justice through Black, feminist, queer and prison abolitionist frameworks, with a particular focus on narratives by people of African descent in the U.S. since 1965.

AFRI 1040. Decolonized Bodies, Spirit Bodies: Tracing the Indigenous Knowledge of Africans.

This course is a comprehensive study of the indigenous bodies of knowledge of rituals as they permeate the wholeness of the existence of African people referencing Yoruba nation of West Africa. It will integrate visual art methods with Rites and Reason Theatre’s Research-to-Performance Method, where students will explore and trace the hidden legacies of the indigenous people of Africa in visual arts, music, dance, fashion, poetry, story-telling as a way of understanding the impacts of slavery, colonialism and decolonization of indigenous knowledge. Students will have the opportunity to study selected enduring indigenous festivals, organize and stage performance as knowledge production.

AFRI 1050A. Advanced RPM Playwriting.

Third level of RPM Playwriting; for students that have successfully completed RPM Playwriting and Intermediate RPM Playwriting (workshop). Instructor permission.

AFRI 1050B. Africana Feminism.

No description available.

AFRI 1050D. Intermediate RPM Playwriting.

Second level of RPM Playwriting; for students that want to continue developing their RPM plays or want to begin a new project (workshop).

AFRI 1050E. The REAL: A Research to Performance Project.

The course introduces students to the Black Arts Movement (BAM), an era from approx. 1965-1975 of politically charged, socially relevant art making designed to uncover, liberate, connect, and transform Black people. BAM artists used ritual, poetry, music, song, dance, and theatre to identify, disrupt, and examine human thought and action that produced and sustained racism, poverty, colonialism, and sexism. In our class, students will study BAM manifestos, poetry, and plays designed to transform audiences. These course readings will be augmented by regular, on-your-feet, interactive workshops in BAM performance techniques such as improvisational theatre, agit-prop, and the choreopoem. Along the way, we will also dive into the origins of Brown’s own Rites & Reason Theatre (est. 1971), and the importance of community-engaged participant research in the African American theatre tradition.

AFRI 1050G. Narrating the Radical Self.

How black women in the United States and elsewhere have written about their lives in autobiographies will be the focus of this course. We will discuss black women's use of autobiographical writing to document their own individual experiences in political movements as well as to provide key insights into how black people throughout the black diaspora have organized in recent history. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1050H. Introduction to Post-Colonial African and African Diasporic Theatre.

This class will explore plays/theatrical works and ideologies of a selected group of playwrights from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Exploring Culture, Creativity and Theatre practices, the course will focus on the ways in which these artists have syncretically responded to varied forms of colonization and creolization. This class will also pay attention to the Post Colonial Social and historical context that continues to impact and influence these modes of artistic production.

AFRI 1050K. Special Topics in RPM Playwriting: Playwriting Strategies From Contemporary Black Theatre.

A study of Aristotle's Poetics in relation to Dubois' four principles of black theatre and Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools." What makes black theatre "black"? We will analyze plays from the 20th Century African-American canon as sites of aesthetic resistance to "normative" American Theatre; and write our own one-act plays based upon our discoveries. Prerequisite: Course is restricted to students who have taken any Africana Studies RPM Playwriting course, Theatre Arts Introduction to Playwriting, Literary Arts Intermediate or Advanced playwriting courses, or has playwriting experience.

AFRI 1050L. RPM Playwriting: Advanced and Staging.

AFRI 1050M. Roots of African American Fiction: Oral Narrative through Richard Wright.

This course will employ a variety of narrative forms -- oral folktales, WPA narratives, slave narratives, short stories by European and American writers -- will also investigate the multiple traditions of African American fiction.

AFRI 1050P. Art and Civic Engagement: Creativity/Reality.

The primary objective of this course is to learn about and reflect upon public art and communities. This course will use selected public art and artists' ideologies as a framework for exploring culture, creativity, politics and practices and focus on the ways in which these public art works and artists' responses to varied forms of internal and external operators and stimuli successfully and unsuccessfully give voice to aspects of the environment, history, culture, social justice, health, politics and the imagination. This course will also pay attention to arts organizations, government agencies, history, power relations, human resources as well as leadership and the political that continues to influence public modes of artistic production.

AFRI 1050Q. New Narratives in African American History:The Art and Craft of Poetic and Creative Non-Fiction.

This seminar examines various examples of creative and poetic non-fiction, pertaining to race and the African American experience. While touching upon historic examples and precedent, emphasis will be on contemporary works, including the genres of poetry, drama, the narrative, the memoir, the travelogue and the personal essay. The course will explore what these works offer to the knowledge, popularization and perception of black history and to the shaping of cultural dialogue on blackness and race. Enrollment limited to 25.

AFRI 1050R. The History of Afro Futurism and Black Science Fiction.

Any class called The History Of Afro Futurism and Black Science Fiction automatically begs the question – "Well, what isn't futuristic about being Black in America?" The entire history of Black America can be seen as a fundamentally futurological and science fictional enterprise – a perpetual biding on hope and struggling for change endeavor that frequently employs far flung visions of tomorrow and other more oblique speculative stratagems in pursuit of outcomes barely foreseeable in the near-present. Enrollment limited to 25.

AFRI 1050S. Comparative Slavery and Slave Revolts: Slave Rebellion in the Americas, 1725-1865.

This course explores the history of slave revolts in North and South America and the Caribbean. It examines how acts of resistance transformed the lives of enslaved Africans and their relationships with white Americans, Europeans, and free and enslaved people of African descent. We will consider in what ways geography shaped the aims of a slave rebellion, how is a successful slave revolt determined, and what are the implications of slave unrest and its aftermath in local slave societies and in the Americas? This class will focus on insurrections in Jamaica, Saint Domingue (Haiti), the United States, Cuba, and Brazil.

AFRI 1050T. Slave Resistance and Moral Order in Environmental History.

This course is designed to examine the avenues by which enslaved persons redefined and re-appropriated the natural landscapes that kept them in bondage into direct forms of cultural and political resistance during the antebellum period. We will investigate rice production in South Carolina, the Dismal Swamp, maroon societies, Negro Spirituals, and the Black Judeo-Christian ethic to understand how the natural environment and the institution of slavery shaped slave resistance in the United States. This course is reading and writing intensive.

AFRI 1050V. Rhythm and Resistance.

This course will investigate the crucial cultural and political contributions of the African Diaspora in the formation of the contemporary Americas through an analysis of the rhythms they have produced in different national settings. We will use these rhythms as a guide to understand the peoples, places and conditions under which they were created and sustained. Through classroom discussion and historical and music-analysis students will understand the relationship of these rhythms to larger issues like nationalism, migration, colonialism, globalization, the politics of sexuality, gender and race and to understand the different meanings and practices of resistance.

AFRI 1050W. Transnational Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

This course will examine the historical, political, and cultural development of the island of Hispaniola, currently divided in the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In this course we will call into question popular narratives that portray Haiti and the Dominican Republic as locked in an ahistorical, continuous conflict and explore the island’s long history of Haitian-Dominican collaborations and networks. Over time, the two countries have developed different understandings of race, ethnicity, and national identity. This course will therefore engage in a comparative survey of the interwoven dynamics of race and national construction in the making of both nations.

AFRI 1050X. Slavery, Materiality, and Memorialization.

The institution of slavery ended in the Americas in the 19th century, but its official conclusion says little about the ways in which its legacies are materially present and memorialized today. This course is designed to place the material aspects of slavery in conversation with less tangible dimensions of how slavery is or isn't remembered and publicly acknowledged. Students will be introduced to the social and economic dimensions of transatlantic slavery, conduct archival research, and visit sites in the Providence area in order to inspire critical dialogue about how the material realities of slavery affect our past, present, and future.

