Africana Studies (AFRS)

Africana Studies (AFRS)

AFRS 1290  Semester Abroad  (1-20)  

Semester Abroad.

AFRS 1550  New Orleans Hip Hop I  (3)  

This course surveys major locations, musical influences, and aesthetic elements of New Orleans hip hop culture, with special emphasis on Bounce and the defining features of local spoken word. The course includes a required service learning component, which guides students through the completion of a public event designed to showcase New Orleans hip hop's educational and entertainment value.

AFRS 1890  Service Learning  (0-1)  

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 1940  Transfer Coursework  (0-20)  

Transfer coursework at the 1000 level. Departmental approval required.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 2000  Introduction to Africana Studies  (3)  

This course serves as an introduction to the study of Africa and its Diaspora and is intended to help students understand the complexities of interdisciplinary approaches to area studies. Emphasis will be placed on the complementary nature of such scholarship and a portion of the course is devoted to learning how the same issue or thematic is treated in diverse ways depending on the disciplinary perspective of the scholar.

AFRS 2390  Semester Abroad  (1-20)  

Semester Abroad.

AFRS 2810  Special Topics  (3,4)  

Course Limit: 99

AFRS 2890  Service Learning  (0-1)  

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 2940  Transfer Coursework  (0-20)  

Transfer Coursework at the 2000 level. Department approval may be required.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 3100  Issues in Afro-Atlantic Studies  (3)  

An exploration of some of the central themes of Afro-Atlantic Studies through the study of selected issues arising out of the Afro-Atlantic moral, cultural, political, and religious experience.

Course Limit: 99

AFRS 3200  Issues in African Studies  (3,4)  

An exploration of some of the central themes of African studies through the study of selected issues arising out of the African moral, cultural, political, and religious experience.

Course Limit: 99

AFRS 3300  Issues in Africana Diaspora Studies  (3,4)  

An exploration of some of the central themes of African Diaspora Studies through the study of selected issues arising out of the African Diasporic moral, cultural, political, and religious experience.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 3333  Hip Hop Culture & Theory  (3)  

This course uses a hip hop centered framework to examine issues of identity formation, economic deprivation, and policing as they impact Black people.

AFRS 3350  Black Music & Performance in New Orleans  (3)  

This course provides an historically situated introduction to African American music and performance traditions in New Orleans. The course opens with an exploration of the historical currents and racial economies that contributed to the making of New Orleans as a particularly Caribbean-esk site of early colonial North America. The course then considers the ways culture, race, and plays of social power gave rise to early “creolized” forms of cultural practice and artistic expression, foundational to the fashioning of black New Orleanian music and performance traditions. The syllabus then follows this conversation chronologically through a thematic exploration of various African American performance genres and spaces from Congo Square, to jazz, to brass bands and second-lines, to Mardi Gras Indians, through today’s hip hop and bounce musics. Additional attention will be given to the social impacts of tourism and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina on black performance traditions, questions of citizenship, and related economies of consumption.

AFRS 3400  Black Cities  (3-4)  

For centuries, cities have been the primary loci for black social mobility, political activism, and creativity. This course is designed as an interdisciplinary encounter with a specific urban space in Africa or the African Diaspora that engages a wide range of materials, including historical narratives, fiction, cinema, popular music, and visual culture. This course may be repeated two times for credit.

Course Limit: 2

AFRS 3450  Race and Performance in Brazil  (3)  

This course explores Brazilian afro diasporic performative practices (music, dance, festivals, artistic production). Students will have an opportunity to engage with Brazilian artists, musicians, and activists to learn about samba, candomblé and capoeira. Students will be asked to connect questions of culture with politics, race, nationalism, gender and class. This culturally immersive study abroad course will build understanding of how cultural performances have been at different times celebrated, marginalized or criminalized over the course of Brazil’s history. From protest movements to popular music and performance, students will explore how affective and intimate bodies are made political as repositories of national heritage or transgressive communities of dissent.

AFRS 3470  Migration, Race, and Identity in the Dominican Republic  (3)  

The history of Hispaniola, currently divided into the countries of Haiti and Dominican Republic, has remained pivotal to the development of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world. The two parts of the island evolved in unique ways, thus creating distinct but interconnected societies. In the east the plantation economy went into decline very early on, thus creating a remarkable rural society, the first in the Caribbean in which free people of African descent predominated; in the west, a brutal plantation regime ended in a spectacular slave revolt (The Haitian Revolution) that shook the foundations of the Atlantic world. Students will explore the Dominican-Haitian relationship from colonial times to present and highlight the ways that the DR and Haiti are interconnected and ways in which they have developed differently.

