Requirements

The Tracks and Course Requirements

The track is one of the three areas of research training in the Department of African American Studies: 1. Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies; 2. Histories; 3. Politics, Society, and Culture.

Our intention is to offer a graduate curriculum that provides a range of graduate students with a firm grounding in a variety of essential texts, materials, methodologies, and traditions. At the same time, we have built in a degree of flexibility that would enable our own students to achieve a higher degree of proficiency within a specific sub-field. Consequently, we will require all our students to take eighteen (18) courses total over two years (that's an average of three courses per quarter). The specific breakdown of the 18 required courses goes as follows:

. 6 core courses
. 4 track courses
. 4 courses within one's chosen discipline of specialization
. 3 elective courses
. 1 research methods course

All students will be required to take six core courses. Three of the core courses correspond to our tracks. We will also require our students to take three introductory, interdisciplinary courses: one covering the diaspora, a second dealing with the concept of memory, and a third focused on conceptual methodologies. The first three core courses will be taught by core African American Studies faculty; the second three will be taught (either independently or in teams) by African-American Studies faculty and faculty from related fields. The six core required courses, then, are: 1. Conceptual Methodologies; 2. Diasporic Theory and Diaspora Tropes; 3. Memory Studies; 4. Black Historiography; 5. Black Expressive Arts; and 6. Black Social and Political Thought.

The descriptions of the six core courses can be found later in this section followed by lists of the relevant track courses. We have required four courses not necessarily containing African American Studies content in another discipline in order to allow students to establish their competence in the discipline in question (e.g., History, English, Theatre, Political Science, Philosophy, etc.) and to enhance their subsequent marketability. The participation of African American Studies-affiliated faculty in other disciplines on student dissertation committees; and the course instruction within the tracks by core African American Studies faculty trained in the traditional disciplines will also assist the students in establishing competence in one of these disciplines. Finally, we will require all students to take a research methods course. In consultation with their advisors, and depending upon the nature of their research interests, students will choose an appropriate course in quantitative and/or qualitative methods.

Core Course Descriptions

Diasporic Theory and Diaspora Tropes
This graduate level course introduces students to a survey of critical approaches to understanding the meaning and applications of diaspora as a concept and discusses a range of approaches involved in developing an analytics of Diaspora formations, imaginaries and mobilizations. The course has five thematic sections. The first theme relates to the generic significance of diaspora. It discusses both the etymology and the genealogy of diaspora as a term and idea involved in accounts of human dispersals, migrations and displacements. It discusses the relevance of the analytical distinction between ethnographic and conceptual accounts of diaspora, as well as the meanings of "diaspora-space" and "diaspora-time." The second theme discusses the social and cultural impact of globalization on the emergence and prominence of diaspora; both historical and contemporary forms of globalization are understood in terms of their colonial and postcolonial dimensions in the dissemination of social identities and the circulation of cultural practices. This third section discusses what may be gained from thinking in terms of comparative diasporas, in particular it examines as exemplars of diaspora, the Jewish, African and South Asian diasporas. The final section discusses recent important developments in social and cultural theory that can be used to understand the tropes of diaspora in differently nuanced ways, particularly as the formation, imbrication and dispersion of meaningful discourses, enactments of identity and exchanges of cultural affinity/dissonance. It highlights the significance of creolization, genealogy and deconstruction in marking these features conceptually.

The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: Joseph Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora; David Scott, Refashioning Futures; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Brent Edward Hayes, The Practice of Diaspora; Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Reader; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Arjun Appardurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture; James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century; Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation; Mireille Rosello Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures; Jacques Derrida Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin; Aihwa Ong Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality; Robin Cohen Global Diasporas; Jana Evans and Anita Mannur eds. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader; Avtar Brah Cartoggraphies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities; Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin Powers of Diaspora.

