Department website: http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana/
The Center for Africana Studies (CAS) offers a rigorous focus on African-descended peoples and their cultures across the globe. Over the past millennium, the contribution, traditions, and values of African, African-American, and African Diaspora cultures helped create the modern and pre-modern world. Africana Studies, as a field of study, grew from the activist and scholarly traditions of Black Studies and the blending of peoples and ideas between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It therefore offers a broad, multidisciplinary approach to history and culture centered on the interests, conditions, philosophies, conceptual schemes, and value systems of African-descended people everywhere. Our courses focus on the human experience in the context of social, political, demographic, cultural, religious, and economic systems. They also offer a unique perspective on racism, colonialism, capitalism, and geography that properly situates the importance of people of color to the making of the modern world.
Africana Studies offers a multidisciplinary curriculum that expands the scope and range of traditional academic disciplines to the presence, roles, cultural contributions, experiences, and particular interests of African peoples and their descendants.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
- Cross Listed Courses
- Anthropology
- Economics
- English
- Film and Media Studies
- First Year Seminars
- History
- History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
- Islamic Studies
- Modern Languages and Literatures
- Near Eastern Studies
- Philosophy
- Political Science
- Program in Museums and Society
- Public Health Studies
- Sociology
- Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
- Theatre Arts & Studies
- Writing Seminars
What is Anti-Racism? How do we identify racism’s presence and effects, and how do we direct social and civic resources to end it? In this Freshman Seminar, students will learn from a series of faculty experts and invited guests about the history, workings, and legacies of racism. They’ll also study present-day and past approaches – attempted and theorized – to abolish racism in the modern world.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will offer students an introduction to the central novels, plays, short stories, essays and poetry that have constituted African American Literature from 1930-1980. By focusing on representative works that span each of the major periods from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, we will continue to consider the question of race and representation. How does one represent the race? And, for whom should black authors write – a white audience in order to change their minds about black people, or to black people for their pleasure and edification? Over the course of the semester, we will trace the various ways early- to late- 20th century black writers sometimes borrowed from earlier literary traditions and, at other times, developed new ones. In addition, we will hone in on the major debates and central texts that have come to define African American Literature and explore how it has long served as a creative, political, and intellectual enterprise.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This introductory course will examine policing and prisons in the United States and beyond, with a focus on racial inequality. It will consist of three parts. First, we will define key concepts in police and prison studies. Then, we will explore the contemporary state of prisons and policing in the United States and look at debates around the rise of “mass incarceration” and aggressive forms of policing in the final third of the 20th century. Third, we will explore policing and prison in other parts of the globe in the contemporary moment, highlighting similarities and differences from the U.S. case. What can studying the instruments of social control in other societies reveal about our own? Students will develop an understanding of major trends, keywords, and debates in the literature on policing and prisons, with particular reference to race and racism.
Area: Humanities
This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of community-engaged documentary filmmaking with a focus on both theory and practice. It will examine documentary filmmaking as an educational tool for raising social- and racial- justice issues from an African diasporic and global perspective. The course is taught by award-winning professional documentary filmmakers. Students will produce their own 3-5 minute film or audio podcast. Students will select their documentary film topic, conduct their own research, and move from pre-production into production. No prior experience in filmmaking is required for this course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores “critical university studies” through the lens of abolitionist thought, from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It historicizes universities’ growth within U.S. cities during the twentieth century.
Writing Intensive
This course will survey African American Literature from the 19th century to the late 20th century. We will turn to prose, poetry, and drama to explore the various ways black writes have engaged U.S. culture, history, and politics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What about performance offers a unique opportunity to learn from and with communities? How might dramatic performance be used to share information while learning from an audience? This course examines the work and research of young artists from Liberia, West Africa who used street theatre to teach best practices for prevention during the Ebola crisis and considers how their use of dialogical performance contributed to critical knowledge which iteratively informed interventions throughout their awareness campaign. This community engaged course connects public health education efforts in Africa to community health education in Baltimore through the Blackstorytelling tradition with local expert Janice the Griot. Course co-educator and artist Janice the Griot Green will share her firsthand experiences and guide the class through the principles of Blackstorytelling for community change. Students will design public performance projects around local-global community-basedconcerns using the tools they have learned. In partnership with the Great National Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, students will develop performance-based public health messaging drawing on their collection to support community outreach curricular materials development. This performance work will be created collaboratively in workshops during class and in team meetings. Public health researchers who are looking for innovative ways to share their data will gain insights into this experimental ethnographic method and practitioners who want to offer their communities ways to connect best practices to lived experience will develop new pedagogical tools. This is a Community Engagement course in partnership with the Center for Social Concern.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.