AFRI 1060A. Africa Since 1950.

This seminar offers a survey of post-colonial African history, while probing the challenges of writing post-colonial history. Readings and discussions will focus on histories that bridge the colonial and post-colonial periods. How robust are these periods? What can historians draw from post-colonial theory? How can historical narratives account for both the colonial legacy and post-colonial dynamism. Enrollment limited to 20; instructor permission required. Students with a background in African history or contemporary African social science will be given priority. Interested students should email the professor at Nancy_Jacobs@brown.edu.

AFRI 1060C. Contemporary African Philosophy.

An examination of some of the most influential work on problems of identity and being, theology and theodicy, time and history, method and evaluation, race and racism, postcoloniality and liberation in contemporary African philosophy. Readings include the work of Anthony Appiah, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Gyekye, Pauline Hountondji, D. A. Masolo, John Mbiti, Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Senghor, Tsenay Serequeberhan, among others.

AFRI 1060D. The Harlem Renaissance: Art, Literature, and Classic Women Blues.

In this undergraduate course, we will focus on the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, the important African American artistic and socio-cultural moment that dates roughly from 1919-1934. Organized as an interdisciplinary course, we will examine the historical context of the period; the literature including novels by Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen; the art including the painting of Aaron Douglas, the sculpture of Richmond Barthé, and the photography of James Van Der Zee; and classic female blues with a focus on the music and lyrics of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. We will also read a range of writers from the period including Marita O. Bonner, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Elise Johnson McDougald, and George S. Schuyler.

AFRI 1060E. West African Writers and Political Kingdom.

Do West African writers have a role to play in the changing political landscape of their countries? An examination of the ways and means through which a select group of West African writers have dealt with issues that relate to the role of the state in the management of individual and group relations, the politics of gender, civil and military relations, and the construction of new forms of civil society. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1060F. Philosophy and Race.

This advanced seminar in Africana philosophy will examine critical texts and thinkers that articulate the problems, methods, and techniques for interrogating the interrelationships between the discourse of philosophy and modern conceptions of race. The seminar will move to consider contemporary engagements in this area by drawing on readings and thinkers from analytical, continental, feminist, marxist, and pragmatist philosophical traditions.

AFRI 1060G. Black Radical Tradition.

This advanced seminar in Africana philosophy will explore the contours of insurgent forms of Africana social and political philosophy. With a temporal focus on the twentieth century, we will concern ourselves with explicating the dominant themes, theoretical orentations, and methodological understandings that in/form constructions and articulations of the varities of Africana feminism/womanism, black nationalism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Pan-Africanism, and radical democracy. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1060H. Racial Frontier in South African History.

This seminar will focus on racial categories in South Africa. We will explore dynamic categories of race from the 17th through 20th centuries. Topics include the relationship of race and class; racial violence; the transmission of culture and knowledge across racial boundaries; intimate relations over racial boundaries; segregation; and race and nation. We will give attention to critiquing the ways that historians have represented race and the ways that conceptions of the category have evolved within the discipline, but the emphasis will be on recent scholarship. Students will be expected to participate actively in the seminar, to write one book review, and one research paper. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1060I. Africana Philosophy of Religion.

Who, or rather, what is God to the oppressed? This advanced seminar in Africana philosophy will examine the various theories, methods, and arguments that engage perennial questions that arise when contemplating God. The seminar will focus on questions of philosophical method and theological exposition while also being critically attuned to modes of social and cultural analysis and critique, particularly those perspectives inspired by forms of critical theory, feminist theory, and Marxist theory. Limited enrollment.

AFRI 1060K. African Literature After Achebe: Emerging African Writers.

In this course we will analyze how contemporary, emerging and marginally-read African writers contest the traditional and widely-held interpretations, understanding and assumptions of African literature. We will read and think about African literature in the contemporary post-colonial and post apartheid moment in Africa. Authors discussed include Dambudzo Marechera, Zoe Wicomb and Binyavanga Wainaina, among others.

AFRI 1060L. Varieties of American Philosophical Experience.

In contrast to Pragmatist and European-oriented views of American philosophy, this course will emphasize the colonial dimensions and features of American philosophy that emerged out of the colonial soil of early America. Out of this soil sprang extended debates between Native Americans, Euro-Americans and African Americans over the legitimacy of the hegemony that Euro-Americans were establishing over increasing portions of North America. This course views American philosophy as having within it two opposing traditions that have been engaged in ongoing angry dialogues: the dominant or Prosperean tradition of Euro-Americans and the subjugated or Caliban tradition of Native Americans and African Americans.

AFRI 1060M. African Environmental History.

This seminar will be devoted to the study of the environment and power in the history of sub-Saharan Africa. The goals for this class are that you learn more about the history of Africa, about the ways that relations with the environment shaped its human history, about the construction of environmental knowledge and its repercussions, and about historical research.

This course also has an applied dimension. Eight African environmental professionals visiting Brown through the Watson Scholars of the Environment (WISE) program will also participate in the class. In their final course project, students will conduct research of use to the WISE fellows on historical cases related to their training at Brown. (For more information see http://www.watsoninstitute.org/ge/watson_scholars/).

This course qualifies as a capstone seminar in the history department. Enrollment limited to 20 students. Instructors permission required. Interested students should email the instructor at Nancy_Jacobs@brown.edu with a description of their interests and background.

AFRI 1060Q. The New Science of Race: Racial Biomedicine in the 21st Century.

This course draws on film, news media, scientific discourse, and social theory to engage biomedicine's most controversial investigations of race and the social scientific questions they have provoked. The course asks: How is contemporary science imagining, constructing, and producing knowledge about race? What are the social, political, and cultural implications of this knowledge? Students will be introduced to important science studies methods that we will apply to historical and contemporary research agendas. No prior knowledge of science or racial theory is required. Enrollment preference will be given to juniors and seniors. Limited to 20.

AFRI 1060R. Comparative Africana Literatures and Criticism.

Caribbean, African American and African literature has been called engaged literature with explicit commitments to memory, history and ways to think about the political. This course will explore a set of writers, their novels, critical essays and their practices of criticism. It will examine anti-colonial, post-colonial writers as well as African American writers who in the words of Toni Morrison, "rip that veil drawn over proceedings to terrible to relate." We will in this course read the works of George Lamming, Patrick Chamoiseau, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Edwidge Danticat, Yvonne Vera, Zoe Wicomb and Njabulo Ndebele.

AFRI 1060T. South Africa since 1990.

South Africa transformed after 1990, but the past remains powerful. This seminar explores the endurance and erosion of the apartheid legacy, as expressed in historical and fictional narratives. We begin with transition to majority rule and continue with the administrations of Mandela, Mbeki, and Zuma, connecting the formative histories of these leaders with the changing dynamic of politics. We end with narratives about the ways that ordinary people experienced new times. The syllabus includes scholarly works in history and politics, biography, fiction and film. Two short writing assignments and a major research paper. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AFRI 1060U. An Introduction to Africa.

Africa invokes myriad images in the global imagination. It figures in debates on the evolution of humans; in the formation of capitalism, and even as a counterpoint to discourses on human progress. This course interrogates how “Africa” gets mobilized in popular discourse in the US and beyond. How might we reconcile the idea of Africa with contemporary conditions of the African continent? We will not only examine Africa through a broad range of disciplinary perspectives; but also become familiar with social, cultural, political and economic diversity of the African continent. We will engage the disciplines of history, economics, politics, cultural studies and gender studies among others.