Memory Studies
This graduate level course explores and reflects on the status of memory as an object of investigation in critical theory and as a contested form of social, cultural and political practice, particularly at the intersection with historiographic representations of the past. It considers why many of the more global issues associated with organized social and cultural repertoires of remembering and forgetting arise in the context of colonial and postcolonial developments. It is concerned with examining the ways in which contested representations of the past and the impact of that contestation on the present, are infused with the politics and ethics of remembering and forgetting. This particularly underlines the displacement and dislocation of populations shaped by the western formations and contested memories and histories of those formations. The course considers the circumstances in which the writing of history and the questions surrounding its remembering and its forgetting have become significant methodological and ethical dimensions of the transnational and diaspora experiences of both colonial modernities and modern post/colonialisms. The first section discusses the intersection between History and Memory, with respect to the conceptual and methodological issues posed. The second section discusses the distinction and relation between social memory (expressed in narratives, oral traditions, popular histories, rituals and commemorations, bodily practices and spatial organization) and cultural memory (associated with forms of trauma, displacement, expressive arts, identity formations). The third section discusses the politics of remembering and forgetting in relation to two cases studies: Atlantic slavery and the Holocaust. The final section discusses the question of memory as methodology and ethics. How can memory studies be used as part of critical inquiry? Is there an obligation to remember or to forget in the design of social forms and the cultivation of cultural expressivity?

The following texts form the basis for a sample representative reading list: Paul Ricouer, History, Memory, Forgetting; Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally, eds., History and Memory in African-American Culture; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slavery-Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums; Johannes Fabian Remembering the present: Painting and popular history in Zaire; Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking time in a culture of amnesia; Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory; Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory; Paul Connerton How Societies Remember; Pierre Nora Sites of Memory; Richard Tierdiman, Past, Present: Modernity and the Memory crisis; Douure Draisma, Metaphors of Memory; Paul Antze and Michael Lambele eds. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory; Theo D'Haen and Patricia Krus eds. The Proceedings of the XVth Conference of the International Comparative Literature Association, 10 volumes; Susannah Radstone ed. Memory and Methodology; Diana Taylor The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas; Avishai Margalit The Ethics of Memory.

Conceptual Methodologies
The aim of this course is to introduce graduate students to the importance of conceptual analysis and the development of concepts in the theoretical, textual, or ethnographic aspects of research. It is particularly concerned with highlighting for attention and discussion a significant range of concepts that are recurrently deployed in critical transnational approaches undertaken in both the social sciences and humanities. Here the general idea of concepts relates both to the development of analysis in research and to the organization of exposition in the presentation of research. The course aims to cover the methodological vacancy that exists between traditional qualitative and quantitative methodologies due to the neglect of focused discussion on the application of critical concepts in interdisciplinary analyses. This is not intended as a course in philosophy, which might be described as the invention and formulation of concepts, but rather as a course in methodology, understood here as the application and development of concepts. The course is divided into four parts, each of which provides an examination of themes, debates and approaches in conceptual analysis. The first section ("Understanding Conceptual Analysis") invites an exploration of the meaning of concepts and their deployment in sustaining different kinds of conceptual methodological approaches. Among the issues taken up in this section are: the meaning of concepts; descriptive and critical distinctions; etymology as conceptuality; applied concepts in grounded theory, grand theory and literary theory; and the status of concepts in the development of conceptual analysis. The remaining three sections, which cover the interdisciplinary dimensions of the course, discuss particular concepts in relational pairings in order to emphasize the extent to which the meaning of a concept is also determined by its relation to and/or distinction from other concepts, which may be similar, oppositional or contextual. The conceptual pairings in each section are intended to be heuristic rather than exhaustive and will be discussed in relation to significant case-studies and exemplary texts. The second section, "historical analysis," discusses a range of conceptual pairings that have become important in accounting for major historical formations and transformation in the making of the contemporary world of transnational and diaspora experiences. It covers the following: Modernity/Post-Modernity; Racism/Eurocentrism; Colonial/Postcolonial. The third section, cultural analysis, examines a range of conceptual pairings which are significant for understanding the dissemination and mobilization of cultural practices and repertoires in distinctive expressive cultures. It considers the following: Identity/Difference; Discourse/Practice; Performance/Representation. The last section investigates a range of conceptual parings which have important implications for the analysis of social movements and the politics of subaltern communities across various within and across national formations. It covers the following themes: Structure/Agency; Power/Resistance; Hegemony/Ideology.