This course will examine film and literary narratives of “passing” in 20th century America. We will study texts that feature people who cross social boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and gender, and consider what “passing” reveals about American social mobility.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture, students will learn about key historical, intellectual, and political aspects of white supremacy as a system or racial domination, and anti-black racism as a central feature of that global system. This class will explore the historical forms that white supremacy has taken—from colonialism and plantation slavery to Jim Crow, gentrification, and mass incarceration—racial ideologies, and how modern political systems have hinged on racial oppression. Most important, we will explore how black people have responded to the structures and ideologies of white supremacy, their thinking about freedom, being, and rights, and their efforts to fit into the worlds in which they found themselves, to improve those societies, and those projects that sought radical alternatives to the an anti-black world.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This summer institute is a week long opportunity that takes place abroad with a theme focused on the healing arts. Grounding this theme is the pursuit of reparatory justice in the Rastafari faith. The summer school will integrate learning activities with existing community projects, for instance, the School of Vision and Rastafari Indigenous Village. Students will study Rastafari as an African-centered ethos, inclusive of culture and economic sustainability.
Area: Humanities
Rather than being a niched form of popular culture, black music, films, and art has in some ways become synonymous with American culture. These productions and the workers associated with them have been used to sell everything from life insurance to computer chips. But accompanying these cultural productions are a whole host of questions regarding racial authenticity, the reproduction of urban space, and various gender/class dynamics, that have gone relatively understudied. In this class we will seek to trace the politics of the production, circulation, and consumption of black cultural production.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Hip hop has become one of the most influential youth cultural movements of the past 40 years. It has moved from being a geographically-isolated African American and Puerto Rican musical scene to influencing every aspect of American and international youth culture, including music, visual culture, language, and politics. How did hip hop develop? Where did it come from, who made it, and why? What do the images and messages of hip hop culture mean, how has it changed our world, and who cares? We will approach these questions by delving into the historical, aesthetic, socioeconomic, and political dimensions of hip hop culture. Classes will historically explore specific themes, either examining issues that hip hop has dealt with (e.g., police brutality) or employing theoretical frameworks that we can use to help us think more critically about hip hop (e.g., subcultural theory).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar will explore some of the pivotal historical and contemporary connections between the US and Liberia since the first Black American settlers arrived in West Africa with the American Colonization Society in 1822. This course asks: What are implications of these stories of migration and reception for how we make sense of global anti-Blackness in the contemporary moment? How does performance provoke new questions about shared histories of those impacted by colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade? Why is a more in-depth understanding of 19th century Black political thought and the precolonial West African indigenous category necessary for developing theory on the political economy of race today? Through the lens of performance studies, students will analyze the documents in the American Colonization Society archive, to reimagine these early encounters as informed by historical documentation including folklore and pan-Africanist theory. Through exploring a range of historical and contemporary materials that center the problematic “indigenous/settler” binary, students will engage in a dramaturgical process which presents powerful possibilities for unlearning historical misrepresentations. In particular, students will develop theater-based projects that interrogate the spatio-temporal connections between the stories of both, free Blacks and those who were enslaved in Maryland and manumitted to go to Liberia, and the contemporary politics of Liberia-US migration.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine the confrontation of Black social movements with imperialism in the twentieth century. How, we will ask, have key Black internationalist thinkers conceptualized and defined diaspora, capitalism, imperialism, war, and the global? What have been the effects of war and repression, as well as economic growth and globalization, on Black internationalism? Readings may include texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Ashley Farmer, Claudia Jones, Robin D.G. Kelley, Claude McKay, Huey P. Newton, Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, etc. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to Black internationalism in the twentieth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the historical, theoretical, and political question of liberation in the African diaspora from the period of enslavement up to the current era. We will consider three major themes: enslavement, marronage, and freedom; Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism; Black Power and national liberation. We will examine how African peoples conceptualized freedom and liberation in each period, the major organizations and intellectuals who framed them, and how popular activity developed and informed all three (ideas, organizations, and intellectuals). Some of the questions taken up include: How did enslaved Africans conceptualize freedom? Did their ideas and activities merely extend western notions of liberty and freedom, or did they develop distinct conceptions of freedom, rights, and humanity? Why, in the early Twentieth Century, did African peoples around the world pursue pan-Africanism as a political philosophy? How do class, nationality, gender, and sexuality inform such movements? Did national liberation struggles from the 1950s through the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean bring about fundamental changes to those societies or merely replicate colonial regimes? What connections existed between national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States and England?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What can we learn about mass incarceration, and social life in the USA more broadly, when we listen to incarcerated people themselves? This course centers the voices, experiences, and expertise of the incarcerated and will combine scholarly readings on life inside prisons with a range of writings by incarcerated people. Topics of discussion may include censorship, rehabilitation, Covid-19, solitary confinement, sexuality, racism, etc. Students will learn to probe primary-source collections to amplify silenced and overlooked voices, while completing a multi-stage research project. Prior course experience on mass incarceration preferred.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.