AFRI 1060V. Black Transnationalism.

This seminar explores the complex dynamics of Black transnationalism during the twentieth century, focusing on the global visions; transnational activities; and transracial political alliances of people of African descent worldwide. The course highlights several key areas of inquiry including the role of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, class and sexuality in shaping Black transnational movements and discourses. It also explores the connections between Black transnationalism and other philosophies including Pan-Africanism, Black nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Course readings will represent a combination of primary and secondary sources that reflect the geographical breadth of the African Diaspora including Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

AFRI 1060W. Policy, Culture and Discourse that Shape Health and Access to Healthcare.

The global discourse on health and access to healthcare are shaped by narratives that often conflate health with being about the healthcare system rather than about where we live, the policies, the politics, and narratives/discourse that shape them. Global health also tends to promote a perspective that it is about those people over there and has nothing to do with us here. This course will create a platform that ties the global to the local. We will discuss how political and cultural discourse on race, class, and gender create the conditions that allow social inequalities to thrive.

AFRI 1060X. African Development.

Course takes an interdisciplinary approach to introduce contemporary development issues in Africa. Drawing on literature from political sciences, economics, sociology and history, it explores the challenges of development in the continent since independence, as well as investigates the influences of governance, institutions, conflicts and external forces in Africa’s development trajectories. This is an applied course that would utilize both theoretical and policy analytical approaches to examine the political and socioeconomic dynamism in contemporary Africa. This course is guided by questions, such as: Why have most African countries remained underdeveloped, poor and susceptible to conflicts (many of which seem intractable)?

AFRI 1060Y. Sex, Violence and the Policing of Black Struggle.

This seminar considers some of the historical dimensions and diverse manifestations of the relationship between sex and violence across the eras of black social movement in order to inquire into the nature of a society structured in antiblackness. We consider violence, gender, sex, and freedom across an interdisciplinary terrain, dealing with problems of representation, punishment, policing, and self-determination. The real significance of iconic black lives lost to policing in recent days and years lies within this realm of sexual violence, beyond an examination of law and policing.

AFRI 1060Z. Race, Sexuality, and Mental Disability History.

This seminar investigates the fraught entanglement of mental disability with race and homosexuality beginning with late 19th Century ideas of scientific racism and the invention of the homosexual body in African American communities. By tracking changes in Psychiatry and Psychology through the 1960s and 1970s, the course examines the impact of the Civil Rights and Gay Rights movements on sustaining contemporary mental health diagnosis of "gender dysphoria" associated with Trans people. The course will further examine several approaches to queer, trans, and gay history from the fields of color critique, black feminism, and disability studies. Enrollment limit is 20.

AFRI 1065. Performing Africa.

Course engages storytelling, photography, movement as creative strategies with which to probe the idea of Africa. We'll explore historical and contemporary discourses that have shaped understandings of Africa in the West; examine the social and imaginative worlds constructed by African artists; study performative pieces that explore the multifaceted realities of what it means to be African today. Course asks students to imagine themselves as creators and curators, rather than merely consumers or critics, of African images. We'll engage the possibilities and limits of several performance strategies in appreciating a diverse continent with such a contested global image. Performance experience not required.

AFRI 1070. RPM: Traditional and Contemporary Elements of Intertribal Indigenous Theater in America.

Utilizes Rites and Reason Theater's research-to- performance method of developing new play scripts to examine the development and relationship of the colonial Euro-American art form, theatre, to its existence within the Indigenous intertribal (Native American Indian) communities in America.

AFRI 1075. Providence Housing Ecosystem, Development, Displacement and Gentrification.

This course will exam what are the influences and power dynamics that shape where we live. We will focus on Providence. From the perspective of marginalized communities often with limited power, we will consider how to change these dynamics. We will consider how government planning policies and housing speculators, impact housing stability, create value and shape the environment in which we live. We will consider the relationship-based channels which encourage social cohesion across neighborhoods and/or social disruption and upheaval caused by market-rate housing and development policies, as well as the discourse on housing and development that influence housing speculation forces.

AFRI 1080. The Life and Work of W. E. B. Du Bois.

From the publication of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 until his death in Ghana sixty years later, W. E. B. Du Bois remained one of America's most penetrating analysts of what he called "the color line." Students read and discuss a selection of Du Bois's writings from his career as journalist, essayist, sociologist, historian, poet, political leader, and pioneering Pan-Africanist. Prerequisite: one course in AC, AF or US History.

AFRI 1085. The Black Vote: A Critical Interrogation of a Concept.

“The black vote” as a concept, simultaneously captures a truth and obscures reality. It reflects the truth that no other racial group comes close to the uniformity of Black Americans’ voting behavior within American electoral politics. Yet, it also obscures the diversity of political opinions and ideological dispositions that animate a dynamic black American public. If voting is an essential means to give citizens voice and their share in self-rule within a democracy, this course explores what it means for the stability of American democracy that the black vote does not reflect the political diversity of the black community.

AFRI 1090. Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945.

Lecture course that examines the extended history of the mass civil rights movement in the U.S. Starting at World War II, we consider the roles of the courts, the federal and state governments, organizations, local communities, individuals and various activist strategies in the ongoing struggle for African American equality, focusing on African American agency, particularly in the South, but also in Boston, Mass. Sources include photographs, documentaries, movies, letters, speeches, autobiographies, and secondary readings. Requirements: Weekly readings, documentary viewings, 4 short papers, 2 exams.

AFRI 1095. Black Women’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels: The Future Then & Now.

Black women’s science fiction and fantasy (SFF) are read as “freedom dreams.” In this 13-week course we will discuss how these genres confront historical black trauma and glean present meaning about Black being and futurity. We straddle two of the most prominent literary eruptions: 1979-1989 when neo-slave narratives became popularized and 2015-2021 when Black SFF literature proliferates anew, particularly in children’s categories. Beginning with Octavia Butler’s acclaimed Kindred and concluding with Tracy Deonn’s instant bestseller Legendborn, we will examine how Black SFF stages cross-temporal conversations attempting to repair the ontological ruptures of historical trauma and recuperate Black being.

AFRI 1099. Alternative Technofutures: Black Speculative Visioning for a Better Tomorrow.

In the last decade, we have witnessed the acceleration of technological experimentation and production. As such, this class explores the role that Black speculation plays in helping us envision and create technocultures beyond empire. Together, we will explore imperialism and colonialism as they manifest in our digital age, paying particular attention to how digital technologies like predictive algorithms, machine learning, surveillance, and data extraction extend and innovate on these systems of power. After initial grounding in the study of technology, speculative art and literature, and speculative design, we will pivot to “labs” where you will be able to read and analyze Black speculative works, develop a Black speculative method based on these works, and apply that method to your design of a technological tool that addresses a social problem.

AFRI 1100A. Comparative Identity Politics in Africa.

This course is a comparative analysis of identity politics in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Africa is a heterogeneous region with ethnic and religious diversity. The course will introduce students to social identity theory and processes of identity politics and discuss how identity processes unfold in difference areas of political discourse.

AFRI 1100B. The Caribbean: Cultures, Politics, Histories and Literature.

The Caribbean archipelago has brought forth a new awareness of the region not as a fixed entity of islands as previously viewed; rather, it is a diverse group of islands that are not only geographically linked but share a common history of slavery and colonialism. This course aims to present students with an opportunity to delve into substantive multidisciplinary (social science and literary) texts that seek to analyze, expose and deconstruct forces that continue to shape the Caribbean.