AFRS 3722  Blackness in Latin America  (3)  

A principal idea in anthropology regarding identities is that they are created. Individuals and groups construct identities using a variety of forms of representation made available in music, media and various forms of cultural production, and in response to sociohistorical and political happenings. Experiences, both personal and collective, are also fodder for identity construction. Given these bases for understanding identity, Blackness in Latin America will interpret the factors that have undergirded the formation of Black racial identities in different sites of the African Diaspora, and also how Black racial identities are used to redress political, social, and economic exclusion. We will focus on case studies in Latin America including Colombia, Honduras, Cuba, and Costa Rica. The course will additionally give attention to the Caribbean and its diaspora, including Trinidad, Jamaica, and also West Indians and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Students will examine the ways in which racial identities are communicated looking in part at the transnational flows of information filtered through music, media, art, and literature that provide the “raw materials” for identity construction, and political basis for their mobilization.

AFRS 3750  From Community to Stage  (3)  

This course introduces students to the story circle methodology as formulated by the Free Southern Theater and Junebug Productions. Students also learn the history of the Free Southern Theater and the Black Arts Movement in the South. Collaboration with local artists will result in the production of an original theatrical performance at the end of the semester.

AFRS 3890  Service Learning  (0-1)  

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 3940  Transfer Coursework  (0-20)  

Transfer Coursework at the 3000 level. Department approval may be required.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4180  African Cinema  (3)  

This course will provide a critical and interdisciplinary look at the development of African cinema from its inception in the 1960s to the present. In looking at this period, we will move from the sociopolitical upheavals of late colonialism to the recent phase of introspection and diversification. The relationship of cinematic practices to transformation in the social and economic sphere will be examined, as well as the creation of distinctively African film styles based on oral traditions. In pursuing these topics, we will consider the impact of technology, history and culture, ties to the cinema of other developing nations and co-productions.

AFRS 4300  Cultural Politics and Film  (3)  

This course is designed to explore developments in the cross-cultural use of media from Hollywood feature films to ethnographic documentaries, from Caribbean liberationist literature to African allegories of colonialism, and from indigenous use of film and video to Black Diasporan oppositional film practice. Issues to be addressed include Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism, racism, sexism, gender, and class bias.

AFRS 4400  Afro-Brazilians  (3)  

Once heralded internationally as a racial democracy, Brazil has been the subject of an ongoing critical re-evaluation that has revealed a vast gap between the national ideal and the social reality. The ideas of race and the various forms of institutional and quotidian racism in Brazil make for compelling contrasts and comparisons with the United States. This course will focus on a wide range of themes, issues, and problems in Afro-Brazilian Studies since the abolition of slavery in 1888. Combining cultural history, anthropology, sociology, literature, and popular music, this course will offer a multidisciplinary approach to black culture and race relations in Brazilian society.

AFRS 4450  Black Diasporic Culture  (3)  

In this seminar students will look at Black cultural forms as they are created, shared, and participated in across national borders. In this process students will interpret the connections of Black culture shared across the diaspora to belonging, power, and practices of collective, and individual social resistance. We will also investigate the relationships that Black communities have with the nations in which they reside in efforts to understand why the transnational exchange becomes socially and politically important. In consideration of the ways in which Black culture takes shape and is shared transnationally the course will ask: What does it mean to think of Black culture as being transnational or diasporic? What are the political investments in the term “Black”? What does “Black culture” hope to explain? In addressing these questions, the seminar will engage transnational theory and discussions of art, politics, gender, sexuality, performance, and belief. The seminar takes a theoretical approach to understanding diasporic Black culture and incorporates case studies to root theory in everyday practice.

AFRS 4560  Internship  (1-3)  

An experiential learning process coupled with pertinent academic course work. Open only to juniors and seniors in good standing. Notes: A maximum of six credits may be earned in one or two courses toward the African and African Diaspora Studies major. See also the college requirements for internships. Pre-requistites: Approval of instructor and director. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4570  Internship  (1-3)  

An experiential learning process coupled with pertinent academic course work. Open only to juniors and seniors in good standing. Notes: A maximum of six credits may be earned in one or two courses toward the African and African Diaspora Studies major. See also the college requirements for internships. Pre-requistites: Approval of instructor and director. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4600  African American Culture & the Arts  (3)  

This course provides an introductory historical survey of African American culture and the arts with an emphasis on questions of identity and the social politics of culture. Moving from the “birth” of African American culture on through the rise of black cultural forms, artistic movements and their key figures, attention will be paid to the ways African Americans have historically used realms of culture to negotiate historical conditions in the making of black selves, community and fields of social vision. Whether the Blues, the Harlem Renaissance, or Hip Hop, the central question to be explored is the extent to which “culture” has and continues to serve as a “political” medium in forging of black experience and agency in the U.S. and into the diaspora.

