University Bulletin (2009-2010)

AAAS 5a Introduction to African and Afro-American Studies
[ ss ]
An interdisciplinary introduction to major topics in African and Afro-American studies. Provides fundamental insights into Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas through approaches and techniques of social science and the humanities. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Joseph

AAAS 18b Africa and the West
[ nw ss ]
Focuses on the relationship between Africa and the "West" from the time of the ancient Egyptians to the postcolonial period. It also assesses the dilemma neocolonialism poses for the West. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sundiata

AAAS 60a Economics of Third World Hunger
[ nw ss ]
Employs the tools of social science, particularly economics, to study causes and potential solutions to problems in production, trade, and consumption of food in the underdeveloped world. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 70a Introduction to Afro-American History
[ ss ]
A survey of the Afro-American experience from the era of slavery to the present. Topics include the rise of a distinct community and its institutions, reconstruction and segregation, the contributions of blacks to American society, and the struggles for freedom and equality. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS 79b Afro-American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss wi ]
An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize Afro-American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 80a Economy and Society in Africa
[ nw ss ]
Perspectives on the interaction of economic and other variables in African societies. Topics include the ethical and economic bases of distributive justice; models of social theory, efficiency, and equality in law; the role of economic variables in the theory of history; and world systems analysis. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 81b Religion in African-American History
[ ss wi ]
Prerequisite or corequisite: AAAS 70a.
Examines religious development in African-American history in order to understand how religion has influenced African-American life. Topics include religious experience and identity, religion in popular culture, institutional developments, political activism among religious figures, theological innovations, and religious conflict. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS 82a Urban Politics
[ ss ]
Examines urban politics in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Topics include urban political machines; minority political participation; the evolution of American suburbs; and racial, economic, and political inequities that challenge public policymaking. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Mapps

AAAS 85a Survey of Southern African History
[ nw ss ]
Explores the roots of segregation and apartheid in South Africa, the development of a regional political economy dominated by South Africa, labor migrancy and land alienation in southern Africa, and the rise of African and Afrikaaner nationalisms. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sundiata

AAAS 98a Independent Study
Independent readings and research on a topic within the student's interest under the direction of a faculty supervisor. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AAAS 98b Independent Study
Independent readings and research on a topic within the student's interest under the direction of a faculty supervisor. Usually offered every year.
Staff

AAAS 99d Senior Research
Usually offered every year.
Staff

AAAS 105a The Black Power Movement
[ ss ]
A study of the Black Power Movement's promotion of racial pride, self-determination, unity, and revolution in American society and abroad from 1955-1975. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Joseph

AAAS 114b Race, Ethnicity, and Electoral Politics in the United States
[ ss ]
Explores the role that racial and ethnic politics play in American political campaigns and elections. Readings provide historical, theoretical, and empirical overviews of racial and ethnic politics in four contexts: political parties, presidential elections, congressional campaigns, and state legislative contests. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Mapps

AAAS 115a Introduction to African History
[ nw ss ]
Explores the history of African societies from their earliest beginnings to the present era. Topics include African participation in antiquity as well as early Christianity and preindustrial political, economic, and cultural developments. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sundiata

AAAS 117a Communications and Social Change in Developing Nations
[ ss ]
Examines the role of communications and information systems within and between developed and underdeveloped nations. Addresses the larger perspective of global communications. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 120b Race in African-American History
[ ss ]
Is race un-American? Explores the meanings and functions of race through the critical lens of African American racial thought. Analyzes primary sources from the antebellum period to the present to answer such questions as: Is race racist? What is black culture? Does justice require "colorblindness"? Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAAS 122a Politics of Southern Africa
[ nw ss ]
Study of clashing nationalisms, alternative patterns of development, and internationalization of conflict in southern Africa. The political economy of South Africa in regional context and its effect on the politics of its neighbors, particularly Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 123a Third World Ideologies
[ nw ss wi ]
Analyzes ideological concepts developed by seminal Third World political thinkers and their application to modern political analysis. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 125b Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work
[ ss wi ]
Utilizing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, fiction, and music to examine the relationship between women's sexuality and conceptions of labor, citizenship, and sovereignty. The course considers these alongside conceptions of masculinity, contending feminisms, and the global perspective. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 126b Political Economy of the Third World
[ nw ss wi ]
Development of capitalism and different roles and functions assigned to all "Third Worlds," in the periphery as well as the center. Special attention will be paid to African and Afro-American peripheries. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 131b American Freedom before Emancipation
[ ss ]
Prerequisite or corequisite: AAAS 70a or HIST 51a.
What did it mean to be free in an age of slavery? The experiences of free African Americans focus our investigation of this founding myth of America. Explores what freedom meant to criminals, reformers, laborers, slaveholders, artists, abolitionists, soldiers, and statesmen. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS 132b Introduction to African Literature
[ hum nw ss wi ]
Examines the cultural production of African writers and filmmakers and their critiques of the postcolonial state. Topics include their exploration of gender, sexuality, language choice, the pressures placed on "authentic" identities by diasporic communities, and the conflicting claims of tradition and modernity. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 133b The Literature of the Caribbean
[ hum nw ss wi ]
An exploration of the narrative strategies and themes of writers of the region who grapple with issues of colonialism, class, race, ethnicity, and gender in a context of often-conflicting allegiances to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 134b Novel and Film of the African Diaspora
[ hum nw ]
Writers and filmmakers, who are usually examined separately under national or regional canonical categories such as "(North) American," "Latin American," "African," "British," or "Caribbean," are brought together here to examine transnational identities and investments in "authentic," "African," or "black" identities. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