AFRI 1100C. Slavery and Empire in the United States.

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the United States grew into the largest slaveholding society in the modern world. This course focuses upon this history to examine the centrality of slavery and empire in the making of the United States. Crucial to the formation of racial capitalism, U.S. slavery’s growth was driven forward by unprecedented economic transformation and territorial conquest. This slavery-based expansion was defined by settler warfare that remade the United States into a vast, continental empire. Yet, in the face of unprecedented violence, enslaved people themselves brought about the end of slavery. Through an examination of this history and its legacies, the course will also introduce a range of sources documenting histories of resistance and subversion.

AFRI 1100X. Black Speculative Fiction: World-Making and Alternative Universes, Science Fiction and Fantasy.

This class surveys the genre, including the work of George Schuyler, Nalo Hopkinson, Samuel R. Delaney, N.K. Jemison, Octavia Butler, Coslon Whitehead, and Tananarive Due, along with everything related, from comic books to album covers to filmic re-writings of canonical science fiction and fantasy works. The goal is to understand the history of the genre, its relationship to histories of anti-blackness and ideologies of black liberation, and its contributions to speculative fiction more broadly.

AFRI 1110. Voices Beneath the Veil.

VBV is an interdisciplinary exploration of African-American history and cultures through the analyses of Black authored plays from 1858 to the present. The course focuses on the development of a thesis paper, which includes an incremental re-writing process.

AFRI 1111. Systemic Racism and Modes of Resilience.

Over the past several years there has been much public discussion about systemic racism, and its role in perpetuating racial inequality. What is systemic racism? What role does it play in society and how have African Americans responded to it? This course will use the lens of “systemic racism” to explore the interconnections between policies and practices that create a network of devastating forms of racial discrimination and disadvantage; conditions that have shifted over time and have made it difficult for black communities, and individuals within them, to flourish. And yet, systemic racism does not have the final word. We will also consider how African-American communities have developed various modes of resilience in cultural, spiritual/religious, artistic, and other facets of life.

AFRI 1112. What's Popping: The Contemporary Black Theatre Workshop.

Open to all Brown students, this course introduces students to contemporary (post-1980) Black theatre history, theory, and artistic practice. Students will read, analyze and interpret a range of influential plays such as What to Send Up When It Goes Down, Hurt Village, Twilight, Topdog/Underdog, Choir Boy, Bootycandy, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and Fences. Course work includes opportunities to perform scenes and monologues, see live theatre in and around Providence, and devise original performance works through in-class writing, movement, and improv theatre exercises. The semester culminates in an Artists Salon featuring students' work. No previous acting, improv, movement, directing, playwriting or Black theatre experience required. No prereqs. All are welcome.

AFRI 1120. The Folk: African American Folk Traditions and Cultural Expressions.

A research, development, and performance workshop designed to explore, examine, and articulate various folk traditions and cultural expressions of African Americans. The course examines the unique history and heritage of African Americans through the creative manifestations of their cultures, e.g., storytelling, dance, music, poetry, and style. The emphasis of the course is on creative writing and in-class performances informed by research and analysis.

AFRI 1130. Black Feminist Thought and Womanist Theology.

Examines the historical contributions and contradictions of African American protofeminists and contemporary African American feminists and womanists. Emphasizes political critiques and theological writings. Examines historical contributions to black feminist thought; contemporary intersectional analyses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ideology; and political advocacy and religiosity in contemporary womanist theology.

AFRI 1135. Reading with Black Caribbean Women Writers.

This course asks what it means for us to read Black Caribbean women’s writing, not only in relation to their words, but also to the lived experiences, stories, worlds and possibilities they engender. We will survey a group of twentieth century Black Caribbean women writers who move through the Caribbean, North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. We will cover themes from enslavement, colonialism, independence movements, feminisms, racial formation, sexuality, and migration in order to evaluate the aesthetic, cultural, and imaginative realms that Black Caribbean women create. Materials will include novels, poetry, interviews, short stories, and literary criticism. Texts not originally written in English are provided in a translation.

AFRI 1140. Women, the State and Violence.

Examines the role of black women in 20th-century political movements, including with the turn-of-the-century antilynching campaigns, the southern civil rights movement, the black liberation movement, and contemporary educational activism for human rights. Central concerns include history of American radicalism and analyses of antiracist experiences, and the politics stemming from African American women's leadership.Prerequisites: AF 150 and/or AF 125.

AFRI 1145. The Black Hero.

This course is an exploration of the notion of a “Black hero.” African American history and culture is replete with individuals who are all share the label of “hero.” However, what exactly makes a hero? And more importantly what kind of political and cultural work is being serviced by invocations of the term? How is it that Barack Obama., Michael Jordan, and the Black Panther – a politician, an athlete, and a fictional character – can all share this same title? Through discussions and readings, students will examine a range of examples of “Black heroes” and offer critical reflections on their relationships to specific kinds of politics as well as vectors of class, gender, and sexuality.

AFRI 1150. Afro-Caribbean Philosophy.

An introduction to the field of Afro-Caribbean philosophy. The first half focuses on the history of the field, identifying its African background and surveying some of its major schools, such as the Afro-Christians, the poeticists, the historicists, and existentialists. The second half consists of a more intensive comparative focus on the ontologies and epistemologies of two of these schools.

AFRI 1160. Public Health in Africa: History, Politics, and Practice.

Examines the ways in which medical knowledge has been produced in sub-Saharan Africa. Treats all medical discourses and practices-including biomedicine and "indigenous" and pluralist medicines-as culturally-based systems of knowledge production. Explores the political economy of health and disease and the role of medicine and medical practices (hygiene, epidemiology, demography) in producing and maintaining power in both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

AFRI 1170. African American Women's History.

This course examines the cultural, economic, political and social history of Black women in the United States from slavery to the present. Through a variety of secondary and primary sources, film and other multimedia, the course explores the myriad ways that African American women have experienced and resisted the “double burden” of racism and sexism in United States history. The course will consider the legacy of slavery and how African American women have defined their own identities as individuals, wives, mothers, community leaders, activists and theorists. Paying careful attention to their diverse experiences, the course will examine Black women’s participation and leadership in a variety of institutions, organizations and social movements. Major course themes include labor, politics, internationalism, religion and family.

AFRI 1180. Visual Cultures of the Afro-Americas.

This course will examine how the visual modalities of power operate to ascribe, authenticate, and contest meaning within the Afro-Americas, understood here to include Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American and African-American cultures. We will query the complex histories and technologies that constitute the social life of vision in the Afro-Americas, while cognizant of the fact that the field of visuality cannot be understood from single point of view. We will consider images made of and images made by peoples of African descent throughout the Americas as we attend to the reception, interpretation and reproduction of images, as well fields of invisibility. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.

AFRI 1181. Black Women Visual Artists Global Contemporary Art in the United States.

This class examines Black women visual artists of the African Diaspora who are based in the United States and are part of the global contemporary art scene. We will study how race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity have forged and continued to shape Black female identity and creative production. The course is organized around three themes: (re)presenting the Black female body; globalization and migration; and performing/visualizing self and community.

AFRI 1190. Haiti: A New World, A Free World.

Course examines the dual Haitian Revolution as a pivotal moment in the making of the modern world. It reviews the various historical interpretations of Haitian events, examines how these events contribute to or troubles our ideas about modern politics and notions of freedom as well as our conceptions of revolution. Course engages in these issues by working through three archives: Vodou Religion; The Art of the Revolution and the conventional historiography about the revolution, and will be tied to a joint Brown/RISD exhibition on Haitian Art. Enrollment limited to 15 juniors/seniors concentrating in Africana Studies, Visual Art, History; 15 RISD students.