Relevant readings would include the following: Stuart Hall, ed., Representations; Robert Bocock, Hegemony; Ernesto Laclau and Chantale Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse and Identity/Difference; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition; David Scott, Refashioning Futures; K. Woodward, ed., Identity and Difference; Allon White and Peter Stallybrass, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy; Edward Said, Orientalism; James M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World; Raymond Williams, Keywords; David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture; Michel Foucault, Power and Selected Readings; V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa; J. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony; and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.

Black Historiography
This graduate level course charts the development of African American history writings and interpretations from the era of enslavement through the twentieth century. The course has four parts. The first part explores the texts early writers produced to chronicle the contributions of African Americans to the making of America. These first writers were self-taught and wrote not only to document Black achievement but to counter prevailing negative stereotypes in the larger society. The second part focuses on the work of scholars who received formal academic training and produced books that celebrated African Americans as active agents of history. The range of texts includes essays, monographs, anthologies, journals etc. and other writings of individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles and others. The third part focuses on the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Era scholars who spearheaded the development of Black Studies. Foci concern the traditional academic scholarship that challenged conventional interpretations of slavery, Black nationalism, Black institutional and organizational development, and enhanced comprehension of Black expressive culture as fundamental to American culture. Another critical development in part three was the emergence of survey texts in African American Studies such as Ron Karenga's Introduction to African American Studies. The fourth part examines the major ideological developments in African American Studies as it acquired legitimacy and acceptance within the academy. The works of Afrocentrists such as Molefi Asante, the challenge of African American women studies scholars that made gender a category of analysis as important as race, and the emergence of African diaspora studies and comparative Black history signaled another important development in African American Studies Historiography. While the course devotes considerable attention to historical works, it is equally important to concentrate on the writings of literary and cultural studies theorists, as well as those of sociologists and political scientists in order to appreciate the richness and expanse of intellectual engagement and productivity of this vital and dynamic discipline.

The following texts form the basis for a sample representative reading list of works that provide a foundation for the diverse ideological contours and streams of black studies scholarship: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro; E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeosie; John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams; Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity; Sterling Stuckey, Black Nationalism; Ron Karenga, Introduction to African American Studies; Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora; Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas; and Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas; Patricia Bell-Scott, Black Feminist Thought; and Barbara Smith, Homegirls.

Black Expressive Arts
The trope of the talking book that conferred humanity and power upon its owners is one starting point for the study of African American/African diaspora expressive arts. The very term points to an oxymoron, juxtaposing the alleged fixity of the written word against the ephemeral polysemy of the body in performance that artists, critics, and lay people have sought to negotiate and complicate in order to articulate individual subjectivity and collective identity. Using crosscutting thematic, historical, and generic grids, the course will utilize such data as slave narratives, fiction, poetry, drama, dance, music, the visual arts, and critical theory to survey how Africa-descended peoples have grappled with such issues as: the relationship to Africa (survivalisms, diaspora, Pan Africanism, Afrocentrism, Black Atlanticism); literature as a mode of self-articulation and struggle (protest tradition, the New Negro Renaissance, Negritude, Indigenism, postcoloniality); performance as a site of knowledge production and contestation; the constitution of blackness (authenticity, creolite, migratory subjectivity, Black feminisms, queer/"quare" theory); modes of representation and their relationship to various ideological and/or theoretical debates; the global circulation of Black cultural production.

