Semester Abroad.

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.

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.

Transfer coursework at the 1000 level. Departmental approval required.

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.

Semester Abroad.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

New Orleans and Senegal are closely linked by culture and history dating from the 18th century Atlantic World to the present. Students in this course will engage in a cultural immersion program that explores the connected and comparative histories and cultural traditions of New Orleans and Senegal. The Republic of Senegal, which achieved independence in 1960 after more than a century of French colonial rule, is arguably one of the most democratic countries in West Africa. Senegal has a population of nearly13.5 million, with 2.5 million living in Dakar, the political and economic capital, and one of West Africa’s most vibrant cities. St Louis, a major port and administrative center during French colonization, and New Orleans have often been described as sister cities, and in many ways that's accurate. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the vitality, resilience, and global breadth of contemporary African and African diaspora communities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Special topics course as designed by visiting or permanent Africana Studies program faculty. For description, consult with the instructor or program director. Course may be repeated up to unlimited credit hours under separate title.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Transfer coursework at the 4000 level. Departmental approval required.

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.

For especially qualified seniors with approval of the faculty director and the Office of Academic Enrichment. Students must have a minimum of a 3.400 overall grade-point average and a 3.500 grade-point average in the major.

Semester Abroad.

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.

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

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.

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.