Area: Humanities
This course is available to students who wish to pursue selected, special work that may not be included in the Center's other courses.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The first semester of Senior Honors in Africana Studies, conducted as an Independent Study. Interested students should submit an application to the CAS Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
The second semester of Senior Honors in Africana Studies, conducted as an Independent Study. Only students who have successfully completed AS.362.510 Senior Honors In Africana Studies I will be allowed to register.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
Over the past two decades, African cities have absorbed rapid population increase without accompanying economic growth. Students will review the major challenges of this mode of urbanization and explore the vibrant ways residents have sought to meet them. Following anthropology’s commitment to lived experience, we will track these issues through the twists and turns of everyday life, and consider what they may say about urbanity more broadly in the 21st century. Topics include livelihood, the built environment, conflict and membership, and popular culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the role of science and technology in the making of African histories and politics. We will examine precolonial iron-working, healing, and weaving; the ways guns and railroads functioned as tools of empire; the role of hydroelectric dams in postcolonial nation building; and the rise of digital communication and payment systems in the present. Throughout, we will challenge commonsense distinctions between the material and the spiritual, designers and users, wealth and people.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Economics
This course examines labor market discrimination by gender, race and ethnicity in the United States. What does the empirical evidence show, and how can we explain it? How much of the difference in observed outcomes is driven by differences in productivity characteristics and how much is due to discrimination? How have economists theorized about discrimination and what methodologies can be employed to test those theories? What has been the impact of public policy in this area; how do large corporations and educational institutions respond; and what can we learn from landmark lawsuits? The course will reinforce skills relevant to all fields of applied economics, including critical evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature, the reasoned application of statistical techniques, and analysis of current policy issues.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality. It covers the measurement of poverty and inequality, facts and trends over time, the causes of poverty and inequality with a focus on those related to earnings and the labor market, and public policy toward poverty and inequality, covering both taxation and government expenditure and programs. By the nature of the material, the course is fairly statistical and quantitative. Students should have an intermediate understanding of microeconomic concepts. Basic knowledge of regression analysis is also helpful.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
English
Drawing from the body of work engaging and recording the Hollywood gunfighter and outlaw folk-hero Clint Eastwood, the course will investigate American cinematic representations of slavery and its absence, the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. A focus on the cultural icon Clint Eastwood enables a close examination of American cinematic fantasies of the frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, particularly the creation of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolitan and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion.