The course also exposes students to a variety of research methodologies and provides jumping-off points for further analysis from national, regional, and/or transnational perspectives. The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Angelyn Mitchell, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present; Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness; Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism; Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture; Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey; Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature; Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America; Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World View; Stuart Hall, Representation and the Media and Race, the Floating Signifier (videorecordings); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism; Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C.L.R. James Reader; Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies and Ali A. Mazrui, eds., The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (selected essays); Sheila S. Walker, ed., African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas; Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader; Jennifer Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture; E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology; Dwight A. McBride, "Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority," Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch; and Sandra L. Richards, "Yoruba Gods on the American Stage: August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone."

Black Social and Political Thought
Sustained social and political questionings of inequalities in the formation of the modern world have been posed by Black populations across the African diaspora since the end of the 17th century. The study of black social and political thought includes investigating not only the pivotal scholarly texts produced by trained social scientists but also the social and political practice of abolitionists, maroons, Pan-Africanists, club women, freedom fighters, poets, and the vast array of "race men and women" across the spectrum of crusades. To explore this range of intellectual production and protest ideology/action, this course has three parts. Part I focuses on the politics and social observation of Blacks in the pre-emancipation Americas and Europe. In an era of "liberty" for many colonies and their white male citizens, how did Blacks, in bondage and not, lay claim to the language of "nation" "freedom" and "liberty"? We will interrogate the narratives, sermons, speeches, and other texts by bondsmen/women and freedmen/women from across the diaspora for early sentiments on political power and social justice. We will also investigate the familial, religious, and organizational lives that Blacks forge in their new worlds, which are characterized by important continuities and breakages. Part II focuses on liberation struggles. Such struggles are characterized by a diversity of forms, strategies and emphases based on the distinct geographic contexts in which they emerged. But we will also investigate how such struggles were transformed and how they inevitably came into dialogue with one another across boundaries of space and time. Such social movements include: Negritude, anti-colonial resistances, the Civil Rights Movement, international Black Marxism, the anti-apartheid struggle, black feminism, and Black Power. Part III covers the post-colonial and post-civil rights period after roughly1970 (with the important exception of South Africa) characterized by increasing political and identificatory autonomy at the individual-level, processes of state- and community-building at national level, and economic and cultural systems that are globally interdependent. Contemporary black social/political theory created by observers, activists, analysts, and critics of and in these developments has taken two routes: On the one hand, it has attended more acutely to important axes of difference among African-descended peoples, such as gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and skin color. On the other hand, Black social/political theorists are highlighting the transnational linkages and interactions that constitute the global African diaspora despite these particularities.

The following texts offer a representative, rather than exhaustive, sample from which readings may be drawn: W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America; C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins; Melville Herskovitz, Acculturation: The Study of Cultural Contact; Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, The Black Bourgeoisie, and The Negro Church in America; Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule and Black Visions; Michael Hanchard, Orpheus and Power; Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class; Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences, Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged; David Scott, Refashioning Futures; Barnor Hesse, Un/Settled Multiculturalisms; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority; Randall Kennedy, Race Crime and the Law; and Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, Black Power.

CURRICULAR TRACKS

The Histories Track:
Darlene Clark Hine
Sherwin Bryant
Martha Biondi
John Marquez

Courses to be Offered by Core History Faculty:
Historicizing the Early Modern Black Atlantic (Bryant)
Comparative Slavery (Bryant)
Slavery, Freedom and the Gendered Worlds of Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Bryant)
Civil Rights and Black Power (Biondi)
African Americans and the World: Black Internationalism in the Twentieth Century (Biondi)
African Americans and the City: Labor, Politics and Culture in the 20th Century (Biondi)
Race, Class, Gender and the Professions in the Diaspora (Hine)
History of Black Women in Diaspora: Race and Gender in Slavery and Freedom (Hine)