AFRI 1190A. Framing Haiti: History, Culture, Politics + Literature.

In broadest terms, the objective of this multidisciplinary course will be to introduce students to the varied “nature” of the Haitian society and its fluid and dynamic culture, and then attempt to make historical and socio-anthropological sense of the country in relation to the region as a whole (particularly to the United States and Dominican Republic). Throughout the course we will discuss the dynamics of power in the realm of governance, with particular emphasis placed on the notion of struggle for sovereignty and the culture of resistance (through the arts) that forms the fundamental character of the national culture.

AFRI 1200. Gospel Music from the Church to the Streets.

Black gospel music has informed popular music artists including Beyoncé, Elvis, and Chance the Rapper. This course surveys African American gospel music as it is implemented for worship, evangelism, and popular consumption. Beyond analysis of key musical and lyrical characteristics of gospel, this class gives attention to the religious and sociocultural contexts that inform gospel composition and performance. Gospel music is integrally connected to the worship traditions of black American Pentecostals, Baptists, and Methodists. Consequently, this course is also a musical introduction to African American Christianity. Classes include interactive demonstrations in addition to discussion of audio/video recordings and required texts.

AFRI 1200X. The Art and Imagination of Josephine Baker.

This class is a seminar-style exploration of the art and imagination of Josephine Baker, the 20th century's most famous Black celebrity. Baker was an iconoclastic political thinker, a race-bending globetrotter, and a figure of outsized historical consequence. Her biography sheds light on many of the major dynamics of Black history, including the long histories of civil rights and human rights, and of radicalism and internationalism. Students will study Baker's body of artistic work, her role in many of the major social movements of the century, and her legacy right up to the present. The aim is to leave the class with a deep and thorough knowledge of her life, her ideas, and her politics.

AFRI 1210. Afro-Brazilians and the Brazilian Polity.

Explores the history and present-day conditions of Afro-Brazilians, looking specifically at the uses of Africana in contemporary Brazil, political and cultural movements among Afro-Brazilians, domestic politics and its external dimensions, and Brazilian race relations within a global comparative framework. Texts from a variety of disciplines. A reading knowledge of Portuguese is not required but students so advantaged should inform the instructor.

AFRI 1215. The Visual Culture of 1930s: Race, Gender, and the Laboring Body.

The 1930s mark a moment of extraordinary change in the United States. The Great Depression precipitated a rethinking and reordering of the federal government’s response to economic, political, and social institutions. As part of this rethinking, the federal government sponsored an unprecedented number of art projects, creating jobs for thousands of painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, architects, filmmakers, writers, and actors. However, the New Deal art projects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt were not the only response to the changing times. The 1930s also saw the rise of leftist political artists and the strikingly conservative art forms of the so-called “Regionalist” painters. In this seminar, we will consider the federal art projects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, social realism (broadly conceived), and the world’s fairs of the period—sometimes called the “Century-of-Progress” expositions.

AFRI 1230. Black Protest Music.

This courses surveys African American protest music through research and performance. At every point in American history, African Americans have crafted music to speak out against racial injustices. This course highlights the music of three specific moments in African American history: 1) spirituals of the enslaved; 2) music of the classical phase of the Civil Rights movement; and 3) burgeoning protest music of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Students study the sociocultural contexts informing the performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, among others. Students gain critical analytical skills for engaging music as cultural production, commodity, and vehicle of activism. Ultimately, this course equips students to situate BLM music within the longer history of African American musical activism, and it provides space for students to perform and compose black protest music.

AFRI 1234. The Black Radical Imagination.

This course offers an examination of early historical attempts to address arguably the two most basic questions of the Black freedom struggle in America: what exactly constitutes freedom? And how is this freedom to be attained? Using three broad themes – escape, salvation, and revolution – it surveys, highlights, interrogates the development of Black political creativity from mid-19th to mid-20th century. Through close reading of primary and secondary source documents, students will be introduced to a range of significant political moments, movements, and theories that chart the evolution of the American Black radical tradition during this period. Topics include the New Negro Movement and the notion of a Talented Tenth, Pan-Africanism and the 1920’s Back to Africa Movement, the Black Women’s Club Movement of the early 20th century, the NAACP “We Charge Genocide” campaign, etc.

AFRI 1237. How We Remember: Collective Memories of Slavery and Colonialism in Contemporary Nonfiction Cinema.

This course is organized in two parts; in the first, we examine five ethnographic and documentary films seeking to comprehend the significance of visual reconstructions of different colonial periods and legacies. We critically analyze bias and injustice in visual historical reconstructions instead of letting them go unaddressed. In the second part of the course, we focus on education and focus on the use of films in class. We study and compare digital learning companions that are complementary to some of the assigned films. As a final project, we use the digital platform Skalar to create a website collecting materials from course assignments. During the semester, we have three guest lectures by directors and education specialists who have used films and digital tools to teach the core topics of this course.

AFRI 1250. Women in the Civil Rights Movement.

This seminar focuses on women in the civil rights movements, spanning the years of 1955-1968. This course examines issues of gender, race, sexuality, social protest, nonviolent civil disobedience and self-defense during the height of activism against apartheid in the United States and for civil rights.

AFRI 1260. The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

This seminar aims to fill in some of the gaps of the official canon by emphasizing that the modern (1954-1966) southern civil rights movement was not as it is mainly portrayed, a movement of mass protest in public spaces led by charismatic leaders; but rather, a movement of grassroots community organizing - quiet day-to-day work. Enrollment limited to 40.

AFRI 1270. Slavery, Democracy, and Racial Violence in the Americas.

This seminar will provide students with an introductory course about the origins of racial violence in the Americas. After a short theoretical introduction, the course will analyze the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and Africans and their descendants as a fundamental instrument of European colonialism and the expansion of capitalism. The following section will describe the role of slavery in the making of constitutional regimes and criminal justice systems across the continent during the Age of Revolutions. Finally, the last classes will focus on the legacies of slavery after emancipation by analyzing phenomena such as lynching, capital punishment, police brutality, and incarceration. The seminar will also illuminate the formation of different racial and legal regimes in the Americas by offering a transnational perspective that integrates the United States, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Brazil as components of a longue durée Atlantic history.

AFRI 1275. Memory, Movements, and Mississippi.

This course explores the history of Mississippi through the lens of race, culture, and politics focusing on the mass of movements for civil rights to the present. Students will understand the complexities and contradictions of race, politics, and memory in the United States and have opportunities to articulate these intricacies in assignments – building communication skills for future work. Students will also advance critical reading skills and analytical writing, discussant, and oral presentation skills applicable beyond an academic setting. It accompanies the experiential component and the January trip to the state through the Bonner Program. Instructor override required.

AFRI 1280. Writing About Race in the Post Civil Rights Era.

This seminar is an explanation of the transformation of racial policies, relations and rhetorics since the end of the civil rights era in the United States. We will examine the complex ways race has remained central to US society and yet has dramatically shifted- examining terms such as: color-blind society; integration; political race, racialized (and gendered) community formation. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1310. Say Her Name: Black Women and the Carceral Experience Since 1865.

The death of George Floyd has increased national attention to police brutality and mass incarceration. However, the death of Breonna Taylor has not garnered as much attention, nor have the experiences of imprisoned Black women. This course examines the experiences of captive Black women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and will probe the prison-industrial complex as well as asylums and other mental health spaces as carceral spaces. Themes will interrogate the criminalization of Black women, definitions of insanity, and activism surrounding Black women’s incarceration.