Area: Humanities
A survey of the major and minor texts written by African Americans during the twentieth century, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and concluding with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Area: Humanities
Using their recorded speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Using their speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will focus on the history of black resistance to oppression and injustice from the early republic to the present through different forms of radical speech acts. The main question(s) that we will explore are as follows: how do radical speech acts shape and inform our understanding of social and political issues, including our very conception of the United States as a nation (and ourselves as a people)? In this course, we will investigate such questions through reading radical speeches and essays from a range of black activists and examining the principles of persuasion that help shape the relationship between polemical language and activism. This course will engage with writers and speakers such as Lemuel Haynes, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Alicia Garza.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course examines fiction writing, memoir, and film that engages the creation and meaning of jazz music. Beginning with writers who explore the late 19th experience of urban black musical cultures roughly designated “ragtime,” the course will offer a deep engagement with the representations of the “blues” and “swing” music of the long New Negro Movement between 1915 and 1940. The final section of the course considers the post-war novelists and memoirists who charted the emergence of the “Be bop” jazz musician as tragic hero, countermanding New Negro representations of entertainer par excellence. Each text will be paired with musical selections from a prominent artist. Questions of the political significance of music, black urban habitus, and musical codings of gender, race and sexuality as an oppositional or counter-hegemonic formation will be important to the course. The seminar will also have sessions to investigate key archival repositories in Baltimore, like the Eubie Blake Center and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Texts and artists considered include: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Scot Joplin, Eubie Blake, Stomping the Blues, Bessie Smith, Satchmo, Louis Armstrong Hot Fives, Jazz, Duke Ellington, The Blacker the Berry, Fletcher Henderson, Home to Harlem, Ella Fitzgerald, Good Morning Blues, Count Basie, A Drop of Patience, Thelonius Monk, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday, Chico and Rita, Dizzy Gilespie&Chano Pozo, Night Song, Charlie Parker.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Film and Media Studies
The bad guy as hero from Little Caesar to Goodfellas. Film screenings Th 7:30-10:00 PM, Sun 7:00-9:30 PM. Lab fee: $40.
Area: Humanities
First Year Seminars
This First-Year Seminar carefully considers the lives and works of two globally famous Black Baltimoreans: the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and the premier jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915-1959). While we will explore key writings and performances of their work, the course also wants to use their historical lives in Baltimore to enrich our knowledge of the city and archival resources that reveal its past. During the semester we will consult a variety of primary resources like newspapers, novels, photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and recorded sound to investigate the complex and intraracial world of Baltimore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the questions we will be considering: How did the city’s black abolitionist and religious networks contribute to Frederick Douglass’s evolution as a journalist and politician? What was the role of Chesapeake Bay black musical culture—ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, and riverboat music—in the creation of Billie Holiday’s unique stylistic expression and singing? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? Students are required to visit three archival repositories during scheduled in-class trips, including a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The final project is an archive-laden digital story map.
Area: Humanities
Over the past decade, cities have become more important than ever before. Protests against policing, against increasing inequality, as well as attempts to rollback societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over the relationship between labor and capital, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this First-Year Seminar will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city by using Baltimore as a case study. This class will be taught alongside similar courses at other universities, offering students a deep dive into Baltimore.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History
An introduction to modern African history, with emphasis on colonialism and decolonization.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to the defining social, political, and cultural moments that reflect the experience of African Americans in the United States, 1896 – present. Topics include the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Struggle, African American politics, urban rebellion, mass incarceration, Hip Hop culture, the current movement for Black Lives, and more.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We will discuss Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, the scholarship supporting each of the essays, and the public debates that ensued. Students will learn how authors build historical arguments and develop critical reading and fact-checking skills. The class will balance a deep investigation of the Project’s essays with an analysis of how those essays have influenced political discourse. This is a reading-intensive, discussion-based class. There will be two small writing assignments, including a final project which can take the form of a podcast, blog post, video, or other multi-media format beyond a traditional essay. The goal is for students to be able to communicate their expertise to people outside the classroom.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class explores the construction and articulation of Black womanhood between the anglophone and francophone worlds in the 19th and 20th century. Through a study of secondary and primary sources, we will follow African American women across the Atlantic and analyze their experiences with France and the French language.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Worlds of Hip-Hop explores hip-hop as an arts movement whose forms, conventions, and standards responded to the specific political and social conditions to address questions of freedom and community.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the rich history of West Africa and its place in the broader world. Topics include the environmental history of the Sahara desert, West African empires, and the rise of Nollywood and contemporary culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores how historical events and processes, such as colonialism and globalization, have shaped ideas of health, healing, medicine, and power in specific African societies since the 19th century. 100-level course in African History recommended.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A research-intensive seminar, this course uses the rich history of Maryland to approach broader themes in early modern American and global history including colonialism, slavery, revolution, race, gender, and sex.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Place of contrasts, Brazil has a multi-ethnic cultural heritage challenged by social and racial inequalities. Its political life remains chaotic. We will examine these problems through Brazilian history and culture (literature, cinema).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Through archival, literary, and other cultural texts, this course considers the history of “diversity” as both a practice and concept, beginning with the arrival of “colorblindness” in the 1890s and moving through recent approaches to institutionalized multiculturalism.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A history of forced and voluntary migration and displacement in Africa, its causes and consequences, with a focus on refugees and labor migrants since 1960.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores canonical and cutting-edge research and scholarship in the broad fields of African American Studies and History, 1865 – present. Students will move beyond a basic knowledge of the modern African American experience, while enhancing their critical research and analytical skills. Broad themes covered include questions of freedom, citizenship, agency, identity, and empowerment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
How can we think about the interconnections between racism, theories of race and the practice of medicine? Living at a moment when racial disparities in health outcomes in the United States are still very stark, this course will provide a historically grounded approach to thinking about the roles that race and racism have played in healthcare, the production of health disparities as well as the role of medicine in the development of racist thought. While much of this course will focus geographically within the United States, this class will also explore global histories of medicine, encountering questions of race and medicine in Africa, the South Pacific and Asia. In addition to the analysis of primary source documents and historical texts, students will also be introduced to theoretical approaches to the study of race and racism from W.E.B. Dubois, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon and others.