Other Offerings History Track:
Black Feminist Theory/Theories (Gender Studies 380): S. Richards
Slavery and Emancipation in Comparative Perspective (History 492): D. Penningroth
Running Black: Race to Empire (History 492): H. Neptune
Islam in West Africa (History 000): B. Ware
Method and Theory in African History (History 405):
African History (History 450):
Topics in African History (History 460):

Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies (EACS) Track:
Core EACS Faculty:
Sandra Richards
Dwight A. McBride
Alex Weheliye
Tracy Vaughn
Sharon P. Holland

Courses to be Offered by Core EACS Faculty:
African American Literary Criticism and Theory (McBride)
The Literature of Slavery and Abolitionist Discourse (McBride)
Issues in Black Queer Studies (McBride)
The African American Novel (Weheliye)
Contemporary African American Literature (Weheliye)
Black Speculative Fiction (Weheliye)
Figurations of Humanity in Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture (Weheliye)

Other Offerings EACS Track:
Black Feminist Theory/Theories (Gender Studies 380): S. Richards
Studies in Drama: African and Caribbean Theatres (Theatre 545): S. Richards
Studies in Drama: African Theatre (Theatre 545): S. Richards
Performances of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Theatre 000): S. Richards
Black Independent Film and Video (African American Studies 000): J. Brody
Black British Cultural Studies (African American Studies 000): J. Brody
James Baldwin (African American Studies 000): Brody/McBride
Black Queer Theory Meets Black Feminist Theory (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson/S. Richards
Issues of Representation in Visual Culture (English 000): J. Brody
Ethnographic Methods (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson
Studies in Race, Gender and Sexuality (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson
Studies in African Art (Art History 486):
Studies in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature (English 465):
French Colonialism in the 18th Century: Discourses, Fictions, Practices (French): D. Garroway
The Aporetic Ideal: Blackness and Silence in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Comparative Literature 481): K. Bell
Post-Structuralism and Minority Discourse (English 481): A. Weheliye
Sonic Afro-Modernity (English 471): A. Weheliye
African American Folklore (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson
Black Popular Culture (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson
Black Arts Movement (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson
Black Performance Studies/Theory (Performance Studies 000): P. Johnson

Politics, Society, and Culture (PSC) Track:
AFAM PSC Faculty:
Mary Pattillo
Celeste Watkins
Barnor Hesse
Richard Iton
Nitasha Sharma

Courses to be Offered by Core PSC Faculty:
Class Debates in the Black Community (Pattillo)
Inequality and Public Policy in Black America (Watkins)
Sociological Perspectives on Black Families (Watkins)
Racism, Deconstruction and Governmentality (Hesse)
Genealogy of Politics and the Political in the African Diaspora (Hesse)
Black Vernacular Movements (Hesse/Iton)
African American Politics (Iton)
Race and Constitutional Order (Iton)
Race, Ethnicity and American Politics (Iton)

Other Offerings PSC Track:
Black Queer Theory Meets Black Feminist Theory (AFAM 000): Johnson/Richards
Transnational Black Politics (Political Science 490): M. Hanchard
Black Political Thought (Political Science 490): M. Hanchard
Race, State and Nationalism (Political Science 490): M. Hanchard
Black American Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Political Science 490): R. Rogers
Immigrant Politics and Race in American Cities (Political Science 490): R. Rogers
Sociology of the Black Experience (Sociology 440): A. Morris
Welfare States and Inequalities: Class, Gender and Race (Sociology 440): A. Orloff
Seminar in African Philosophy (Philosophy 466): S. Diagne
Critical Race Theory (Philosophy 467): R. Gooding-Williams
Seminar in African American Philosophy (Philosophy 467):
Black Feminist Theory/Theories (Gender Studies 380): S. Richards
Stereotyping and Prejudice (Psychology 486):
Theories of Economic Development (Economics 425):
Globalization and Its Discontents: Race, Gender and Culture in Capitalist Histories (Anthropology 490): M. Di Leonardo
African American Child Development (Human Development 451): Jelani Mandara