AFRS 4800  Black Women's Health  (3)  

This course examines intersectional issues of health, wellness, public policy, and identity formation for black women and girls in a variety of texts and historical contexts.

Corequisite(s): AFRS 4890.

AFRS 4810  Special Topics  (3,4)  

Special topics in African and African Diaspora studies. Notes: May be used to fulfill African and African Diaspora studies distribution requirements in consultation with the program director.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4811  Special Topics  (3,4)  


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4812  Special Topics  (3,4)  


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4821  Special Topics  (1-4)  

Special topics in African and African Diaspora studies. Notes: May be used to fulfill African and African Diaspora studies distribution requirements in consultation with the program director.

AFRS 4830  Special Topics  (3,4)  

Special topics in African and African Diaspora studies. Notes: May be used to fulfill African and African Diaspora studies distribution requirements in consultation with the program director.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4831  Special Topics  (3)  

Special topics in African and African Diaspora studies. Notes: May be used to fulfill African and African Diaspora studies distribution requirements in consultation with the program director.

AFRS 4890  Service Learning  (0-1)  

Students complete a service activity in the community in conjunction with the content of a three-credit co-requisite course. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours.

Corequisite(s): AFRS 4800.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4910  Independent Study  (1-3)  

Open to advanced student with approval of the director and subject to availability of faculty mentor.

AFRS 4920  Independent Study  (1-3)  

Open to advanced student with approval of the director and subject to availability of faculty mentor.

AFRS 4940  Transfer Coursework  (0-20)  

Transfer coursework at the 4000 level. Departmental approval required.


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 4990  Honors Thesis  (3)  

For especially qualified juniors and seniors with approval of the director and the Honors Committee. Students must have a minimum of a 3.000 overall grade-point average and a 3.500 grade-point average in the major.

AFRS 5000  Honors Thesis  (4)  

For especially qualified juniors and seniors with approval of the director and the Honors Committee. Students must have a minimum of a 3.000 overall grade-point average and a 3.500 grade-point average in the major.

AFRS 5380  Junior Year Abroad  (1-20)  

Semester Abroad.

AFRS 5390  Junior Year Abroad  (1-20)  

AFRS 6050  Black Feminism and Social Movement in the United States  (3)  

This course surveys major thought and development in black feminism to understand its application to political, social, and economic issues relevant to black women's lives.

AFRS 6090  Criminal Justice and African and African Diaspora Studies  (3)  

This course broadens ADST course offerings at advanced levels; in addition, it enhances the disciplinary range of ADST courses.

AFRS 6875  Special Topics  (3,4)  


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 7450  Black Diasporic Culture  (3)  

In this seminar students will look at Black cultural forms as they are created, shared, and participated in across national borders. In this process students will interpret the connections of Black culture shared across the diaspora to belonging, power, and practices of collective, and individual social resistance. We will also investigate the relationships that Black communities have with the nations in which they reside in efforts to understand why the transnational exchange becomes socially and politically important. In consideration of the ways in which Black culture takes shape and is shared transnationally the course will ask: What does it mean to think of Black culture as being transnational or diasporic? What are the political investments in the term “Black”? What does “Black culture” hope to explain? In addressing these questions, the seminar will engage transnational theory and discussions of art, politics, gender, sexuality, performance, and belief. The seminar takes a theoretical approach to understanding diasporic Black culture and incorporates case studies to root theory in everyday practice.

AFRS 7810  Special Topics  (3)  


Maximum Hours: 99

AFRS 7922  Blackness in Latin America  (3)  

A principal idea in anthropology regarding identities is that they are created. Individuals and groups construct identities using a variety of forms of representation made available in music, media and various forms of cultural production, and in response to sociohistorical and political happenings. Experiences, both personal and collective, are also fodder for identity construction. Given these bases for understanding identity, Blackness in Latin America will interpret the factors that have undergirded the formation of Black racial identities in different sites of the African Diaspora, and also how Black racial identities are used to redress political, social, and economic exclusion. We will focus on case studies in Latin America including Colombia, Honduras, Cuba, and Costa Rica. The course will additionally give attention to the Caribbean and its diaspora, including Trinidad, Jamaica, and also West Indians and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Students will examine the ways in which racial identities are communicated looking in part at the transnational flows of information filtered through music, media, art, and literature that provide the “raw materials” for identity construction, and political basis for their mobilization.

AFRS 7990  Independent Study  (1-4)