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
This course explores how American Muslims navigate and contest complex notions of belonging in the context of national conversations on race, gender, citizenship, and national security. With a focus on specific case studies that range from Black Muslim movements of the early twentieth century to the ongoing War on Terror, the course adds complexity to the public conversation on what it means to be Muslim - and what it means to be American. We will draw on history, ethnography, first-person narratives, films, blogs, documentaries and fiction. As a Community Engaged course, the class will include site visits and learning with and from Muslim communities in Baltimore.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its inception. A key thread in that fabric has been the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, some of whom were Muslims, and who not only added to the dynamism of the American environment, but eventually helped shape American culture, religion, and politics. The history of Islam in America is intertwined with the creation and evolution of African American identity. Contemporary Islam in America cannot be understood without this framing. This course will provide a historical lens for understanding Islam, not as an external faith to the country, but as an internal development of American religion. This course will explicate the history of early Islamic movements in the United States and the subsequent experiences of African-Americans who converted to Islam during the first half of the twentieth century. We will cover the spiritual growth of African American Muslims, their institutional presence, and their enduring impact on American culture writ large and African-American religion and culture more specifically.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modern Languages and Literatures
No previous knowledge of Portuguese is required. This course is an accelerated Portuguese introductory course for non-romance language speakers. The course is designed to foster rapid acquisition by intensive exposure to the language through immersion activities, videos and culture. The course covers all content for Portuguese Elementary and gives you a sound knowledge of the basics of Portuguese grammar. Students are encouraged to use the language through communicative activities, reading, listening, and writing activities. Upon the successful completion of this course with a grade C or higher, students may enroll in 210.277 Portuguese Intermediate. May not be taken on a Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory basis. No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Area: Humanities
Designed to sharpen students’ abilities in contemporary spoken and written Portuguese. This third-year course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will briefly review previous grammar structures and concentrate on new complex grammar concepts. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills. Successful completion of Advanced Portuguese I will prepare students for the next level, Advanced Portuguese II, AS.210.392. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: AS.210.278 or placement test. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Prerequisite(s): AS.210.278 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English, but ONE extra credit will be given to students who wish to do the course work in Portuguese. Those wishing to do the course work in English for 3 credits should register for section 01. Those wishing to earn 4 credits by doing the course work in Portuguese should register for section 02. The sections will be taught simultaneously. Section 01: 3 credits Section 02: 4 credits (instructor’s permission required). No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Over the last three decades Italy, historically a country of emigrants—many of whom suffered from discrimination in the societies they joined—became a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from various countries, and particularly from Africa. Significant numbers of these immigrants came to Italy as a result of the country’s limited, though violent colonial history; others arrive because Italy is the closest entry-point to Europe. How have these migratory flows challenged Italian society’s sense of itself? How have they transformed the notion of Italian national identity? In recent years, growing numbers of Afro- and Afro-descendant writers, filmmakers, artists and Black activists are responding through their work to pervasive xenophobia and racism while challenging Italy’s self-representation as a ‘White’ country. How are they forcing it to broaden the idea of ‘Italianess’? How do their counternarratives compel Italy to confront its ignored colonial past? And, in what way have Black youth in Italy embraced the #Blacklivesmatter movement? This multimedia course examines representation of blackness and racialized otherness, whiteness, and national identity through literary, film, and visual archival material in an intersectional framework. Examining Italy’s internal, ‘Southern question,’ retracing Italy’s colonial history, and recognizing the experiences of Italians of immigrant origins and those of immigrants themselves, we’ll explore compelling works by writers and filmmakers such as Igiaba Scego, Gagriella Ghermandi, Maza Megniste, Dagmawi Yimer, and others.