AFRI 1330. Africana Studies Junior Seminar.

This junior seminar course is designed to support students’ growth as academic writers and will prepare them to better complete their culminating senior thesis projects. While specifically geared towards Africana Studies concentrators, the class is open to any undergraduate student who has successfully completed AFRI 0090: An Introduction to Africana Studies and at least four semesters of coursework overall towards the Bachelor’s degree. Course materials will delve deeply into the history, spaces, peoples and cultures of the African Diaspora, exploring a selection of critical writings, performance pieces, fiction and non-fiction works by leading scholars and artists.

AFRI 1360. Africana Studies: Knowledge, Texts and Methodology.

This course will explore the issues of Africana Studies as a discipline by engaging in a series of critical readings of the central texts, which laid the protocols of the discipline. The course will also raise issues of knowledge production and methodologies. This course is a senior capstone seminar. Open to all senior Africana Studies concentrators; others by instructor permission only. Enrollment limited to 25.

AFRI 1410. Africans and the West: Studies in the History of Ideas.

This course will examine the political thought of a selection of Africana thinkers from the period of slavery to the 20th century. It will examine the political thought of thinkers like, Franz Fanon, Ida B. Wells, Cugoano, CLR James, W.E.B. DuBois and Rastafari. The course will be an exploration of black radical intellectual tradition and its different meanings.

AFRI 1420. Caribbean Imaginations: Writing and Cultural Production.

In the global imagination, the Caribbean is either thought of as a place for vacation or a place of extreme violence. This course calls for a deeper engagement with the region and its diaspora by surveying the writing and cultural production of the Caribbean to unpack the varying meanings of a Caribbean imagination in the historical and present moment. We will cover themes ranging from enslavement, indentureship, colonialism, racial formation, gender and sexuality, class, and migration to understand the various transformations in Caribbean literary and expressive cultures. Students will evaluate the aesthetic and political contributions that these imaginative works put forward in a broader understanding of the Caribbean. Materials include novels, short stories, poetry, film, music videos, and visual art. Readings will be inclusive of the Anglophone, Hispanophone, Francophone, and Dutch Caribbean.

AFRI 1430. Lincoln in the Archive: Material Culture, Representation, and Race.

AFRI 1430 explores the Charles Woodbury McLellan Collection of Lincolniana in the John Hay Library. We will consider this extensive archive dedicated to Abraham Lincoln including the material objects, the many images of Lincoln, the visualization of the Emancipation Proclamation, and how race is represented in the collection. Students will engage the collection to create and publish a digital exhibition through the platform, CultureConnect

AFRI 1440. Theorizing the Black Diaspora.

This seminar will focus on the theorization of the black diaspora as a way to explore the various articulations of colonialism, gendered racism and resistance against that racism throughout African-descendant communities. Course readings will highlight the scholarship of black women who have contributed to the internationalization of radical black vis-a-vis theories of diaspora, transnationalism, transformative politics, identity formation, and community.

AFRI 1441. Caribbean and Latin American Migration: Race, Gender, Community.

This course explores key issues in migration, especially as they relate to Latin America and the Caribbean. Viewing migration through multidisciplinary lenses, it explores the historic and contemporary forces behind the movement of people across the region; global and regional Migration regimes and their limitations; the implications of gender, race, ethnicity and class on migrant experience; the social effects of migration, especially on families; migrant survival strategies; and migrants contributions to their adopted countries, among others. The course draws from literature, film alongside academic texts representing a wide range of disciplinary perspectives to illustrate the varied approaches to think about migration and the people at the center of this phenomenon.

AFRI 1460. Tell the Story: The Afro-Diasporic Experience Through Documentary Film.

Documentary films have grown into an influential art form that has influenced politics, culture, social movements and how we see the world. They are relied on to sort out fact from fiction in an increasingly complex world where the lines continue to blur. Through film screenings, lectures, readings, critical analysis and group discussions, the course examines the changing nature of the documentary as it relates to how films documenting the Black Experience are conceived, told and distributed in different mediums. We will also look at how these films have been influenced as much by technology and ethical, social, cultural and political movements, as it has by the individual choices of the filmmakers.

AFRI 1470. Southern African History.

This course examines major themes of the history of southern Africa from the earliest times until 1994, with a heavy emphasis on historiographical debates. Our discussions of the South African past will always be informed by a consideration of the approach of the scholars who have interpreted and presented it as history. Our major questions concern the origins of historical change and the creation of racial groups. We will probe the significance of race in South African history but also the limitations of its explanatory power. Readings are arranged at three levels. First, we will be reading primary sources, to gain experience in working with the evidence that informs historical work. Second, we will be working through a concise textbook that summarizes the major themes of South African history. Third, we will be reading specialized scholarly books and articles, chosen to illustrate recent discussions about the interpretation of South Africa's past. The course will meet twice a week for lecture and discussion groups will meet once a week.

AFRI 1480. The Black Digital Humanities.

What is the relationship between race, digital technology, and power? This question is the basis for studying and building with the “The Black Digital Humanities,” a space and tool to consider the intersections between Blackness, humanity, and digital technology, an umbrella term that includes all electronic devices, systems, and resources that produce, process, or store information. In this course, students will spend the semester exploring the ways digital technology offers opportunities to revisit, reconsider, and reimagine knowledge about the Black experience in the United States and beyond. Drawing on Black epistemologies, students will utilize, adapt, and attempt to break digital technologies to both analyze and build things that help us pose new and different questions about the human. Course readings will include texts in digital studies, new media, and the digital humanities.

AFRI 1500. Incarceration, Education, and Political Literacy.

This seminar (w/out audits) in politics and social justice is open to juniors/seniors. Captivity has become a critical political- social phenomenon in U.S. democracy, given that the United States has over two million people in prison/jails/INS detention centers. This two-part, one-year long course examines and maps (using cyber technology) captivity and criminality in the United States, focusing on race, gender, politics and literacy. Students are strongly urged to take both semesters; the second semester course as practicum, with training in cyber-technology and community-based learning/literacy, is open only to those who complete the fall course (Pt I) and the grade option for the second part of the course will be S/NC. Pre-Semester writing assignment required; see syllabus on WebCt for details.

AFRI 1500A. Black Life in the Post-Industrial City.

This course explores key themes in African American life in post-industrial U.S. cities. Relying on scholarly and historical sources and films, we will examine the complicated interplay of race, class, ethnicity, and gender dynamics in the transformation of black urban life in the late twentieth-century, the structures that have defined black urban life, and various expressive cultures and modes of resistance that have emerged out of the urban context. While not required, it is beneficial for students to have a working knowledge of twentieth century American history, and African American history in particular.

AFRI 1500B. Black Women Thinkers: Alternative Genealogies of Black Radical Thought.

This seminar examines contributions of Black women as major thinkers within the Black radical tradition, and provides a critical genealogy of Black feminist activists, writers and scholars contributing to social movements in the 20th century. Throughout the course, we will ask the following questions: What methods do Black women use to form critical thought? How is Black women’s knowledge disappeared and devalued within academic and activist contexts? Finally, how can we recover and center those histories within our work? Assignments include short writing assignments, a final paper, and a collaborative digital humanities project. Introduction to Africana Studies preferred.

AFRI 1510. Making and Remaking Blackness in the Western World.