AAAS 145b What Is Race?
[ ss wi ]
What is race? How has it shaped what it means to be American? Explores nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations of race in science, law, reform initiatives, and popular literature. Issues include eugenics, census categories, race loyalty, polygenesis, immigration, passing, and miscegenation. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAAS 155a Slavery in America
[ ss ]
Examines the rise of slavery in America, the formation of slave and free-black communities, the emergence of the planter class, the role of slavery in the economy and politics, the relationship between slavery and racism, and the legacy of slavery. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS 156a The Civil Rights Movement
[ ss ]
Explores the civil rights movement through primary readings and films. Includes an assessment of the consequences of the movement and the ongoing controversies over the best ways to achieve equality for black Americans. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS 158a Theories of Development and Underdevelopment
[ nw ss wi ]
Humankind has for some time now possessed the scientific and technological means to combat the scourge of poverty. The purpose of this seminar is to acquaint students with contending theories of development and underdevelopment, emphasizing the open and contested nature of the process involved and of the field of study itself. Among the topics to be studied are modernization theory, the challenge to modernization posed by dependency and world systems theories, and more recent approaches centered on the concepts of basic needs and of sustainable development. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 163b Africa in World Politics
[ nw ss ]
Explores the impact of African states in world affairs; the African and Afro-Asian groups in the United Nations; relations with Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and the Americas; the Afro-Asian movement; nonalignment; the Organization of African Unity; and Pan-Africanism. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 167a African and Caribbean Comparative Political Systems
[ nw ss ]
Introduces students to the literature and method of comparative political analysis. Case studies central to the course will be Ghana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe; and Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 170b Seminar: Political Economy of Developing Countries
[ ss ]
Offers analysis of political and economic issues in developing countries with special emphasis on the major explanations for underdevelopment and alternative strategies for development. Topics include colonialism, nationalism, developing countries in the international system, state-building, rural development, and gender perspectives on underdevelopment. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Nyangoni

AAAS 175a Comparative Politics of North Africa
[ nw ss ]
Explores the formation and development of political cleavages and cleavage systems, and of mass-based political groups, analyzing the expansion of mass political participation, elections, the impact of the military on political groups, and international factors. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Nyangoni

ANTH 112a African Art and Aesthetics
[ ca nw ss ]
The visual arts and aesthetics of sub-Saharan Africa and the African Diaspora, with attention to the spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions of art and performance. Special emphasis on the historical dynamism and cultural creativity of "tradition-based" and contemporary African artists. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Auslander

ANTH 133a Culture and Power in Africa
[ nw ss ]
Explores the variety and richness of indigenous African social and cultural forms, such as the organization of the family; indigenous political systems; rank and slavery; traditional economics; ideas about magic, witchcraft, and religion; and the arts. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Auslander

COML 166b Literacy, Language and Culture
[ hum ]
Considers emergent literacy in cultures where different languages are spoken at home and school. Students will work directly on projects in Haiti and Lesotho designed to develop picture books for young children in their home languages. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

ECON 69a The Economics of Race and Gender
[ ss ]
Prerequisite: ECON 2a.
The role of race and gender in economic decision making. Mainstream and alternative economic explanations for discrimination, and analysis of the economic status of women and minorities. Discussion of specific public policies related to race, class, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Brainerd

ED 170a Critical Perspectives in Urban Education
[ ss ]
Examines the nature of urban schools, their links to the social and political context, and the perspectives of the people who inhabit them. Explores the historical development of urban schools; the social, economic, and personal hardships facing urban students; and challenges of urban school reform. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Brown

ENG 16a Slavery and Self-Making in African American Literature
[ hum ]
Critical investigation of African American writing as it engages slavery, freedom, and literary self-fashioning. We will read autobiographies, uplift novels, protest fiction and neo-slave narratives. Particular attention will be paid to issues of identity, sexuality, and social status; textual modes of representation and liberatory politics; the literary culture of sentiment; and African American constructions and contestations of race, gender, nation, and expressive culture since the antebellum period. Authors may include Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Gayl Jones, Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Toni Morrison. Contemporary films may include Sankofa, Amistad, and Daughters of the Dust. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman or Ms. Smith

ENG 57b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison
[ hum ]
An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman

ENG 87a Sex and Race in the American Novel
[ hum ]
Depictions of racial and sexual others abound in American literature of the twentieth century. Reading texts across racial, geographical, and temporal divides, this course investigates the representation of non-normative sexualities as signaled, haunted, or repaired by an appeal to race. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman

ENG 127b Migrating Bodies, Migrating Texts
[ hum ]
Beginning with the region's representation as a tabula rasa, examines the textual and visual constructions of the Caribbean as colony, homeland, backyard, paradise, and Babylon, and how the region's migrations have prompted ideas about evolution, hedonism, imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Smith

ENG 136a Race and Realism
[ hum ]
Explores American realism's complex relationship to the issues of race in the period after the Civil War. Topics include interracial violence, passing, white supremacy, sexuality, and censorship. Authors are James, Twain, Crane, Chestnut, Howells, others. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Gilmore

ENG 138a Making Modern Subjects: Caribbean/Latin America/U.S.A. 1850-1950
[ hum ]
Considers inflections of "the modern" across the Americas, allowing us to compare models and strategies at a historical moment when shifts from slavery to "freedom" and from Europe to the U.S.A., frame anxieties about empire, citizenship, technology, vernaculars, and aesthetics. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Smith

ENG 147b South African Literature and Apartheid
[ hum ]
Survey of South African literature, its engagement with apartheid and its aftermath: fiction, drama, poetry. Authors may include Paton, Millin, Louw, Gordimer, Fugard, Head, Serote, Sepamla, Matshoba, Coetzee, and Wilcomb. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ENG 167b The Postmodern African-American Novel
[ hum ]
A study of experimental fiction of prominent twentieth-century African-American authors. Investigates features of the postmodern novel including disruptive chronologies, the representation of fragmented identities, intertextual play and parody, and the critique of Western modernity as long-standing practices in black writing. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman

ENG 197b Within the Veil: African-American and Muslim Women's Writing
[ hum ]
In twentieth-century United States culture, the veil has become a powerful metaphor, signifying initially the interior of African-American community and the lives of Muslims globally. This course investigates issues of identity, imperialism, cultural loyalty, and spirituality by looking at and linking contemporary writing by African-American and Muslim women. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Abdur-Rahman

FREN 164a Haiti, Then and Now
[ hum nw ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies Haiti's cultural history through literature, music, painting, film, and journalism. Topics include: Haiti's first inhabitants, the Arawaks and Taino; slavery and colonialism; the world's first black republic; dictators and presidents; Creole and French; Catholicism and Vaudou; the island's ecology. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 165b Francophone Literatures and Cultures of Subsaharan Africa
[ hum nw ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writing in French in Subsaharan Africa, with particular emphasis upon its cultural and historical contexts. Topics include Negritude, African languages, defining "tradition,' oral and written literature, Islam, film, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

HIST 115a History of Comparative Race and Ethnic Relations
[ ss ]
Explores and understands the origin and nature of racial and ethnic differences in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Explores how theoreticians explain and account for differences, and how race and ethnicity relate to economic class and social institutions. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sundiata

HIST 116a Black Homeland: West Africa
[ nw ss ]
Surveys the history of the ancestral land of most African Americans from the rise of the great African empires through the period of the slave trade and colonialism. Traces the rise of African nationalism up to 1960. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Sundiata

HIST 153b Slavery and the American Civil War
[ ss ]
A survey of the history of slavery, the American South, the antislavery movement, the coming of the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Fischer

HS 120a Race and the Law
[ ss ]
Explores how race has been defined and used to uphold or undermine the principles espoused in the Constitution and other sources of the law in the United States. Issues discussed range from treatment of Native Americans at the nation's birth to the modern concept of affirmative action. One of our premises is that ideally the law represents the synthesis of the narratives of various elements of a society. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hill

HS 515a Race/Ethnicity and Gender in Health and Human Services Research
Explores theoretical and empirical approaches to race/ethnicity and gender as factors in health and human services practices, programs, and policies in the United States. Begins by examining current data on racial/ethnic and gender differences in health, mental health, functional status, and lifestyle. Attention then turns to alternative accounts of the causes of these differences. Although primary focus is on patterns of race/ethnicity and gender differences in health outcomes and services that have received the most comprehensive attention, the course offers perspectives on research methods and analytic frameworks that can be applied to other issues. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Nsiah-Jefferson

MUS 31b Music and Globalization
[ ca ]
Examines the forces--social, economic, political, and technological--that bring musical cultures into contact with one another and studies the resulting transformations. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

MUS 35a Freedom and Convention: Jazz Improvisation from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and John Coltrane
[ ca ]
Open to music majors and non-majors. Basic music reading ability helpful, but not required.
Examines the improvisatory process through the study of recordings, relevant scholarship, and analyses of individual artists and their improvisations. An aural approach acquaints students with several styles including Bebop, Hardbop, Free-Jazz, and other more modern approaches. Special one-time offering, fall 2009.
Mr. Levy

POL 124b Race, Inequality, and Social Policy
[ ss ]
Explores the causes and consequences of economic, social, and political inequality in the United States. Examines trends from the perspective of both liberal and conservative social scientists. Asks what forms of inequality matter and what should be done about them. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Mapps

POL 140a Politics of Africa
[ nw ss ]
Political transformation in Africa from the rise of nationalism to the search for effective governance and development. Case studies may include Nigeria, Tanzania, Cote d'Ivôire, Mali, Madagascar, and South Africa. Usually offered every year.
Staff