Area: Humanities
Across the 20th century, mainstream and avant-garde French culture was deeply impacted by the presence of African American musicians and performing artists hailing from the jazz tradition. From the Josephine Baker craze of the 1920s to the second post-war which welcomed the innovations of bebop and sixties-era free improvisation, metropolitan France proved a space where expatriate and exiled Black Americans could both perpetuate the tradition and innovate by turns. At the same time, French tastemakers, critics, and musicians eager to adopt new forms and styles debated the extent to which American jazz music in its various strains could be “made French.” This course in transcultural French studies will feature readings in music criticism, history, and literature, as well as frequent close listening. It will culminate in a local concert reflecting France’s continued connection to and support of jazz and related improvised musics. Though some background in French language and in musical notation is desirable (students are encouraged to engage in original-source research), all core course readings will be provided in English. Discussion in English.
Area: Humanities
We will study literary claims of epic colonial possession and aesthetic dispossession through close readings of five works in reverse chronological order: V.S. Naipaul’s late historical novel, A Way in the World (1994); Derek Walcott’s transoceanic poem, Omeros (1990); Alejo Carpentier’s short anti-Enlightenment moral tale, El reino de este mundo (1949) and his short tale in celebration of Afro Cuban wizardry, Viaje a la semilla (1944); Aimé Césaire’s prose poetry, mixed chronicle, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939-1947). We will address questions of temporality and historicity (Heidegger) and a base-materialist political blocking of wild dreams as attainable through translation (Bataille). Such formal and epistemic problems will draw us into issues of race across the colonial spectrum of Caribbean histories.
Area: Humanities
Near Eastern Studies
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Area: Humanities
This course examines Africa’s ancient past from the emergence of biologically modern humans, ancient hunter-gatherers, the earliest animal herding and farming populations, to cities and civilizations. While Egypt plays an undeniably central role in world history, this course concentrates in particular on ancient geographies other than Egypt.
Area: Humanities
Introduction to the grammar and writing system of the classical language of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055-1650 B.C.). In the second semester, literary texts and royal inscriptions will be read. Course meets with AS.133.600.
Area: Humanities
This course examines Africa’s ancient past from the emergence of biologically modern humans, ancient hunter-gatherers, the earliest animal herding and farming populations, to cities and civilizations. While Egypt plays an undeniably central role in world history, this course concentrates in particular on ancient geographies other than Egypt.
Area: Humanities
Philosophy
The Idea of Power surveys seminal texts in the history of political thought on the nature, promise, and dangers of political and social power; it also critically engages contemporary texts on race and gender power relations
Area: Humanities
Political Science
This course introduces students to the foundational importance of race and racism to the construction of our contemporary global order. Topics include the Crusades, European imperialism, eugenics, Apartheid, freedom struggles, decolonization, and global development.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore theories and practices of race and immigration in order to illuminate the proliferation of populations regarded as disposable in contemporary politics. We will pay special attention to the contestable criteria used to determine eligibility for membership in the human race. We shall also examine how political power influences the relays between citizenship status and those whose lives are worthy of protection, and those who should be allowed to die.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is a survey of the bases and substance of politics among black Americans and the relation of black politics to the American political system up to the end of Jim Crow. The intention is both to provide a general sense of pertinent issues and relations over this period as a way of helping to make sense of the present and to develop criteria for evaluating political scientists' and others' claims regarding the status and characteristics of black American political activity.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.340.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the colonial logics that underpin key categories and concepts in Political Science. Working through four sub-fields – political theory, political behavior, comparative politics and international relations, the course also introduces students to alternative knowledge traditions, emanating from minority communities and colonized peoples, which seek to explain the stuff of Political Science via anti-colonial logics.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course analyzes the distinctive US welfare state in historical and comparative perspective. We begin with a survey of the policy context, an historical overview from the poorhouses through the Great Society, and a tour of welfare states across the rich democracies. We then survey developments – and explain the actual workings of policy – across jobs, education, welfare, pensions, and health care. We explore the institutional and political factors behind their divergent trajectories through conservative revival and the age of Trump. Students will write a seminar paper exploring policy development over time in a program or area of their choosing. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students may take AS.190.380 or AS.360.380, but not both.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that explores how racial stigma functions as a marker of being always already in debt. In view of the legacies of settler-colonialism, imperialism and chattel slavery, how is it that those from whom so much has been taken are nevertheless regarded as perpetually in debt? We shall examine the moral, economic and racialized logics of power through which a range of political subjects come to be regarded as ungrateful “takers” as opposed to “makers,” and owing a debt to society. In so doing, we will investigate how temporality functions as a tool of power by considering how the indebted are made vulnerable to precarity, discipline, and disposability—in effect, forced to live life on borrowed time.