This course is an interdisciplinary survey of cultural, social, and political expressions of Blackness among people of African descent in the Western World, primarily the United States, and the social forces that create various understandings of this identity. Black experiences of and reflections on what it means to be Black are articulated in writing, visual and performing arts, music, and social media. Students will read, listen, and view a wide of set of materials that reflect people of African descent and their negotiation, rejection, and reimagination of different forms of Blackness in affirmative and complex ways from the 18th century to the present. Primary and secondary texts will comprise the course readings and range from cultural studies, philosophy, critical race theory, sociology, political science, literature, and history, among other areas.

AFRI 1540. Black Popular Cultures.

This course is an historical and topical examination of the development of black popular cultures. We will explore the debates about popular culture and specifically examine the ways that race (as well as gender, sexuality and class) shape these debates. In addition we will explore specific black popular cultural practices (music, dance, film, radio, theater, etc.) as well as the larger contexts for their production and reception. Instructor permission required.

AFRI 1580. Contemporary African Women's Literature.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to novels like Head's A Question of Power, El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile, Adochie's Half of a Yellow Sun and other major prose works by contemporary African women writers. It will present the African woman as a writer, her environment and her commitments. The emphasis is on the writing of continental African women, but will include works of other women writers. For a brief but necessary historical background to the course, it will be introduced with selections from Margaret Busby's Daughters of Africa. Enrollment limited to 25.

AFRI 1600. Caribbean Popular Culture: Reggae, Dancehall, and Calypso.

Whether interrogating the aesthetics and moralizing philosophies that compose reggae music, examining the manifestations of skin bleaching depicted in dancehall culture, or mapping the global routes calypso music occupies with an agenda to theorize Caribbean cultures—the course centers popular music as sites of politics, pleasure, clashes, and identity-making.

AFRI 1620. Black New Orleans: A Research Seminar.

Examines the development of a unique African/ American cultural and political identity in New Orleans. The seminar focuses on the development of the Faubourg Tremé, the oldest free black community in the United States, and covers the period from 1718 until 1899. Topics include: slavery and resistance; relations between enslaved and free blacks; social and political agitation; and the resulting early development of the nation's Civil Rights movement and legislation. There is discussion also of the formation and continued tradition of artists' and artisans' guilds; Creole language (e.g., Creole slave songs, proverbs); NOLA relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1630. Modernist Africana Poetry of the Americas.

Focus on origins of Modernism among Africana authors of the Americas, with emphasis on the poetry, poetics and poetry movements of Brazil and Latin America, the Caribbean and US from 1888 through the first half of the 20th century. Begins with an overview of innovations wrought by Rubén Dario of Nicaragua, arguably the first modernist poet, and continues with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910's and 20's; the Brazilian writers at the center of the Week of Modern Art of 1922; Caribbean writers of the Negrismo and Négritude movements; concludes with the work of such US and Anglophone Caribbean poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Martin Carter. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1640. Development, Dependency, and Decline in Africa, 1950-2025.

This course on the history of Africa begins as European empire unraveled after the Second World War and ends with a look toward the future. Development was high on the international and national agenda in the mid-twentieth century, but the most conspicuous outcome of the following decades was dependency and decline. Yet the story is more mixed than has been represented in American headlines; it was not one of pre-determined and constant failure. More than ever, at the beginning of this new millennium, conditions across the continent have diverged. What are current signs for future development or continuing crisis?

AFRI 1710A. Political Visions and Community Formations.

This course aims to consider the depths of connection between forms of racialized, gender, class and sexual oppression vis a vis the creation and maintenance of community and intimate social bonds among the oppressed. We will read sociologists, historians and others who have worked ath this intersection and musicians and writers such as: Morrison, Bambara, Baldwin, Hill-Collins, Hansberry, soul and neosoul artists. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 1750. Eastern African History.

A lecture course examining the history of Eastern Africa from earliest times until 1963. The area includes the Great Lakes region, the Horn of Africa, Madagascar, and the East African Coast. The major topics are: precolonial interactions, the development of states and stateless societies, contact with other Indian Ocean people, the slave trade, colonial rule, and independence movements.

AFRI 1800. Race, Empire and Modernity.

Taking Cicero's notion of empire as "ways of life", this course will survey the history of empires as forms of rule. It will explore how race has been deployed in the various types of empire. The course will pay particular attention to empires in modernity since 1492. The course will think about the various technologies of rule and their discourses of power.

AFRI 1820. Contemporary African Political Philosophy.

This course examines some contemporary responses to the human condition in Africa. Topics will include Democracy, human rights, instability, social justice, identity, community and solidarity. These topics will be approached through the works of Canonical figures such as Leopold Senghor, K. Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and the recent analytical (T. Kiros), Hermeneutical (T. Serequeberhan), Existential (L. Gordon) Historicism and poeticism (P. Henry) and Postcolonial Misolocation (M. Diawara).

AFRI 1850. The Civil Rights Movement: History and Legacy.

Explores the origins, conduct and complex legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Topics include: historical roots of the movement; the campaign against legal segregation; the birth of S.N.C.C.; Black Power; the impact of the Cold War, Vietnam and the coming of African independence; and the movement's impact on other political struggles, including movements among women, Latinos, and Native Americans.

AFRI 1920. Health Inequality in Historical Perspective.

Seminar takes a historical perspective to explore causes of health inequality. Draws on studies from the 19th century-present. Examines socio–political and economic context of health/disease, focusing on how race, class, and gender shape the experience of health, disease causality, and public health responses with emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. Includes health consequences of immigration and pandemics, incarceration, race-based medicine. Enrollment restricted to 20, second and third-year students.

AFRI 1930. Race, Difference and Biomedical Research: Historical Considerations.

This advanced seminar places the current debate over race, health, and genetics in historical context. An overarching goal is to understand how the social world informs the scientific questions we ask, design of research studies, and interpretation of findings. How have the theories and practices of biomedical science and technology produced knowledge of “race” and racial difference historically? How does race relate to gender and class? What are the implications of this debate for understanding health inequality? Previous coursework in Africana Studies preferred. Enrollment limited to 20; instructor permission.

AFRI 1950. Philosophy, Literature and the Caribbean Novel.

This is a thematic course on the philosophical and literary themes which emerge from the Caribbean novel and writing in general.

AFRI 1955. History and Memory in Africana Literature.

Focuses on the close reading of nine works by writers of African descent - encompassing a variety of eras, forms and genres, stretching from the slave narrative to more contemporary settings. The thrust is to examine how each writer wrestles with issues of history and memory, with particular attention to the sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit interest in ideas and modes of expression that are rooted in African culture. Enrollment limited to 20 sophomores, juniors, and seniors; preference given to Africana Studies and English concentrators.

AFRI 1968. 1968: A Year in Review.

In 1968 students’ walked-out at Brown, leading to the 1969 creation of the Rites and Reason Theatre and later the formation of Afro-American Studies, now the Department of African Studies/Rites and Reason Theatre. 1968 was also a global year of contention, confrontation and change, with consequences that continue to resonate into the present. This class harnesses the multiple narratives and studies of our faculty across the campus and alumni who took part in the 1968 walk-out. Classes blend lecture and discussion. Speakers assign appropriate reading to coincide with their topics. Requirements include mandatory participation to planned anniversary events.

AFRI 1970. Independent Reading and Research.

Section numbers vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

AFRI 2001. Theories of Africana Thought: Intellectual History and Critical Theory.

This course will be a close reading of the various ideas, theories and practices of the thinkers, writers, artists and activitists whose work and practices have constituted an Africana intellectual tradition. In conducting this review we will examine questions around the formation and the history of thought and intellectual traditions in general. We will also think about the various fields of knowldege which have shaped Africana thought. The course therefore will spend some time working through the different meanings of intellectual work and critical thought and theory. Enrollment limited to 12 graduate students.

AFRI 2002. Theories of Africana Thought: Literary and Expressive Cultures.

A preoccupation of Africana Studies involves the central, highly contested role of the notion of what constitutes black culture in the modern world. To what degree can we claim aesthetic and other distinctions between black cultures in the Diaspora and other western cultural practices and expressive forms? What role did enslavement, forced migration and segregation play in shaping Africana culture in the modern west? These cultural debates play a central role in literary, musical, philosophical, aesthetic, historical and sociological analyses of the culture of people of African descent frame this graduate course.

AFRI 2005. Monuments, Counter-Monuments, and the Representation of the Slave Past.

This course is concerned with the memorialization and representation of the slave past through monumental form in the Atlantic world. Beginning with a range of theoretical considerations of the concepts of monument and counter-monument, we engage the writings of Ana-Lucia Araujo, Stephen M. Best, Huey Copeland, Cheryl Finlay, Saidiya Hartmann, Katherine McKittrick, Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Christina Sharpe, Marita Sturken, Lisa Woolfork, James Young, and others. Using these various approaches and theories, we examine monuments located in a range of countries including Benin, Ghana, Senegal, England, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Guadeloupe, and the United States.

AFRI 2010. Black Transnational Feminism.

This graduate seminar brings together methodological and theoretical approaches to interpreting the significance of race, gender, sexuality and nation in the rich literature on Black transnationalism. The course will explore how Black feminist thought has infomed the development of the field, placing special emphasis on foundational and emergent scholarship. The course underscores the varied ways Black feminist scholarship has been crucial for understanding the complex dynamics of Black internationalist thought and praxis. Course readings will represent a combination of primary and secondary sources that reflect the geographical breadth of the African Diaspora, including Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

AFRI 2015. Revolt and Revolution in the Black World.

From 18th Century slave revolts to the iconic Haitian Revolution, the Grenadian Revolution of 1979 and the 2019 popular uprisings in the Sudan, revolts and revolutions have undoubtedly occupied a hallowed place in the political imaginaries of the Black World. Reading narratives from a select group of instances, we will explore, against the broader theoretical work on global revolutions, the more specific meaning of revolution in Africana history and literature. The overriding question is, in the face of disappointing outcomes, tragedy and collapse, can the history of Black revolt and revolution still provide a framework for thinking about radical change in the 21st Century, or should we move beyond it?

AFRI 2020. Afro-pessimism and Its Kin.

As an intellectual project, Afro-pessimism has developed an interpretation of the unique position of black people within a world they say the transatlantic slave trade and anti-black racial solidarity has made. Through close reading, this seminar will begin by critically engaging the core texts of Afro-pessimism, move on to contextualize its central claims about black ontology, social death, civil society, and the world within its canon (e.g. Saidiya Hartman, Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers and so on) and critically engage an ever-expanding scholarship that takes up, expands, and contests the Afro-pessimist project (e.g. Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe and so on).

AFRI 2031. What Hortense Spillers Said.

This course is devoted to understanding the work of Hortense Spillers, a preeminent black feminist theorist and critical literary scholar. In addition to reading her texts, we will track how her work is taken up by contemporary scholars in black studies and explore her archive in the John Hay Library. This class is particularly interested in tracking Spiller’s unique approach to study, what thinking about the unique position of black women does to feminist theory and black study, and the host of other texts and analytic traditions she engages across her work.

AFRI 2100. Race and the Modern World.

Race and the Modern World is a team taught interdisciplinary graduate seminar that critically examines the intersections of ideas, institutions, ideologies, and practices that have defined race and processes of racialization in the modern era. The seminar will closely examine the theoretical and methodical issues in the critical study of race; the politics and political theories of race; the imbrications of discourses of race, culture, and public life; the political economy of race; and the intellectual history of the discourse of race with an emphasis on the university as a key site in the production of racial knowledge. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 2101. Methods in Africana Studies.

This graduate seminar brings together various methodological and theoretical approaches to interpreting Africana life, culture, thought, and politics. Placing special emphasis on emergent scholarship that shapes and reshapes the discipline of Africana Studies, we examine a selection of humanistic and social scientific studies of various local, national, and international contexts. Texts demonstrate the ways in which innovative interdisciplinary methods are crucial for understanding the complexity of the Africana world. We will give attention to the strategies scholars utilize to formulate their research questions, design their methodologies, and create new ideas that contribute to the advancement of Africana Studies scholarship.

AFRI 2102. Interdisciplinary Methods and Africana Studies.

This graduate seminar focuses on interdisciplinary methodology and Africana Studies. The seminar explores how students and scholars in Africana Studies use interdisciplinary methods developed in the social sciences and the humanities in novel and innovative ways. Students will critically examine key methodological issues in Africana Studies and how and in what ways these issues are similar to and differ from such disciplines as economics, history, sociology, and literature. Prerequisite: a prior undergraduate or graduate level methods in Humanities or Social Sciences. Enrollment limited to 20.

AFRI 2104. Theorizing the Black Diaspora.

This seminar will focus on the theorization of the black diaspora as a way to explore the various articulations of colonialism, gendered racism and resistance against that racism throughout African-descendant communities. Course readings will highlight the scholarship of black women who have contributed to the internationalization of radical black vis-a-vis theories of diaspora, transnationalism, transformative politics, identity formation, and community. This course is open to upper level concentrators in Africana Studies by permission of instructor. Enrollment limited to 19.

AFRI 2300. Black Critique: Black Critical Theory - History, Literature, Politics, the Human Sciences of Being.

This class is about re-figuring black radical thought as a field of interdisciplinary critical theory. Working with the corpus of writers like Sylvia Wynter, WEB Du Bois and Frantz Fanon the course will seek to grapple with the practices, questions and ideas of Black thinkers around questions of the human, the figure of the black fugitive, the significance of enslaved labor to the capitalism, Black internationalism, black feminism and the ways in which questions of history have been reconfigured in Black thought. The course is an reading intensive one and is open to all graduate students.

AFRI 2303. Black Feminism and the Politics of Care.

“caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Audre Lorde) This course focuses on Black feminist thought through the lens of care as both theory and lived experience from the late twentieth century to the present. Care in the context of the course is a radical epistemology and praxis that might be defined as, in the words of Aisha K. Finch “to be about the business of living with people, sharing in and amplifying their life force, recognizing their value and worth.” Through the critical examination of a number of texts, the course will examine the multifaceted concept and practice of care in Black people’s lives as a contest against state power and a means of survival and joy.

AFRI 2450. Exchange Scholar Program.

AFRI 2502. Race and Nation in the Spanish Caribbean.

For five centuries, the Caribbean has stood at a crucial crossroads in the unfolding history of the Americas, Europe, and the African diaspora. This seminar engages in a comparative survey of the interwoven dynamics of race and national construction in the making of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The focus of the seminar will be placed on the on-going centrality of race in these island nations. Drawing on a range of readings in history, music, poetry and anthropology, this course will explore the overlapping historical contexts of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

AFRI 2970. Preliminary Examination Preparation.

For graduate students who have met the tuition requirement and are paying the registration fee to continue active enrollment while preparing for a preliminary examination.

AFRI 2980. Graduate Level Independent Reading and Research.

A program of intensive reading and research. Section numbers may vary by instructor. Please check Banner for the correct section number and CRN to use when registering for this course.

AFRI 2990. Thesis Preparation.

For graduate students who have met the residency requirement and are continuing research on a full time basis.

AFRI XLIST. Courses of Interest to Concentrators in Africana Studies.