Writing Intensive
This course uses a community based learning approach to inquire into the presence of the Rastafari community in the Baltimore area. Most people will have heard of Rastafari through the music of Bob Marley. People might not know, however, that Rastafari emerges out of and has been part of a global history of liberation struggles. This course is co-taught with a local Rastafari organization. You will be intellectually and practically equipped to take part in a project of original research on the Rastafari presence in the Baltimore region, starting with the demonization of the movement in the 1980s “war on drugs” and including the movement’s response.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Afropessimism represents a critical body of thought that takes as its fundamental premises two ideas, the Black is the Slave, and in order to end that ontological condition the world must end. In this course, we will interrogate the key readings associated with this body of thought as well as responses.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course, students will gain a foundational understanding of critical race theory, including its genesis in legal theory. The course will examine its relationship and importance to social movements, including through key concepts like intersectionality. The course will also use critical race theory to grapple with law, racial segregation, and the criminal justice system in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
How are museums responding to the pressures to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible towards public audiences and their staff? Students go behind the scenes of the Smithsonian, Baltimore Museum of Industry and Baltimore Museum of Art to meet with working groups and staff charged with transforming their institutions. Includes site visits, hands-on experiences and research on best practices.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This community-engaged course will address the historic role of the African American cemetery and its present dilemmas. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, in tandem with classes at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, our collective aim is to further the interests of these local sites by researching and telling stories with community and biographical relevance.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Public Health Studies
An introduction to Urban Health with Baltimore as a case study: wellbeing, nutrition, education, violence and city-wide geographic variation. Lectures by JH Faculty, local government/service providers and advocates.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sociology
This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who are currently registered for or have completed any of the following courses may not register for AS.230.205: EN.553.111 OR EN.553.211 OR EN.553.230 OR EN.553.310 OR EN.553.311 OR EN.553.413 OR EN.553.420 OR EN.553.430 OR EN.560.435 OR EN.560.348 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.230.394.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines the new wave of social protest and popular uprisings in contemporary Africa through the interconnected themes of land, labor, and environmental movements.Attention will be placed on the early 21st century.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Race and ethnicity have played a prominent role in American society and continue to do so, as demonstrated by interracial and interethnic gaps in economic and educational achievement, residence, political power, family structure, crime, and health. Using a sociological framework, we will explore the historical significance of race and its development as a social construction, assess the causes and consequences of intergroup inequalities and explore potential solutions.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce students to a range of software programs that are critical for conducting social scientific research in the 21st century. Students will develop competency in the use of computer programs for statistical analysis, database management, the creation of maps and timelines, and the presentation of research reports. The course uses examples from ongoing social science faculty research projects at Johns Hopkins on global inequality and international development. Required for GSCD track students.Course previously titled "Research Tools and Technologies for the Social Sciences"
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, Sadiya Hartman, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recent national conversations about racial segregation, inequality and the affordable housing crisis raise many important questions—this course focuses on several of these questions, through the lens of urban sociology and housing policy. There are three main areas we will focus on in the course: 1) Understanding the role of racial segregation, neighborhood and housing effects on children and family life; 2) Research methods for studying urban poverty and neighborhoods; and 3) Programs, policies and initiatives designed to house the poor, alleviate concentrated spatial poverty, and increase residential choice. We will primarily focus on issues related to urban poverty in large cities, comparing the patterns of residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics for white and Black Americans. We will utilize archival data, qualitative interviews, census data, and quasi/experimental data to gather evidence about neighborhoods, housing, and policies, as well as their impacts. We will also explore interactive online applications that facilitate the study of neighborhoods (e.g. American Community Survey, GIS with Social Explorer). A statistics/public policy background is helpful, but not required.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the function and purpose of schooling in modern society? Is education the "great equalizer" in America, or does family background mostly predict where people end up in life? What can we do to improve educational attainment? This course is designed to tackle such questions and develop the ability of students to think critically, theoretically, historically and empirically about debates in the sociology of education. The course will also cover additional topics, including: racial and economic differences in educational attainment; school segregation; the rise of for-profit education; how college matters. In addition to reading empirical studies and theoretical work, the relevance of education research for policy-making will be emphasized throughout the course.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course provides "hands on" research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Qualitative observational and/or interviewing methods will be emphasized. Students will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. This course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for the Sociology major.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course uses the city of Baltimore as a lens through which to explore issues of urban inequality. We will focus on Baltimore's history of racial segregation and concentrated poverty, and its effect on the social and economic well-being of the city and its residents, with attention to education, employment, health and crime. Students will learn how to employ Census data, GIS approaches, and sociological research to inform questions about population change, inequality and the distribution of resources across the city and metropolitan region. Students will also work on one or more policy relevant studies based in Baltimore, including: a project on abandoned and vacant housing, a desegregation intervention, and a longitudinal study of inner city youth. Finally, students will become familiar with Baltimore City's programs and policy approaches to addressing the city's most pressing problems, and will design innovative and effective and innovative solutions as part of their course assignments. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students that took AS.360.357 may not take AS.230.357
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In the United States, we spend more than $100 billion annually on illegal drugs—and the government spends more than $50 billion a year to combat their sale and use. These statistics raise important and complicated social questions. This course will examine the production, sale, use, and control of illegal drugs from a historical and sociological perspective. We will have three objectives: to understand the social construction of drug use and illegality in the United States and other rich countries; to uncover the political and economic consequences of drug trafficking in those countries that produce drugs, particularly in Latin America; and to examine the political economy of drug control through the so-called War on Drugs, both domestically and internationally.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Policing has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities, and has been a site of resistance and freedom struggles since the first Reconstruction. In this undergraduate seminar, we will survey key debates around policing and social movements, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which policing “makes race” and how debates about crime, surveillance, and safety were often debates about black inclusion and equality. We will explore changes in the racial logics of policing over time, debates over how policing helped construct the racial order, and the consequences of several shifts in policing for communities. From broken windows policing in New York to the emergence of the new vagrancy-style banishment laws in urban Seattle to the men who live under constant surveillance in Philadelphia and to the large share of blacks in Ferguson with outstanding warrants for ‘failure to appear”, these policies and policing regimes have helped remake the government in the eyes of the urban poor. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, racial lifeworlds, and community social capital? The course will include a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative).
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will get to know intersectional feminist philosophy through the lens of a Black feminist epistemology. What does this mean? That means that we will focus on how the contributions of Black feminist authors can bring out the specific political and philosophical nature of an intersectional theoretical framework.
Area: Humanities
Introducing feminist approaches to ecology and nonhumans, this course considers the interconnections between heteropatriarchal domination and the domination of nonhuman animals and ecologies. What different sensibilities and ways of seeing sex and gender open up when attention shifts to nonhumans? What tensions within and between feminism, animal liberation, and ecological concern come to the fore when each approach is alongside the others? How does the study of nonhumans extend the promise of feminism, and vice versa? In responding to these questions, we will see the real breadth of issues that the theory and practice of feminism can address.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Theatre Arts & Studies
A survey of the history of the Black Performer and Performance. In exploring the art of storytelling from ancient African civilizations, students will critically engage and discuss the origins, aesthetics, characteristics, and practices of Black performers, and their often-unacknowledged contributions and influence upon mainstream performance throughout the history of the world.
Area: Humanities
Writing Seminars
This course will explore the context and craft of racial passing texts in the U.S, asking students to think critically about literal passing narratives and their persistence over time, and more broadly about how we write about cultural passing, codeswitching, and identity as conscious performance. We’ll start with texts that ground us in the genre—Chopin, Larsen, Fauset, Ellison, and Morrison—and read our way into contemporary texts, potentially including work by Danzy Senna, Mat Johnson, Brit Bennett, Min Jin Lee, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Students will write a critical paper, a craft paper, and a short story or novella.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive