Africana Studies (AFRC)

AFRC 0008 Sociology of the Black Community

This course explores a broad set of issues defining important aspects of the Black/African American experience. In addition to the "usual suspects" (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, poverty, gender, and group culture), we also think about matters of health and well-being, the family, education, and identity in Black/African American communities. Our goal is to gain a deeper sociological understanding and appreciation of the diverse and ever-changing life experiences of Blacks/African Americans.

Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 0100

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0010 Homelessness & Urban Inequality

This first-year seminar examines the homelessness problem from a variety of scientific and policy perspectives. Contemporary homelessness differs significantly from related conditions of destitute poverty during other eras of our nation's history. Advocates, researchers and policymakers have all played key roles in defining the current problem, measuring its prevalence, and designing interventions to reduce it. The first section of this course examines the definitional and measurement issues, and how they affect our understanding of the scale and composition of the problem. Explanations for homelessness have also been varied, and the second part of the course focuses on examining the merits of some of those explanations, and in particular, the role of the affordable housing crisis. The third section of the course focuses on the dynamics of homelessness, combining evidence from ethnographic studies of how people become homeless and experience homelessness, with quantitative research on the patterns of entry and exit from the condition. The final section of the course turns to the approaches taken by policymakers and advocates to address the problem, and considers the efficacy and quandaries associated with various policy strategies. The course concludes by contemplating the future of homelessness research and public policy.

Fall

Also Offered As: SOCI 2940, URBS 0010

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0012 Study of an African American Author

This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major African American author. Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 0012

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0013 First-Year Seminar: Race, Class & Punishment

This first-year seminar analyzes the politics of "crime in the streets" and "crime in the suites." Key topics

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: PSCI 0013

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0015 Race and Identity: Coming of Age in 20th Century America

In this First-Year Seminar, we will use coming-of-age autobiographies to explore some of the most significant historical developments of the 20th century. By coming of age I mean autobiographies in which the author focuses primarily on the periods of childhood and adolescence into young adulthood. We will read books by people who lived during segregation in the South, the Great Depression, Japanese Internment during World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We will consider many issues, including: race, racism, immigration, religion, social class, and gender. We will contemplate questions about identity, family, honesty, and memory. As we read each book we will examine an individual life in a particular place and time, and we will move out beyond the confines of a person, family, or town to explore the broader historical moment in which the individual lived. To make this deeper contextualization possible, the course is divided into segments that will allow us to study the historical context of the autobiography as well as engage in focused discussion of the texts themselves.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0016 First Year Seminar - Black Spiritual Journeys: Modern African American

This first year seminar presents African Americans who have created religious and spiritual lives amid the variety of possibilities for religious belonging in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. By engaging an emerging canon of memoirs, we will take seriously the writings of Black spiritual gurus, theologians, hip hop philosophers, religious laity, activists, LGBTQ clergy, religious minorities, and scholars of religion as foundational for considering contemporary religious authority through popular and/or institutional forms of African American religious leadership. Themes of spiritual formation and religious belonging as a process—healing, self-making, writing, growing up, renouncing, dreaming, and liberating—characterize the religious journeys of the African American writers, thinkers, and leaders whose works we will examine. Each weekly session will also incorporate relevant audiovisual religious media, including online exhibits, documentary films, recorded sermons, tv series, performance art, and music.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 1080

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0019 Visions of America: Plural Nations, Places and Ideals

This course will introduce students to a more hemispheric understanding of the American experience, through the writings of many authors from the New World, including the United States, on what it means to be an American. Students will read texts from many genres including but not limited to poetry, film, prose, political speeches and autobiography, to come to terms with histories of native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and whites in the United States, as well as peoples of South America and the Caribbean. In the process students will become familiar with scholarship across the social sciences and humanities that consider issues of race, culture, nation, freedom and inequality in the Americas, and how racial slavery and the Afro-American hemispheric experience has informed multiple American visions.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0030 First-Year Seminar: Africa in World History

This seminar examines Africa's connections--economic, political, intellectual and cultural--with the wider world from ancient times to the 21st century, drawing on a diverse sample of historical sources. It also explores Africa's place in the imaginations of outsiders, from ancient Greeks to modern-day development "experts." Whether you know a lot or almost nothing about the continent, the course will get you to rethink your stereotypes and to question your assumptions about the importance of Africa in world history. First-year students only.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0030

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0081 Decolonizing French Food

Wine and cheese, baguettes and croissants, multiple courses and fresh ingredients straight from the market—these are the internationally recognized hallmarks of French food. Yet, even as the practices surrounding the mythical French table have been deemed worthy of a place on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2010, culinary traditions in France remain persistently rooted in legacies of colonialism that are invisible to many. In order to “decolonize” French food, this seminar turns to art, literature, and film, as well as archival documents such as advertisements, maps, and cookbooks. In what ways do writers and filmmakers use food to interrogate the human, environmental, and cultural toll that French colonialism has taken on the world? How do their references to food demonstrate the complex cultural creations, exchanges, and asymmetries that have arisen from legacies of colonialism? We will interpret artworks, read literature (in English or in translation), and watch films (subtitled in English) that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by authors and directors from across the Francosphere—from Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the Caribbean; to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; from the Vietnamese diaspora in France, Canada, and the United States; to North, Central, and West Africa. Just as food can be examined from many angles, our discussions will focus on art, literature, and film, but also take into account perspectives from the fields of history, anthropology, and environmental studies. Moreover, we will employ the theoretical tools supplied by food studies, feminist and gender studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 0081, FREN 0081

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0082 Caribbean Literature

This course will introduce students to Caribbean literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 0082, ENGL 1220

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0100 African Language Tutorial I: Beginning Level I

This is a course in beginning level of an African language that could be offered to students interested in particular region or country. The courses offerings are flexible and could be scheduled based on student requests.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0116 American Race: A Philadelphia Story (SNF Paideia Program Course)

This course proposes an examination of race with a three-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach; situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia; and examines the international human rights context of race with Greece as a case study. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. Students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies, South Asia Studies, Latin American & Latinx Studies, and through international human rights law. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, Asian Americans, and international communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans and from a thematic and legal perspective. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia and travel to Greece, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan and Fernando Chang-Muy along with local activists with varied disciplinary backgrounds from local community organizations. Each guest lecturer not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience. This course is a Penn Global Seminar, which includes a travel component. An application is required. For more information and to apply, visit: https://global.upenn.edu/pennabroad/pgs. The course is also supported by the SNF Paideia Program, the Asian American Studies Program and Africana, Latin American & Latinx Studies, Sociology, South Asia Studies, and Urban Studies.

Spring

Also Offered As: ASAM 0116, LALS 0116, SAST 0116, SOCI 0116, URBS 0116

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0300 Africa Before 1800

Survey of major themes and issues in African history before 1800. Topics include: early civilizations, African kingdoms and empires, population movements, the spread of Islam, and the slave trade. Also, emphasis on how historians use archaeology, linguistics, and oral traditions to reconstruct Africa's early history.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0300

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0320 First Year Seminar: Black Queer Traditions

This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0320, GSWS 0320

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0350 Africa Since 1800

Survey of major themes, events, and personalities in African history from the early nineteenth century through the 1960s. Topics include abolition of the slave trade, European imperialism, impact of colonial rule, African resistance, religious and cultural movements, rise of naturalism and pan-Africanism, issues of ethnicity and "tribalism" in modern Africa.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 0350

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0400 Colonial Latin America

The colonial period (1492- 1800) saw huge population movements (many of them involuntary) within the Americas and across the Atlantic. As a result, Latin America was created from the entanglement of technologies, institutions, knowledge systems, and cosmologies from Indigenous, European, and African cultures. We will learn about colonial institutions such as slavery and encomienda. We will also explore the different strategies pursued by individuals and communities to build meaningful lives in the face of often dire social and environmental circumstances. Class readings are primary sources and the focus of discussions, papers, and exams will be their interpretation.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 0400, LALS 0400

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0496 Malagasy (Elementary II/Intermediate II): Language in a Cultural Context

Combining the Elementary II and Intermediate II levels of Malagasy, this class will create a communicative language environment where students will explore the language and culture of Madagascar. The course offers a unique opportunity for students to deepen their understanding of an island that has remained largely isolated from the rest of the world while fulfilling a language requirement. Emphasis will be placed on exposing students to Malagasy culture through speaking, reading, writing and listening, and students will be expected to use the target language in class as much as possible. At the end of the semester, students will travel to become fully immersed in the Malagasy language and to deepen their understanding of the history, environment, and unique culture of Madagascar. Students who are interested in taking this seminar must complete Malagasy Elementary I or Malagasy Intermediate I in the preceding fall. Malagasy Elementary I is available to all students.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MALG 0496

1 Course Unit

AFRC 0521 Benjamin Franklin Seminar: 18th-Century Slavery and Abolition

This course examines how the slave trade was understood, justified, contested, and represented in British literature. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 0521

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1000 Introduction to Sociology

Sociology provides a unique way to look at human behavior and social interaction. Sociology is the systematic study of the groups and societies in which people live. In this introductory course, we analyze how social structures and cultures are created, maintained, and changed, and how they affect the lives of individuals. We will consider what theory and research can tell us about our social world.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 1000

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1001 Introduction to Africana Studies

The term Africana emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of the field, however, are much older,easily reaching back to oral histories and writings during the early days of the Trans-Atlantic African slave trade. The underpinnings of the field continued to grow in the works of enslaved Africans, abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century, and evolved in the twentieth century by black writers, journalists, activists, and educators as the sought to document African descended people's lives. Collectively, their work established African Studies as a discipline,epistemological standpoint and political practice dedicated to understanding the multiple trajectories and experiences of black people in the world throughout history. As an ever-transforming field of study, this course will examine the genealogy, major discourses, and future trajectory of Africana Studies. Using primary sources such as maps and letters, as well as literature and performance, our study of Africana will begin with continental Africa, move across the Atlantic during the middle passage and travel from the coasts of Bahia in the 18th century to the streets of Baltimore in the 21st century. The course is constructed around major themes in Black intellectual thought including: retentions and transferal, diaspora, black power, meanings of blackness, uplift and nationalism. While attending to narratives and theories that concern African descended people in the United States, the course is uniquely designed with a focus on gender and provides context for the African diasporic experience in the Caribbean and Latin America.

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1002 Introduction to Africa

This course provides an introduction to the study of Africa in all its diversity and complexity. Our focus is cultural, geographical, and historical: we will seek to understand Africa s current place in the world political and economic order and learn about the various social and physical factors that have influenced the historical trajectory of the continent. We study the cultural formations and empires that emerged in Africa before European colonial invasion and then how colonialism reshaped those sociocultural forms. We ll learn about the unique kinds of kinship and religion in precolonial Africa and the changes brought about by the spread of Islam and Christianity. Finally, we ll take a close look at contemporary issues such as ethnic violence, migration, popular culture and poverty, and we'll debate the various approaches to understanding those issues.

Fall

Also Offered As: ANTH 1002

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1060 Race and Ethnic Relations

The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and multiracials.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ASAM 1510, LALS 1060, SOCI 1060, URBS 1060

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1090 Urban Sociology

This course is a comprehensive introduction to the sociological study of urban areas. This includes more general topics as the rise of cities and theories urbanism, as well as more specific areas of inquiry, including American urbanism, segregation, urban poverty, suburbanization and sprawl, neighborhoods and crime, and immigrant ghettos. The course will also devote significant attention to globalization and the process of urbanization in less developed counties.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 1090, SOCI 1090, URBS 1090

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1092 Contemporary American Literature

The readings for this course expose students to a wide range of American fiction and poetry since World War II, giving considerable attention to recent work. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CIMS 1092, ENGL 1092

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1100 American Jesus

Images and beliefs about Jesus have always been a compelling part of American life. This course seeks to examine the social, political, religious and artistic ways that Jesus has been appropriated and used in American life, making him a unique figure for exploring American religious life. Special attention will be given to how Jesus is used to shape social and political concerns, including race, gender, sexuality and culture.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: RELS 1100

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1115 American Race: A Philadelphia Story (SNF Paideia Program Course)

This course proposes an examination of race with a two-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach and also simultaneously situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia, home to the University. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. For example, students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies and through Latin American & Latinx Studies. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, and communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans historically and presently. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan and Fernando Chang-Muy but guest instructors with varied disciplinary backgrounds and guest speakers from local community organizations. Each instructor not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 1150, ASAM 0115, LALS 0115, SAST 1115, SOCI 2976, URBS 1150

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1117 African American Religion

The unique history and experiencesof African Americans can be traced through religion and belief. Through the mediums of literature, politics, music, and film, students will plore the religious experience of people of the African Diaspora within the context of the complex history of race in American history. The course will cover a broad spectrum of African American religious experience including Black Nationalism, urban religions, the "black church" and African religious traditions such as Santeria and Rastafarianism. Special attention will be paid to the role of race, gende, sexuality, and popular culture in the African American religious experience.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 1170

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1119 History of American Law to 1877

This course is designed to explore major themes and events in early American legal history. Because of the richness of the subject matter and the wealth of sources available, we will be selective in our focus. The course will emphasize several core areas of legal development that run throughout colonial and early national history: 1) the state: including topics such as war and other military or police action, insurrection, revolution, regulation, courts, economic policy, and public health; 2) labor: including race and racially-based slavery, varied forms of servitude and labor coercion, household labor, industrialization, unionization, and market development; 3) property: including property in persons, land, and business, and the role of lawyers in promoting the creation of wealth; 4) private spaces: including family, individual rights, sexuality, gender, and private relations of authority; 5) constitutionalism: various methods of setting norms (rules, principles, values) that create, structure, and define the limits of government power and authority in colonial/imperial, state, and national contexts; 6) democracy and belonging: including questions of citizenship, voting rights, and participation in public life. By placing primary sources within historical context, the course will expose students to the ways that legal change has affected the course of American history and contemporary life. The course will be conducted primarily in lecture format, but I invite student questions and participation. In the end, the central aim of this course is to acquaint students with a keen sense of the ways that law has operated to liberate, constrain, and organize Americans. Ideally, students will come away with sharper critical thinking and reading skills, as well. *This course is a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor (LSHS).*

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 1119

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1120 Religious Ethics and Modern Society

Religious beliefs of Malcolm X and MLK formed their social action during the Civil Rights for African Americans. This seminar will explore the religious religious biographies of each leader, how religion shaped their public and private personas, and the transformative and transgressive role that religion played in the history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and abroad. Students in this course will leave with a clearer understanding of religious beliefs of Christianity, The Nation of Islam, and Islam, as well as religiously based social activism. Other course emphases include the public and private roles of religion within the context of the shaping of ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality in the United States, the role of the "Black church" in depicting messages of democracy and freedom, and religious oratory as exemplified through MLK and Malcolm X.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 1120

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1121 The American South

Southern culture and history from 1607-1860, from Jamestown to seccession. Traces the rise of slavery and plantation society, the growth of Southern sectionalism and its explosion into Civil War.

Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given for either

Also Offered As: HIST 1121

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1122 Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America

This course explores the lost worlds of witches, sexual offenders, rebellious enslaved people, rebellious colonists, and Native American leaders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the troublemakers, the criminals, the rebels, and other non-conformists, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century. The lives of these unique “movers and shakers” help us to understand the issues that Americans debated in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Fall

Also Offered As: GSWS 1122, HIST 1122

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1123 Law and Society

After introducing students to the major theoretical concepts concerning law and society, significant controversial societal issues that deal with law and the legal systems both domestically and internationally will be examined. Class discussions will focus on issues involving civil liberties, the organization of courts, legislatures, the legal profession and administrative agencies. Although the focus will be on law in the United States, law and society in other countries of Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America will be covered in a comparative context. Readings included research reports, statutes and cases.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 1120

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1130 Contemporary African Politics

This class provides an introduction to contemporary African politics. The core questions that motivate the course are (i) to what extent are political outcomes in contemporary Africa a consequence of its history, culture and geography? (ii.) Why are state structures and institutions weaker in Africa than elsewhere? (iii.) What accounts for Africa's relatively slow economic growth? (iv.) Why have some African countries been plagued by high levels of political violence while others have not? (v.) What explains the behavior of key African actors: parties or politicians?

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: PSCI 1130

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1151 Race, Space and Place in American History

This course provides with a historical introduction to America's racial and ethnic groupings by examining the social, spatial and historical forces that have defined these groups. Weekly lectures and readings trace American racial formations, identities and experiences from the age of Columbus to the present day. Following the work of historians and geographers who emphasize the importance of space and place in constructions of racial and ethnic identity, most of the class readings chart the evolution of such identities within specific regions or communities. Early readings illuminate the origins of categories such as "white," black, "Native American" and "Asian" by exploring the colonial encounters in which these identities first took shape; while later readings trace how these identities have been maintained and/or changed over time. Less a product of racial attitudes than of economic and political interests, early American conceptions of race first took shape amidst contests over land and labor that pitted European immigrants against the indigenous peoples of North America, and ultimately led to the development of racial slavery. Colonial legal distinctions between Christians and Heathens were supplanted by legislation that defined people by race and ethnicity. Over time these distinctions were reinforced by a variety of other forces. Distinctive from place to place, America's racial and ethnic groupings have been shaped and reshaped by regional economies such as the slave South, political initiatives such as Indian Removal and Chinese Exclusion Acts, a changing national immigration policy, and sexual and social intermixture and assimilation. Course readings will examine the links between race, region, labor, law, immigration, politics, sexuality and the construction and character of racialized spaces and places in America.

Also Offered As: HIST 1151

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1160 Caribbean Culture and Politics

This course offers anthropological perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. We will examine how the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships between race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. As a region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence, we will question the processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred. Course readings include material on the political economy of slavery and the plantation system, family and community life, religious beliefs and practices, gender roles and ideologies, popular culture, and the differing ways national, ethnic, and racial identities are expressed on the islands and throughout the Caribbean diaspora.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 1160, LALS 1160

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1166 A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered

Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people.

Also Offered As: ASAM 1166, HIST 1166, LALS 1166

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1169 History of American Law Since 1877

This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time. *This course fulfills a core requirement for the Legal Studies and History Minor.*

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1169

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1172 Bodies, Race and Rights: Sex and Citizenship in Modern American History

What did it mean to be a man or woman in the post-Civil War United States? Was being a man the same as being a citizen? If African-American men were to be fully embraced as both men and citizens in the aftermath of slavery, where did that leave women, white and black? Why did a nation built on immigration become so hostile to certain groups of immigrants during this period? In this course, we consider how the meanings and experiences of womanhood, manhood, citizenship, and equality before the law changed from the period immediately after the Civil War until the present day. We look at political battles over the meaning of citizenship, the use of terror to subdue African Americans politically and economically, and the fears of white Americans that they would lose their political and economic dominance to immigrant groups they deemed irreconcilably different from themselves. We also consider the repercussions of these conflicts for medical, legal, and economic efforts to regulate the bodies of women, children, poor people, immigrants, working class laborers, military men, and African Americans. Throughout the course, we will follow the state's changing use of racial, sexual, and economic categories to assess the bodily and intellectual capacities of different groups of citizens. We will also note some of the popular cultural expressions of manhood, womanhood, and citizenship. The lectures and reading assignments are organized around a series of historical problems, dynamic leaders, and controversies that illuminate these issues.

Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 1172, HIST 1172

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1176 African American History 1550-1876

This course examines the experiences of Africans and African Americans in colonial America and in the United States to 1865. We will explore a variety of themes through the use of primary and secondary sources. Topics include: the development of racial slavery, labor, identity, gender, religion, education, law, protest, resistance, and abolition.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 1127

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1177 African American History 1876 to Present

A study of the major events, issues, and personalities in Afro-American history from Reconstruction to the present. The course will also examine the different slave experiences and the methods of black resistance and rebellion in the various slave systems.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1177

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1187 The History of Women and Men of African Descent at the University of Penn

The history of the women and men of African Descent who have studied, taught, researched, and worked at the University of Pennsylvania provides a powerful window into the complex history of Blacks not only in America but throughout the Diaspora. This class will unpack, uncover, and present this history through close studies of texts and archived records on and at the university, as well as through first hand accounts by alumni and past and present faculty and staff members. These stories of the trials and triumphs of individuals on and around this campus demonstrate the amazing and absurd experience that Blacks have endured both at Penn and globally. Emphasis will be placed on the research process with the intent of creating a democratic classroom where all are students and all are instructors. Students will become familiar with archival historical research (and historical criticism) as well as with ethnographic research. Far more than just a survey of historical moments on campus and in the community, students will meet face to face with those who have lived and are presently living history and they will be faced with the challenge of discerning the most effective ways of documenting, protecting, and representing that history for future generations of Penn students.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1200 African-American Literature

An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1200, GSWS 1201

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1201 Divinities, Diviners and Divinations: Religions of the African Diaspora

This undergraduate course is designed to provide students with a broad introduction to major themes within African Diasporic Religions. This is an interdisciplinary course. We will be drawing upon various theoretical methods, i.e. historical, ethnographical, and autobiographical. Additionally, we will be examining visual media to understand the presence and value of African Diasporic Religions in the 20th/21st century. Special attention will be given to Vodou, Santeria, and Candomble in the Americas. Thematically, we will work through concepts of the diaspora; memory, myth and authenticity; ritual and material practices; borders, migration, gender and sexuality, religious commodities and exchange. As we traverse through these various religious traditions, it is through the readings, lectures, invited speakers, films and class discussions that we will develop a complex understanding of integrative religious worldviews that impacts every aspect of life: family structure, gender relations, education, healing, economics, politics, arts, and so on. It is with the hopes that we can apprehend how these traditions are indeed an American Religion.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 1202, HIST 0867

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1202 Spirit possession in Caribbean Religions

This course is designed to provide students with a broad introduction to possession experiences in Caribbean Religions. Through historical, ethnographic, autobiographical, literary and visual texts this course examines complex, gendered practices within the possession process, the vibrant spiritual energy that sustains communal connections during religious ceremonies, and the transnational imaginations that animate Caribbean religious practices in the Americas. Special attention will be given to Santeria, Candomble, Vodou, Myal, Palo Monte, and Revival Zion in the Americas. Possession is a process through which gender and sexuality can be performed, contesting national and regional discourses of sexuality, gender, and race in the Caribbean. Thematically, we will work through concepts of memory, community, adornment, ritual, borders, and the senses. We will investigate religious ritual practices to understand various religious worldviews that shape communities' religious and social lives.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1205 Constitutional Law

This class introduces students to the United States Constitution, specifically Articles I, II, III, the Tenth Amendment, Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment. The format for each class will consist of a 45-minute lecture followed by small group discussions on assigned issues and questions.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: PSCI 1205

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1206 American Constitutional Law II

This course examines American constitutional development from the eve of WWI through the second Obama administration. Topics include the growth of the New Deal and a Great Society regulatory and redistributive state, struggles for equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women and GLBT Americans, contests over freedoms of religion and expression, criminal justice issues, the Reagan Revolution and the revival of federalism and property rights, and issues of nationalsecurity powers after September 11, 2001.

Also Offered As: PSCI 1206

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1210 Literatures of Jazz

That modernism is steeped as much in the rituals of race as of innovation is most evident in the emergence of the music we have come to know as jazz, which results from collaborations and confrontations taking place both across and within the color line. In this course we will look at jazz and the literary representations it engendered in order to understand modern American culture. We will explore a dizzying variety of forms, including autobiography and album liner notes, biography, poetry, fiction, and cinema. We'll examine how race, gender, and class influenced the development of jazz music, and then will use jazz music to develop critical approaches to literary form. Students are not required to have a critical understanding of music. Class will involve visits from musicians and critics, as well as field trips to some of Philadelphia's most vibrant jazz venues. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 1210

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1220 Popular Culture and Youth in Africa

All across the continent, Africa is alive with the energies of young people, expressed in music, art, fashion, drama, video, poetry, protest, and urban legends. In this course, we take a close look at the wide variety of popular forms produced and consumed by young people in a diversity of contexts, urban and rural, elite and marginal, mainstream and transgressive. We will examine how popular culture draws from African tradition to craft innovative versions of modernity and futurity. We will explore themes of democracy, inequality, and social justice threaded through popular genres as well as experiences of joy, anger, fear, and hilarity. We will see how popular culture provides escape and entertainment for young people while also working to transform African societies.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 1202

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1310 Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1310, LALS 1310

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1350 Faces of Jihad in African Islam

This course is designed to provide the students with a broad understanding of the history of Islam in Africa. The focus will be mostly on West Africa, but we will also look at developments in other regions of the continent. We will explore Islam not only as religious practice but also as ideology and an instrument of social change. We will examine the process of islamization in Africa and the different uses of Jihad. Topics include prophetic jihad, jihad of the pen and the different varieties of jihad of the sword throughout the history in Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1350

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1358 Histories of Egypt

This course will explore Egypt’s impact on the world in several historical eras – the ancient past and its unparalleled legacy; the nineteenth century and nationalism; the twentieth century’s wars, peace and music and the twenty-first centuries lessons in revolution. We will examine European Egyptomania and Orientalism in the 19th century, Afrocentrism’s ambitions for Egypt, and Egypt’s centrality to pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. And we will explore the history as Egypt’s writers, filmmakers, musicians and poets have imagined it from the nineteenth century to the present.

Also Offered As: CIMS 1358, HIST 1358

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1370 African Environmental History

This new course will explore multiple dimensions of Africa’s environmental history, drawing upon literature in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. It is one component of a pilot project supported by Penn Global and directed by the instructor on ‘Local Histories of Climate Change in the Horn of Africa”, though we will cover topics and case studies from the entire continent. The course takes an historical perspective on environmental change in Africa, with an eye to engaging current debates on climate change and its impact on contemporary urban and rural communities. Students will read and discuss key works on the African environment, conduct their own literature reviews on selected topics, and prepare case studies of communities which have been impacted by severe climate events in the past half-century. The format combines lectures and seminar-style discussions, and we will draw upon the expertise of guest lecturers in a variety of disciplines which have contributed to the study of environmental change.

Also Offered As: HIST 1370

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1400 Jazz Style and History

This course is an exploration of the family of musical idioms called jazz. Attention will be given to issues of style development, selective musicians, and to the social and cultural conditions and the scholarly discourses that have informed the creation, dissemination and reception of this dynamic set of styles from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Fulfills Cultural Diversity in the U.S.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MUSC 1400

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1475 History of Brazil: Slavery, Inequality, Development

In the past decade, Brazil has emerged a leading global power. As the world's fifth-largest country, by size and population, and the ninth-largest by GDP, Brazil exerts tremendous influence on international politics and the global economy, seen in its position as an emerging BRIC nation and a regional heavyweight in South America. Brazil is often in the news for its strides in social welfare, leading investments in the Global South, as host of the World Cup and Olympics, and, most recently, for its political instability. It is also a nation of deep contradictions, in which myth of racial democracy -- the longstanding creed that Brazilian society has escaped racial discrimination -- functions alongside pervasive social inequality, state violence, political corruption, and an unforgiving penal system. This course examines six centuries of Brazilian history. It highlights the interplay between global events -- colonialism, slavery and emancipation, capitalism, and democratization -- and the local geographies, popular cultures, and social movements that have shaped this multi-ethnic and expansive nation. In particular, the readings will highlight Brazil's place in Latin America and the Lusophone World, as well as the ways in which Brazil stands as a counterpoint to the United States, especially in terms of the legacy of slavery and race relation. In this lecture, we will also follow the current political and economic crises unfolding in Brazil, at a moment when it has become all the more important to evaluate just how South America's largest nation has shaped and been shaped by global events.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 1475, LALS 1475

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1500 World Musics and Cultures

This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process. Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 1500, MUSC 1500

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1510 Music of Africa

African Contemporary Music: North, South, East, and West. Come to know contemporary Africa through the sounds of its music: from South African kwela, jazz, marabi, and kwaito to Zimbabwean chimurenga; Central African soukous and pygmy pop; West African Fuji, and North African rai and hophop. Through reading and listening to live performance, audio and video recordings, we will examine the music of Africa and its intersections with politics, history, gender, and religion in the colonial and post colonial era. (Formerly Music 053). Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MUSC 1510

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1560 Seeing/Hearing Globally (SNF Paideia Program Course)

This is a Penn Global Seminars Abroad semester long class with travel abroad after. It focuses on the interrelationship of music, arts, community-building, land, politics, and history. Places covered in coursework and travel vary by semester, and students have to apply for the class through Penn Global. The class is limited in student participation to no more than 20 students.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 1560, MUSC 1560

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1600 North Africa: History, Culture, Society

This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 0835, MELC 1600

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1625 Era of Revolutions in the Atlantic World

This class examines the global ramifications of the era of Atlantic revolutions from the 1770s through the 1820s. With a particular focus on French Saint Domingue and Latin America, it provides an overview of key events and individuals from the period. Along the way, it assesses the impact of the American and French revolutions on the breakdown of colonial regimes across the Americas. Students will learn how to think critically about citizenship, constitutional power, and independence movements throughout the Atlantic world. Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were seriously challenged in places such as Haiti, and the class investigates the appropriation and circulation of revolutionary ideas by enslaved people and other subaltern groups.

Also Offered As: HIST 1625, LALS 1625

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1700 The African Diaspora: Global Dimensions

This class examines the cultural and social ramifications of the African diaspora on a global level. It is divided into two major sections. The first section provides the historical background to the African diaspora by focusing on the forced migration of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. We will then delve into the black experience in French and British colonial spaces. In this section, we will also endeavor to move beyond the Atlantic-centric paradigm in studies of the African diaspora by examining free and unfree migrations of African people across the Indian Ocean to places as far away as India and the Philippines. The second half of the class devotes significant attention to the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism in places like Brazil, Cuba and the United States. In this section, we will discuss such issues as race relations, the struggle for civil rights for African-descent people as well as the emergence and the implementation of affirmative action policies in places like Brazil and the US.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 1700, LALS 1700

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1780 Faculty-Student Collaborative Action Seminar in Urban University-Community Rltn

This seminar helps students develop their capacity to solve strategic, real-world problems by working collaboratively in the classroom, on campus, and in the West Philadelphia community. Students develop proposals that demonstrate how a Penn undergraduate education might better empower students to produce, not simply "consume," societally-useful knowledge, as well as to function as caring, contributing citizens of a democratic society. Their proposals help contribute to the improvement of education on campus and in the community, as well as to the improvement of university-community relations. Additionally, students provide college access support at Paul Robeson High School for one hour each week.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0811, URBS 1780

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1810 Sounding Poetry

Never before has poetry been so inescapable. Hip hop, the soundtrack of our times, has made rhyme, meter, and word-play part of our daily lives. How did this happen? This course ranges through oral and lyric traditions in Europe, the Americas, and the Commonwealth. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of current offerings.

Fall

Also Offered As: COML 1810, ENGL 1810

1 Course Unit

AFRC 1880 African American Drama: Origins to present

This course will introduce students to African American drama from its origins to the present. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 1880, THAR 1880

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2010 Social Statistics

This course offers a basic introduction to the application/interpretation of statistical analysis in sociology. Upon completion, you should be familiar with a variety of basic statistical techniques that allow examination of interesting social questions. We begin by learning to describe the characteristics of groups, followed by a discussion of how to examine and generalize about relationships between the characteristics of groups. Emphasis is placed on the understanding/interpretation of statistics used to describe and make generalizations about group characteristics. In addition to hand calculations, you will also become familiar with using PCs to run statistical tests.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 2010

Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 2011

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2130 Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition

The total number of incarcerated peoples in the United States is currently around 2.1 million people, held across various carceral sites – jails, immigration detention centers, and state and federal prisons. If we include all human beings under the direct control of the criminal justice system in the tally, not just the actively incarcerated but those on probation or parole as well, that number swells to approximately eight-million adults, or one person in thirty-seven (Wacquant, 2009). The United States, in both absolute terms and as a percent of its population, is the most aggressive incarcerator of its own citizens in the world. If those under supervision of the criminal justice system were counted as a city population, it would be the second most populous in the country just behind New York City. Currently, one of every six Black men in the United States has been or is currently locked up, and one in three is destined to be at some point in their life. One in six Latinx men will similarly find themselves locked down throughout their life-course. Forty-percent of Black males from the nation’s “hyperghettos” (Wacquant) between the ages of 18 and 35 years-old are under some form of carceral control, and police and prisons are often the primary contact between young Black men and the state. It was within this context that in the summer of 2020, the nation witnessed the extra-legal police executions of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Subsequent civil disobedience actions rocked the country from coast to coast with calls to “defund the police” and “end mass incarceration.” As a result, the notion of police/prison abolition has entered mainstream political discourse to a remarkable degree not witnessed in generations. And its appearance has spawned strident debate across the political spectrum about the viability of police and/or prison abolition, its potential societal effect(s) and/or abolition’s very necessity or even its desirability. The aims of this seminar are twofold. First, we will engage a set of interdisciplinary texts (Sociological, Philosophical, Black Studies, Geographical, Autobiographical, Ethnographic etc.) to develop a broad understanding of that complex set of forces that have transformed the United States into the most rapacious incarcerator of its own citizens of any nation in the global state system. Said straightforwardly, we want to explore the questions: why do we have such a large prison system in the United States and how did it come to be? What work does the prison do on behalf of civil society and why does it deleteriously impact communities of color most profoundly? Secondly, this seminar will work to develop a broad familiarity with abolitionist discourse not only with regards to the questions raised above, but also to develop an understanding of abolitionist perspectives/orientations on what we can, should or even must do about prisons, policing and carcerality – “mass” incarceration - more broadly. In order to realize these contextualizations, this seminar is organized across three larger themes each thinking about “mass” incarceration from a differing vantage - whether external and/or internal to the prison itself: 1. An examination of the political, social, economic and historical forces that have built contemporary carcerality in both ideology and in material fact, 2. A familiarization with abolitionist perspectives on “what must be done” to challenge racialized “mass” incarceration as well as abolitionists’ critique of mainstream political proposals on police and/or prison reform, and 3. An analysis of the carceral interior through the politicized writings of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated abolitionist thinkers as well as those scholars who take the culture/institutions internal to the prison as proper site for abolitionist intervention.

Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 2908, URBS 2130

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2140 Tutankhamun’s Tomb: Its Treasures and Significance

This course examines the short life of the young boy king and what the discovery of his tomb and its contents mean in terms of Egypt’s long history and accomplishments.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MELC 2140

Mutually Exclusive: MELC 6140

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2161 The Civil Rights Movement

This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from its earliest stirrings in the 1st half of the twentieth-century to the boycotts, sit-ins, school desegregation struggles, freedom rides and marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. Among the question we will consider are: What inspired the Civil Rights movement, when does it begin and end, and how did it change American life? Readings will include both historical works and first-hand accounts of the movement by participants.

Also Offered As: HIST 2161

Mutually Exclusive: HIST 3151

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2180 Diversity and the Law

The goal of this course is to study the role the law has played, and continues to play, in addressing the problems of racial discrimination in the United States. Contemporary issues such as racial profiling, affirmative action, and diversity will all be covered in their social and legal context. The basis for discussion will be assigned texts, articles, editorials and cases. In addition, interactive videos will also be used to aid class discussion. Course requirements will include a term paper and class case presentations.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LGST 2180

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2200 African-American Literature Seminar

In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2200

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2210 Race and the Media

This course considers the theory and practice of minority representation in the public domain: film, theater, television, music, advertising and museums. How has "minority" been defined - who is included and why? How have notions of "minority" status been constructed in our public languages and what may be the impact of those images on both minority and non-minority populations? Our focus will be on representation and how it may work to marginalize or empower members of minority populations. While we will concentrate primarily on ethnic minorities, we will also consider how these same issues might affect sexual minorities. Our discussions will be supplemented by film and video examples. While the course will be theoretically situated in communication, it will consider how the perspectives of anthropology, feminism, and literary and ethnic studies have affected our understanding of public representations.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: SOCI 2210

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2211 (T)rap Music

This course examines the coming to pass of trap music from several perspectives: 1) that of its technological foundations and innovations (the Roland 808, Auto-tune, FL Studio (FruityLoops), etc.); 2) that of its masters/mastery (its transformation of stardom through the figures of the producer (Metro Boomin) and the rock star (Future)); 3) that of its interpretability and effects (what does the music say and do to us). We will thus engage with this music as a practice of art and form of techno-sociality that manifests uncanny and maximal attunement with the now. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2210

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2219 Social Inequalities: Caste and Race

This course introduces students to two systems of inequity, caste in South Asia, particularly in India, and race in the United States. It’s main objective is to demonstrate how these modes of inequity, sometimes dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, continue to shape social and state institutions like family, law, and bureaucracy. The course will explore sociological literature on caste and race and examine how these systems existed in a range of historical contexts. It will examine how certain groups were recipients of economic, political, and social privilege, and how these groups othered communities such as Afro-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India. We will consider how privileged groups continue to represent modern institutions like state and law that fail to protect disadvantaged communities in both India and the United States. The course will also explore how privileged communities employ the tool of gendered violence of different kinds like physical violence against men and sexual violence against women of Afro-American communities and Dalit communities to maintain forms of social power and control. The final unit of the course will deal with the emerging and imagined solidarities between Afro-American social and political movements in the United States and Dalit movements in India.

Also Offered As: GSWS 2219, SAST 2219, SOCI 2970

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2220 African Women's Lives: Past and Present

Restoring women to African history is a worthy goal, but easier said than done.The course examines scholarship over the past forty years that brings to light previously overlooked contributions African women have made to political struggle, religious change, culture preservation, and economic development from pre-colonial times to present. The course addresses basic questions about changing women's roles and human rights controversies associated with African women within the wider cultural and historical contexts in which their lives are lived. It also raises fundamental questions about sources, methodology, and representation, including the value of African women's oral and written narrative and cinema production as avenues to insider perspectives on African women's lives.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: GSWS 2220

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2229 Dalit and Black Literatures: Caste, Race and Representation

The aim of this course is to study the historical conversations and comparisons between caste and racial oppression and the forging of categories of caste and/as race in the Dalit and African American literatures. Beginning with a brief survey of the historical conversations between the Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, the course introduces some selected scholarly and literary debates on caste and/as racial discrimination, history of Afro-Dalit solidarity, literary representation of identities of caste and race and themes of freedom and equality. Selections of seminal texts and debates from the Dalit and African literary and cultural movements are included for discussion and analysis.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: SAST 2229

Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 5229, SAST 5229

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2232 Africa in India and Arabia

Africa has interwoven linkages for centuries with the Arabian Peninsula, and India, politically, historically, geographically, and culturally. These linkages were represented in continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The ancient world of Africa, Arabia, and India had served as an epicenter of the global economy in the pre-modern world. As such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. The eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from India and Arabia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions, India, and Arabia are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalence of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between these three regions are also apparent in several archeological sites and in the expansion that allowed the populations in these areas to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats. The objectives of this course are to achieve the followings: • Explore the geographic and historical interconnectedness between Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and India. • Examine the history of the different forces that have shaped the cultural landscape of the African shores with reference to India and the Arabian Peninsula. • Examine the political, economic, and cultural interconnections between Africa, Arabia, and India and the impact of Europe's colonial expansion. •Explore the historical concept of globalization and the challenges of inter-disciplinary study and research in the study of Africa and its neighbors.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2238 Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships

The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 2338, LALS 2238

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2240 Law and Social Change

Beginning with discussion of various perspectives on social change and law, this course then examines in detail the interdependent relationship between changes in legal and societal institutions. Emphasis will be placed on (1) how and when law can be an instrument for social change, and (2) how and when social change can cause legal change. In the assessment of this relationship, emphasis will be on the laws of the United States. However, laws of other countries and international law relevant to civil liberties, economic, social and political progress will be studied. Throughout the course, discussions will include legal controversies relevant to social change such as issues of race, gender and the law. Other issues relevanat to State-Building and development will discussed. A comparative framework will be used in the analysis of this interdependent relationship between law and social change.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 2240

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2245 Dancing the African Diaspora

This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography, and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political significance of black bodies in motion.

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2250 African Languages and Culture

The aim of the course is to provide an overall perspective on African languages and linguistics. No background in linguistics is necessary. Students will be introduced to theoretical linguistics-its concepts, theories, ways of argumentation, data collection, data analysis, and data interpretation. The focus will be on the languages and linguistics of Africa to provide you with the knowledge and skills required to handle the language and language-related issues typical of African conditions. We will cover topics related to formal linguistics (phonology/phonetics, morphology, syntax, and semantics), aspects of pragmatics as well as the general socio-linguistic character of African countries. We will also cover language in context, language and culture, borrowing, multilingualism, and cross-cultural communication in Africa.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2251 Race and Ethnicity Seminar

This course explores an aspect of race and ethnicity intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 2250

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2302 Sustainable Entrepreneurship

This course is designed to introduce students to the multiple methods of engaging Africana entrepreneurship, public service and philanthropy. Alongside a thorough review of both popular and independent activist media, students will be trained to use accessible technology to participate in international communications networks. "Big ideas," will be translated into succinct artistic statements. We will look intimately at the architecture of David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates; the initiatives of Majora Carter for Sustainable South Bronx and Majora Carter Group; the philanthropic equity of Vista Equity Partners and C.E.O. Robert Smith, and the political work of Mayor Ras Baraka, City of Newark among other examples from the public and private sector throughout the African Diaspora. Prior to the development of our own app ideas, we will focus on the urban market advertising strategies of majority companies that are lauded for their sustainable initiatives including Nike, Hewlett-Packard and Apple. We will also use as secondary resources macro approaches to sustainability from the United Nations Foundation. This course makes an argument for inclusion of race, class and gender equity in the evolving definition of sustainability. Our argument, consistent with the growth of so many of these professionals inside of and clearly influenced by hip-hop culture, is that they are best prepared, culturally, to "make something out of nothing."

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2310 Gender, Sexuality, and Literature Seminar

This advanced seminar focuses on literary, cultural, and political expressions of gender and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 2310, ENGL 2310, GSWS 2310

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2321 War and Peace in Africa

The end of colonial rule was the springboard for the start of cold wars in various regions of Africa. Where peace could not be maintained violence erupted. Even where secession has been attained, as in the new country of South Sudan, the threat of civil war lingers. While domestic politics have led to the rise of armed conflicts and civil wars in many African countries, the external factors should also not be ignored. Important in all current conflicts is the concern to international peace and security. Overall this course will: (1) investigate the general nature of armed conflicts in Africa (2) provide in-depth analysis of the underlying factors (3) and discuss the regional and the international responses to these conflicts and their implications. Special emphasis will be placed upon African conflicts and civil wars in: great Lakes area, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2324 Dress and Fashion in Africa

Throughout Africa, social and cultural identities of ethnicity, gender, generation, rank and status were conveyed in a range of personal ornamentation that reflects the variation of African cultures. The meaning of one particular item of clothing can transform completely when moved across time and space. As one of many forms of expressive culture, dress shape and give forms to social bodies. In the study of dress and fashion, we could note two distinct broad approaches, the historical and the anthropological. While the former focuses on fashion as a western system that shifted across time and space, and linked with capitalism and western modernity; the latter approach defines dress as an assemblage of modification the body. The Africanist proponents of this anthropological approach insisted that fashion is not a dress system specific to the west and not tied with the rise of capitalism. This course will focus on studying the history of African dress by discussing the forces that have impacted and influenced it overtime, such as socio-economic, colonialism, religion, aesthetics, politics, globalization, and popular culture. The course will also discuss the significance of the different contexts that impacted the choices of what constitute an appropriate attire for distinct situations. African dress in this context is not a fixed relic from the past, but a live cultural item that is influenced by the surrounding forces.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 2024, ARTH 2094

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2325 August Wilson and Beyond

"The people need to know the story. See how they fit into it. See what part they play.” - August Wilson, King Hedley II If you want to get to know community members from West Philadelphia, collaborate deeply with classmates, gain deeper and more nuanced understandings of African American history and culture, engage in a wide range of learning methods, and explore some of the most treasured plays in the American theatre, then this is the course for you. No previous experience required, just curiosity and willingness to engage. In this intergenerational seminar, Penn students together with older community members read groundbreaking playwright August Wilson's American Century Cycle: ten plays that form an iconic picture of African American traditions, traumas, and triumphs through the decades, nearly all told through the lens of Pittsburgh's Hill District neighborhood. (Two of Wilson’s plays are receiving fresh attention with recent acclaimed film versions: Fences with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Davis and Chadwick Boseman.) Class participants develop relationships with one other while exploring the history and culture that shaped these powerful plays. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, the class plans and hosts events for a multigenerational, West Philadelphia-focused audience with community partners West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance / Paul Robeson House & Museum, and Theatre in the X. Class members come to a deeper understanding of Black life in Philadelphia through stories community members share in oral history interviews. These stories form the basis for an original performance the class creates, presented at an end-of-semester gathering. Wilson's plays provide the bridge between class members from various generations and backgrounds. The group embodies collaborative service through the art and connection-building conversations it offers to the community.

Fall

Also Offered As: ENGL 2222, THAR 2325

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2350 Migration and Refugees in African History

This seminar will examine the experiences of recent African emigrants and refugees within and from the continent Africa from a historical and comparative perspective. We will look at the relations of overseas Africans with both their home and host societies, drawing on some of the extensive comparative literature on immigration, ethnic diasporas, and transnationalism. Other topics include reasons for leaving Africa, patterns of economic and educational adaptation abroad, changes in gender and generational roles, issues of cultural, religious, and political identity, and the impact of international immigration policies. Students will have the opportunity to conduct focused research on specific African communities in Philadelphia or elsewhere in North America, Europe, or the Middle East. We will employ a variety of sources and methodologies from different disciplines--including newspapers, government and NGOs, literature and film, and diaspora internet sites--to explore the lives, aspirations, and perceptions of Africans abroad. History Majors may complete the research requirement if their paper is based on primary sources. Students not seeking credit for the research requirement may write papers drawing on secondary sources exclusively. Class will consist of a combination of lectures (including several by invited guests), discussions, video screenings, and presentations by students of their research in progress.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 2350

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2401 Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean

This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 2401, HIST 2401, LALS 2401

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2402 The Haitian Revolution

In August 1791, enslaved Africans on the northern plain of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) rose up in a coordinated attack against their French colonial masters, launching the initial revolt in what would come to be known as the Haitian Revolution. In the years that followed, their actions forced the abolition of racial discrimination and slavery throughout the French Empire. When Napoleon Bonaparte threatened to return slavery to Saint Domingue, they waged a war for independence, declaring Haiti the world's first "Black Republic" in 1804. This seminar will examine some of the major themes and debates surrounding Haiti's colonial and revolutionary history. We will begin by considering the colonial paradox: France's leading role in the intellectual movement called the "Enlightenment" coincided with its ascent as a slaveholding colonial power. The seminar will also explore parallels and points of connection between the revolutionary movements in France and Saint Domingue: how did increasingly radical ideas in France shape events in the Caribbean? Likewise, how did west African traditions and political ideologies influence insurgents and their leaders? And how, in turn, did revolution in the Caribbean impact the revolution in France? Finally, we will ask how the Haitian Revolution influenced ideas about liberty, sovereignty and freedom throughout the Atlantic World. We will read a combination of primary and secondary materials each week. A final research paper will be required of all students.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 2402, LALS 2402

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2430 Race, Science & Justice

What is the role of the life and social sciences in shaping our understanding of race? How has racial stratification influenced scientists and how have scientists constructed racial difference and helped to maintain or contest racial inequities? How have these racial theories shaped the production of scientific knowledge and the way we think about human bodies, diversity, and commonality—and what are the consequences for justice in our society? This course draws on an interdisciplinary body of biological and social scientific literature to explore critically the connections between race, science, and justice in the United States, including scientific theories of racial inequality, from the eighteenth century to the genomic age. After investigating varying concepts of race, as well as their uses in eugenics, criminology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, medicine, and public health, we will focus on the recent expansion of genomic research and technologies that treat race as a biological category that can be identified at the molecular level, including race-specific pharmaceuticals, commercial ancestry testing, and racial profiling with DNA forensics. We will discuss the significance of scientific investigations of racial difference for advancing racial justice in the United States.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 2430

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2501 The Science-Fictions of Octavia E. Butler

This course covers key novels, short stories, and essays by the great African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, with a focus on her experiments with genre and gender-bending shape-shifters. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2501, GSWS 2501

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2542 Brazilian Baroque

This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2542, ENGL 2542, LALS 2542

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2545 Sex, Love, and Race in African American Life and History

This course discusses the political and social implications of sex, race and personal relationships in U.S. political and social history. In this class, we examine how so-called ‘emotional,’ human experiences such as falling in love, engaging in a sexual relationship, marriage, coming out of the closet, and other deeply personal events over the course of a lifetime are shaped by political, legal and historical forces. This course will examine the history of marriage rights, claims to ethnic and racial identity, activism among multiracial people in the United States, sex education in public schools, and debates about marriage and family rights in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Fall

Also Offered As: GSWS 2545, HIST 0818

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2548 Black Women’s Activism in the United States

This advanced undergraduate course examines African-American women’s history in the U.S., with an emphasis on social activism, politics, and cultural production. This course will use first-hand narratives as well as monographs to provide an overview of African-American women’s lives from slavery to the contemporary period. Through writing assignments, students will have an opportunity to strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 0718

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2630 Contemporary Issues in African Society

This course will deal with law and society in Africa. After surveying the various legal systems in Africa, the focus will be on how and to what extent the countries of Africa "re-Africanized" their legal systems by reconciling their indigenous law with western law and other legal traditions to create unified legal systems that are used as instruments of social change and development. Toward this end, the experiences of various African countries covering the various legal traditions will be included. Specific focus will be on laws covering both economic and social relations. This emphasis includes laws of contracts and civil wrongs, land law, law of succession, marriage and divorce and Africa's laws of International Relations, among other laws. Throughout this course a comparative analysis with non-African countries will be stressed.

Also Offered As: SOCI 2630

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2670 Latin American Art

The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2670, LALS 2670

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6670

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2709 Pan-Africanism in Global Perspective

This class covers the history of Pan-Africanism from its early inception in the nineteenth century to the present. Pan-Africanism has sparked political struggles and provided a powerful catalyst to artistic endeavors across the globe. The class focuses on the early critiques of the transatlantic slave trade, tracing the development of a unifying sociopolitical movement and the struggle for identity among Africans and African descendants in the diaspora. C. L. R. James posits that people of African descent, no matter where they might live, are linked through ancestral ties to Africa and as victims of structural and historical racism in the West. The class will not only engage with the classics of Pan-Africanism but also explore the movement’s influence through the arts (music, movies, and literature) and politics. To stress Pan-Africanism’s global ramifications, the class pays significant attention to the movement’s impact on Africa and Latin America.

Also Offered As: HIST 2709, LALS 2709

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2740 Facing America

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2740, CIMS 2740, LALS 2740

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6740

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2760 African American Life and Culture in Slavery

This course will examine the lives of enslaved African Americans in the United States, both in the North and the South. We will engage historiographical debates, and tackle questions that have long concerned historians. For example, if slaves were wrenched from families and traded, could they sustain family relationships? If slaves worked from sun-up until sun-down, how could they create music? We will engage with primary and secondary sources to expand our understandings of values, cultural practices, and daily life among enslaved people. Topics will include: literacy, family, labor, food, music and dance, hair and clothing, religion, material culture, resistance, and memories of slavery. Several disciplines including History, Archaeology, Literature, and Music, will help us in our explorations. Written, oral, and artistic texts for the course will provide us with rich sources for exploring the nuances of slave life, and students will have opportunities to delve deeply into topics that are of particular interest to them.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 0710

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2762 The Politics of Everyday Life in Africa

This course will explore the different dimensions of everyday life in Africa. Everyday life has been described by Agnes Heller (1978) as “the secret yeast of history.” What constitutes this “yeast of history” in contemporary Africa? In exploring everyday life, we will examine the existing (in)capacities in the structures of state and society in Africa for human well-being in relation to the differences between political life (bios) and bare life (zoe). The course engages with the everyday life in terms of how social, economic, and political lives are constituted and the implications of this process for whether Africans live well or not, how they die, and their struggles for alternative lives. With (ethnographic) accounts and perspectives from different countries in Africa, the course focuses deeply on how to understand and explain the conditions under which everyday social needs and economic necessities are turned into political/existential struggles as well as the conditions under which political exigencies can transform into economic, social and bodily fatalities. The overarching questions that will animate this course include these: What are the prevalent conditions of everyday life in Africa? What and who determines (in)eligibility regarding the everyday tools of good life and human survival? How are these determinations related to the differential distribution of potential and/or actual injury, harm, and damage to human life and the conditions of its survival? What can ethnographic insight contribute to our understanding of everydayness in Africa? The roles of sexualities, gender, generation, humor, identities, racism, hate, memory, memorial, transactions, etc., in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of daily life – and death – in the continent will be examined. Audio-visual materials will be used to analyze important themes about quotidian life in Africa.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 2762, SOCI 2905

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2781 African American Art

This lecture course focuses on art, architecture, and visual culture made by peoples of African descent in the United States.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 2781

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2800 "In the Dark We Can All Be Free": Black Queer, Feminist & Trans Art(s) of Abolition

If the afterlife of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman argues, is an aesthetic problem, what then is the relationship between abolition and aesthetics? How has the ongoing project of abolition been an aesthetic enterprise, and how does art shape its aims and horizon -- historically, presently and in afro-futuristic imaginary of the to come? How might the analytics of black studies, feminist theory, and trans studies, in their co-implicacy and entanglement, prompt a rethinking of aesthetics -- both its limits and possibilities? In this course we will consider the art(s) of the Black radical tradition, trans art, queer art and feminist art and theory, alongside a grounding in aesthetic theory, and explore the work of a constellation of scholars in Black studies, art history and artists including Saidiya Hartman, Laura Harris, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, American Artists, fields harrington, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Tourmaline, Juliana Huxtable, Kiyan Williams, Simone Leigh, Alvin Baltrop, Tina Campt, (and more) to consider how abolition is activated in contemporary Black queer, trans and feminist visual art.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3989, GSWS 2800

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2850 Modern Art in Africa and Europe

The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the nation and how to represent it, developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the artistic practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the ramifications of colonialism, colonial masquerade, post-colonial monuments and memorials, the African influence on Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, colonial arts education, and the South African built environment under and after Apartheid.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 2850

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2851 Advanced Swahili II

The objectives are to continue to strengthen students' knowledge of speaking, listening, reading, and writing Swahili and to compare it with the language of the students; to continue learning about the cultures of East Africa and to continue making comparisons with the culture(s) of the students; to continue to consider the relationship between that knowledge and the knowledge of other disciplines; and using that knowledge, to continue to unite students with communities outside of class. Level 3 on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale.

Spring

Also Offered As: SWAH 1200

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2852 The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance

This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day. BAM artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, dancers, producers, directors, and teachers, shared a goal to develop an alternative theatre based in Africanist and Black aesthetics combining poetry, music, and dance in a non-linear fashion allowing stories to emerge through alternative and abstract structures that are activist in nature. We will ground our examination of the period in a growing global black consciousness, as well as the relationship between black aesthetics and self-determination. The course will explore a breadth of mid twentieth century Black experimental theatre ranging from Jean Genet’s The Blacks and Imamu Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, to Ntozake Shange’s Choreopoems, and the performance poetry Jayne Cortez. The course culminates in the work of present-day performance artists that have taken up and evolved the form. The course is designed to incorporate theory and practice through play and poetry readings, movement investigations, student presentations of Theatre/Performance Artists, and viewing performances either virtually or in person. Students will develop either a choreopoem of their own or curate an imagined Black Arts Movement theatre festival or season.

Also Offered As: ENGL 2850, THAR 2850

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2860 Modern Art: Picasso to Pollock

Early twentieth-century art in Europe is marked by a number of exciting transformations. This period witnessed the rise of abstraction in painting and sculpture, as well as the inventions of collage, photomontage, constructed sculpture, the ready made and found object, and performance art. Encounters with the arts of Africa, Oceania and other traditions unfamiliar in the West spurred innovations in media, technique, and subject matter. Artists began to respond to the challenge of photography, to organize themselves into movements, and in some cases, to challenge the norms of art through "anti-art." A new gallery system replaced traditional forms of exhibiting and selling art, and artists took on new roles as publicists, manifesto writers, and exhibition organizers. This course examines these developments, with attention to formal innovations as well as cultural and political contexts.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 2860

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2870 Religion and Society in Africa

In recent decades, many African countries have perennially ranked very high among the most religious. This course serves as an introduction to major forms of religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis will be devoted to the indigenous religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as they are practiced on the continent. We will examine how these religious traditions intersect with various aspects of life on the continent. The aim of this class is to help students to better understand various aspects of African cultures by dismantling stereotypes and assumptions that have long characterized the study of religions in Africa. The readings and lectures are will be drawn from historical and a few anthropological, and literary sources.

Also Offered As: HIST 0837, RELS 2870

1 Course Unit

AFRC 2903 Exhibiting Black Bodies

This course concerns the exhibiting of Black Bodies in Museums and gallery spaces. We will trace the evolution of public history from the "Cabinets of Curiosity" in 18th and 19th Century Europe, through to the current institutional confirmation of the vindications traditions represented by Museu Afro Brasil (Sao Paulo, Brazil), National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington,D.C.), and the Museum of Black Civilization (Dakar, Senegal). We will give particular attention to "why these representations at these times in these places?." In the process of addressing these questions we will give voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content from those with the colonial mentality, to those with the abolitiionist and nationalist and Pan-African visions.

Also Offered As: SOCI 2903

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3051 Housing, Race, and Community in the United States

One's home is the first site of self-identity, socialization, and notions of citizenship. In the United States, neighborhoods are the basic units of political organization, educational options, and familial wealth. This course explores the intersections between race and housing in the United States with a specific focus on the experiences of African-Americans in urban centers. The intersectional housing experiences of Asian, Latinx, first-generation immigrants, Arab, and indigenous communities will also be analyzed. This course represents both a timely and nuanced opportunity to address housing as a focal point of existing racial tensions and deepening socio-economic inequalities in the U.S. Increasingly, housing has become a contested subject, with heated debates concerning its status as a human, and potentially constitutional, right. Students will explore urban governance values, the commodification of urban landscapes, and the institutional dimensions of race in the United States. Students will develop a critical understanding of the underlying structural causation for the issues faced by minority populations seeking adequate, affordable, and safe housing in the U.S. Prior knowledge of urban planning, housing, or social policy is not necessary for this course. Students will finish the course equipped with a broad knowledge base of associated development topics including globalization, commodification, and social justice.

Spring

Also Offered As: URBS 3050

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3101 Poetry Workshop

Students will develop techniques for generating poems along with the critical tools necessary to revise and complete them. Through in-class exercises, weekly writing assignments, readings of established and emerging poets, and class critique, students will acquire an assortment of resources that will help them develop a more concrete sense of voice, rhythm, prosody, metaphor, and images as well as a deeper understanding of how these things come together to make a successful poem. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3101

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3106 Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop

This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in poetry who are interested in pushing their practice and learning new poetic forms, such as long poems, serial poems, cross-genre work, multimedia poetry, or poetry informed by research. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3106

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3110 Medicine, Health and Healing in Africa

This seminar course will examine how sub-Saharan Africans have interpreted and dealt with issues of health, healing, and medicine under colonial and postcolonial regimes. It will also look at how various social, economic, religious, and political factors have impacted health and healing on the continent and shaped African responses. Class discussions will center around both general themes affecting health and healing in Africa as well as case studies drawn from historical and anthropological works.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0838

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3112 Experimental Writing

A creative writing workshop committed to experimentation. The workshop will be structured around writing experiments, collaborations, intensive readings, and new and innovative approaches to composition and form, which may also include work in digital, sound, and performance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3112

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3151 The Civil Rights Movement

This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement from its earliest stirrings in the 1st half of the twentieth-century to the boycotts, sit-ins, school desegregation struggles, freedom rides and marches of the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. Among the question we will consider are: What inspired the Civil Rights movement, when does it begin and end, and how did it change American life? Readings will include both historical works and first-hand accounts of the movement by participants.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3151

Mutually Exclusive: HIST 2161

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3152 Law and Social Change

This is a course in the history of law and social change. Discussion of assigned readings and papers will focus on the role law, lawyers, judges, other public officials and policy advocates and social movements and networks have played in proposing solutions to specific problems. The course will focus on evaluating the importance or lack thereof of historical perspective and legal expertise in making social change. Assigned readings will be discussed in class. Each student will submit a paper based on primary and secondary material on a topic of her choosing within the overall subject matter of the course. Paper drafts will be discussed in class. The Final Paper is due at the beginning of the final examination period.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3152

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3173 Penn Slavery Project Research Seminar

This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3173

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3174 Free State Slavery and Bound Labor Research Seminar

This seminar invites students to do original research into the stories of Black refugees – including escaped, kidnapped, sojourning, and other temporary or permanent residents of Pennsylvania. Their stories unfolded through contentious freedom suits, daring escapes on the Underground Railroad, newspaper wars, gun fights and thuggery, treason cases, and more. We have assembled an archive of statutes, legal cases, testimony, judicial and administrative decisions, newspaper stories, images, memoirs, maps, and more to help students get started with their research. In addition, students will have opportunities to pursue additional research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a co-sponsor of this course. Many of these materials have never been the subject of sustained study or placed in their historical context. Students will choose their topics in consultation with the professors and will produce research reports in written or digital or cinematic formats. Students are expected to contribute to the course website, a platform that will be available to the public as well as to the Penn community, and we aim to provide new information and venues for research. The course therefore will involve considerations of how best to convey what we learn, as well as explorations of historical methods and collaborating archives.

Also Offered As: HIST 3174

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3180 African Art Seminar

This seminar focuses on art of the African continent. It is open to undergraduates only.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3180

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3230 Demography of Race

This course will examine demographic and statistical methods used to capture the impact of racial stratification in society. This course covers the skills and insights used by demographers and social statisticians in the study of racial data. A key challenge facing researchers is the interpretation of the vast amount of racial data generated by society. As these data do not directly answer important social questions, data analysis and statistics must be used to interpret them. The course will examine the logic used to communicate statistical results from racial data in various societies. We will question the scientific claims of social science methodology by extending the critical perspective to biases that may underlie research methods. We will discuss good and bad practices within the context of the historical developments of the methods.

Also Offered As: SOCI 3230

Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 6320

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3250 Rethinking Civil Rights and Black Power

This course encourages a rethinking of the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement. In it, students will be pushed to think beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Students will understand Black agency, actions, and politics through careful reading of scholarship in the field, documentary film, and art. Students will also read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship. Each week students will focus on an individual case study, building upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today?

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3251 Writing for Children

A creative writing workshop devoted to the art and practice of writing for children. Students can expect to read texts by a variety of practitioners of the genre, complete regular writing assignments, and workshop writing by their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3251

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3253 Writing for Young Adults

This writing workshop will explore the craft of young adult literature. Students will focus on concerns crucial to writing about and for teens, such as voice, point of view, immediacy, and pacing, and will draw on the many possibilities available in YA literary fiction: blurred genres, unreliable narrators, surrealism, retellings, and issues of identity and self-discovery. We will look beyond straightforward prose into forms such as epistolary and verse novels and other experimental mashups. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3253

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3255 Advanced Writing for Children

This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for children, including early chapter books and teen fiction. Exercises may include studies in voice, point of view, plot development, humor, description, developing a fantasy world, writing historical fiction, or memoir. Students will read and discuss a wide variety of published work for children and workshop the writing of their peers. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3255

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3257 Advanced Writing for Young Adults

This workshop is suitable for students with some prior experience in writing for young adults and want to spend the semester making significant progress toward a major work for young adults. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3257

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3305 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Youth Voices Amplified

Youth Voices Amplified is an improvisational workshop in creative nonfiction that connects you to current reporting opportunities; gives you structured choice in assignments; and teaches you how to write about hard subjects for and about young people. Big questions about the social, emotional, relational and physical structures that affect young people require clear, engaging prose that avoids self-importance. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ENGL 3305

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3306 Writing and Politics

This is a course for students who are looking for ways to use their writing to participate in electoral politics. Student writers will use many forms, including essay, social media posts, videos, scripts, and podcasts, to explore our desire to live responsibly in the world and to have a say in the systems that govern and structure us. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3306

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3336 Africa and the Indian Ocean World

The Indian Ocean region represents an area with interwoven centuries of interactions, politically, historically, geographically and culturally. This area has witnessed continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The Indian Ocean world has served as an epicenter of global economy in pre-modern world and as such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. As part of the Indian Ocean World, the eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from Asia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions and the rest of the Indian Ocean world are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalent of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between the Indian Ocean world and the African shores are apparent in several archeological sites, as well as in the cultural practices of religion, language, architecture and modes of dress. The European colonial expansion, has allowed the populations in the Indian Ocean world to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and in addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3340 Feminist Ethnography

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3340, GSWS 3340

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3343 Global Engagement Seminar

This course is a Global Seminar which includes a travel component; topics vary.Topics and locations may include Chile, Ghana, or China. For more information and to apply: https://global.upenn.edu/pennabroad/pgs.

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3350 Religion and Colonial Rule in Africa

This course is designed to introduce students to the religious experiences of Africans and to the politics of culture. We will examine how traditional African religious ideas and practices interacted with Christianity and Islam. We will look specifically at religious expressions among the Yoruba, Southern African independent churches and millenarist movements, and the variety of Muslim organizations that developed during the colonial era. The purpose of this course is threefold. First, to develop in students an awareness of the wide range of meanings of conversion and people's motives in creating and adhering to religious institutions; Second, to examine the political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in the expansion of religious social movements; And third, to investigate the role of religion as counterculture and instrument of resistance to European hegemony. Topics include: Mau Mau and Maji Maji movements in Kenya and Tanzania, Chimurenga in Mozambique, Watchtower churches in Southern Africa, anti-colonial Jihads in Sudan and Somalia and mystical Muslim orders in Senegal.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3350

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3351 Africa and the Mid-East

This seminar will explore the historical relationship between these two regions from the early modern age to the present. We will examine the history of trade, particularly the slave trade, and its cultural and political legacy. We will compare the experiences of European imperialism--how the scramble for Africa dovetailed with the last decades of the Ottoman Empire--with an eye to how this shaped nationalist movements in both regions. The course will also explore the decades of independence with a special eye towards pan-Africanism and pan-Arabism. We will also study the ramifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the relationship between African and Middle-Eastern countries, from Uganda to Ethiopia, from OPEC to Darfur. The course will pay close attention to migrations through the regions, whether forced or economic or religious. Whenever possible we will explore, through film and literature, how people in Africa and the Middle East see their connections, and their differences.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3351, MELC 3550, NELC 3550

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3386 Digital Blackness

#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #ICantBreathe, #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, #BlackOutDay are just some of the many hashtags that Black people have created and use on social media to protest police brutality and proclaim their full humanity within the context of Blackness. Over the past three decades, Black people have created and utilized social media, along other digital platforms, media, and tools to reconfigure the terms and terrain of debates and discussions on what it means to be Black in the United States and the larger world. This course is an interdisciplinary investigation into the relationship between historical and contemporary cultural, social and political expressions of Blackness and what might be called the "Digital," the use of computers and computerized technologies, including the internet, to construct the world around us. More specifically, lectures, readings, and class discussions will help students deconstruct the cultural, political economy, and social construction of Blackness in the Digital in an effort to uncover the ways that race more broadly and Blackness more narrowly influences and shapes Black people's present social status and struggles for social justice. Accordingly, the course fosters a critical understanding of Blackness within the "Digital" and provides students with theoretical and practical apparatuses to analyze and develop new constructions of race and freedom using technology.

Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3408 Global Blackface, Minstrelsy and Passing

Global Blackface, Minstrelsy and Passing is an undergraduate seminar that will explore the performance of blackface across the world. We will look at the practice of "blacking up" in theater, opera, vaudeville and film through the Middle East, Africa, Europe, India, the Caribbean and put these historical practices in dialogue with British and American blackface performance. We will also look at how performers enlisted themselves or were hired for minstrelsy shows and how these translated around the world. The seminar will also explore the concept of passing, and whether it is just a matter of skin color, but also of language. This is a cultural history course that will also investigate constructions of blackness and whiteness around the world.

Also Offered As: HIST 3709

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3450 Studies in African-American Music

This course explores aspects of the origins, style development, aesthetic philosophies, historiography, and contemporary conventions of African-American musical traditions. Topics covered include: the music of West and Central Africa, the music of colonial America, 19th century church and dance music, minstrelsy, music of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, and film music. Special attention is given to the ways that black music produces "meaning" and to how the social energy circulating within black music articulates myriad issues about American identity at specific histroical moments. The course will also engage other expressive art forms from visual and literary sources in order to better position music making into the larger framework of African American aesthetics. (Formerly Music 146).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MUSC 3450

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3452 “Black Spiritual Journeys: Modern African American Religious Memoir”

This seminar presents African Americans who have created religious and spiritual lives amid the variety of possibilities for religious belonging in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. By engaging an emerging canon of memoirs, we will take seriously the writings of Black spiritual gurus, theologians, hip hop philosophers, religious laity, activists, LGBTQ clergy, religious minorities, and scholars of religion as foundational for considering contemporary religious authority through popular and/or institutional forms of African American religious leadership. Themes of spiritual formation and religious belonging as a process—healing, self-making, writing, growing up, renouncing, dreaming, and liberating—characterize the religious journeys of the African American writers, thinkers, and leaders whose works we will examine. Each weekly session will also incorporate relevant audiovisual religious media, including online exhibits, documentary films, recorded sermons, tv series, performance art, and music.

Fall

Also Offered As: RELS 3170

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3455 Undergraduate Research Seminar: The 1963 March on Washington

In this course, students will examine the origins of the March on Washington movement in the 1940s, biographies of the March organizers, and the ways the March has been memorialized over the past six decades. By exploring the dynamics that contributed to the demonstrations, students will delve into primary source documents, read secondary literature, and write their own article-length research papers based on the course material. The course will also examine the ways documentary film footage, photography, music, and media coverage of the March has contributed to understandings and misreadings of this moment in Civil Rights history.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 0816

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3460 The Blackness of Rock: Revisiting Histories of Race, Gender, and Genre

This course explores the history of rock music by focusing specifically on the innovations and contributions of black musicians. The course will address itself to the legacies of race records, the uninterrupted appropriation of black sounds by white artists (think Elvis), and the further complications introduced by the British Invasion, all while focusing on individual artists such as Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Jimi Hendrix. The course will highlight and offer hands-on explorations of the innovations brought to rock music by these black artists. And, because the guitar is such an iconic instrument in rock, the course also will introduce students, through a series of labs, to the gear that makes these sounds possible. Understanding how amplifiers, effects pedals, and guitars interact and produce radically divergent sounds depending on how they are set up will offer insights into the artistry of these early rock musicians. Understanding the circuits, and how using (and abusing) them in particular ways is part of the materiality of rock's sound, will help shed light on the extent to which creative engagement with technology determined particular sonic pathways within the genre (distortion, overdrive, fuzz, feedback, etc.). And, these innovations literally shaped the future of rock, providing a foundation of sound and style and a particular relationship to gear that extends into the present. The final unit of the course will explore the racial politics, gender dynamics, and industry structures that have buried the black histories of rock and sidelined women's crucial contributions to the genre, contributing to rock's framing and marketing as a (mostly) male, white genre. The course will also ask how black musicians who perform rock today, such as Tosin Abasi, Lenny Kravitz, Brittany Howard of the Alabama Shakes, Bad Brains, Big Joanie, and Living Colour, among many others, negotiate these politics, these silenced histories, these industry barriers, and these audience expectations?

Fall

Also Offered As: MUSC 3460

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3500 American Slavery and the Law

In this course, we will work both chronologically and thematically to examine laws, constitutional provisions, and local and federal court decisions that established, regulated, and perpetuated slavery in the American colonies and states. We will concern ourselves both with change over time in the construction and application of the law, and the persistence of the desire to control and sublimate enslaved people. Our work will include engagement with secondary sources as well as immersion in the actual legal documents. Students will spend some time working with Mississippi murder cases from the 19th century. They will decipher and transcribe handwritten trial transcripts, and will historicize and analyze the cases with attention to procedural due process as well as what the testimony can tell us about the social history of the counties in which the murders occurred. The course will end with an examination of Black Codes that southern states enacted when slavery ended.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0814

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3510 Love, Anger, Madness: History and Silences in Modern Haiti

On the stage of modern world history, Haiti plays the unique role as both the exceptionally victorious and tragic character. This course interrogates archival documents, oral histories, historical texts, and prose created within the nation and her diaspora in order to establish a nuanced image of the projection of Haiti's modern history. Using two classic Haitian texts, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995),this course examines how, why,and to what end Haiti's history and popular narratives about the country have served to construct and dismantle global movements, popular culture, and meanings of race, gender, and citizenship in the Americas. In our historical examination, we will question some of the iconic representations of Haiti through literature that deepen the affective historical profile of Haiti with interrogations of culture, sexuality, political, and media performance. Students will become familiar with the post -colonial history of Haiti and the region, meanings of race, and the production of history. The course is a research and historical methods seminar. Students will conduct archival research and write narratives from primary source material. This course qualifies as a "methods" course for Africana Studies undergraduate majors and minors.

Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 3510, HIST 0840, LALS 3510

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3511 Brazilian Baroque Seminar

This undergraduate lecture explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3511, LALS 3511

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3515 Race, Rights and Rebellion

This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism. The course will be organized around the following objectives: 1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of social movements; 2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora; 3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, and rebellions; 4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 2515, LALS 3515, SOCI 2907

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3540 Art, Medicine, & Magic: Bodily Remedies

In this activity-centric course, you will explore art, medicine, and magic as entangled approaches for healing human bodies across time, space, and societies. At first glance, artists, doctors, and religious leaders may seem to address questions about bodies and healing in very different ways. Yet, in practice, art, magic, and medicine have been in deep conversation with one another for millennia. 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, medical doctors were professionals who had offices, hospital beds, and pharmacological and surgical equipment expertise, but they often worked hand in hand with diviners and exorcists. In rural Haiti today, Haitian Vodou priestesses collect herbs, craft sculptures, and sing as they clean wounds and dispense antibiotics within the course of a single "remed" (remedy). In the United States, megachurches send thousands of doctors on evangelical medical missions each year, while in Colombia, contemporary artists are called on to assuage profound social trauma related to decades of military conflict. Examples like these show that art, magic, and medical practice have long been entangled technologies; sometimes working together, sometimes at odds with one another, these practices have always been in dialog about what "healing" is and how it can be achieved. Attending to these entanglements this course asks "what does healing look like and feel like - in what ways do humans transform affliction?" Together, we will investigate how everyday bodily experiences of "wellbeing" and "illness" are configured through art, magic, and medical practices across human communities, shaping how people understand and manage disorders from COVID-19 to schizophrenia, from ancestral trauma to breast cancer. Throughout the course, you will use ethnographic case studies & in-class activities to work through three aspects of the core class question: 1) how do art, magic, and medicine work in communities? 2) how are they experienced in communities (who has access to what kind of healing and who doesn't have access; who can be a healer and who can't be; what should and does healing/sickness feel like?) 3) how do they approach inequalities? (e.g. how and why are illnesses unequally distributed; what illnesses matter more (and less) than others; which communities should be saved (and which sacrificed).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3540

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3550 Accordions of the New World

This course focuses on the musical genres and styles (both traditional and popular) that have grown up around the accordion in the New World. We will begin our explorations in Nova Scotia and move toward the Midwest, travelling through the polka belt. From there, our investigation turns toward Louisiana and Texas--toward zydeco, Cajun, and Tex-Mex music. We will then work our way through Central and South America, considering norteno, cumbia, vallenato, tango, chamame, and forro. Our journey will conclude in the Caribbean, where we will spend some time thinking about merengue and rake-n-scrape music. Throughout the semester, the musical case studies will be matched by readings and film that afford ample opportunity to think about the ways that music is bound up in ethnicity, identity, and class. We will also have occasion to think about the accordion as a multiply meaningful instrument that continues to be incorporated into debates over cultural politics and mobilized as part of strategies of representation through the New World. (Formerly Music 157).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3550, MUSC 3550

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3560 Music and Performance of Africa

This class provides an overview of the most popular musical styles and discussion of the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged in contemporary Africa. Learning to perform a limited range of African music/dance will be part of this course. No prior performance experience required. (Formerly Music 253).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 2560, MUSC 3560

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3561 Fighting the Dispossession of black bodies -The Brazilian Black activism from slavery to the present

The objective of this seminar is to provide to the students an overview of the history of black activism in Brazil. We will examine several forms of racial conflict, focusing on the afro-Brazilian ways of organization. We will explore the main periods and organizations of black activism, such as the abolitionism, the Brazilian Black Front, the Experimental Black Theater, the Black Unified Movement and the Quilombolas' movement. Through this exploration, the classes will investigate the relationship between black organizations, black thinkers and the circulation of black ideas across Americas, Africa, and Europe. We will also examine how the Brazilian black movement has elaborated values of democracy and equality, handling notions of class, race and nationality.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3560

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3570 Caribbean Music and Diaspora

This course considers Caribbean musics within a broad and historical framework.Caribbean musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Caribbean contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and globalization. Each of these concepts, moreover, will be explored with a view toward understanding its connections to the central analytical paradigm of the course--diaspora. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music ranging from calpso to junkanoo, from rumba to merengue, and from dance hall to zouk. We will then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own North-American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 258).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 2570, LALS 3570, MUSC 3570

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3580 Latin American Music

This survey course considers Latin American musics within a broad cultural and historical framework. Latin American musical practices are explored by illustrating the many ways that aesthetics, ritual, communication, religion, and social structure are embodied in and contested through performance. These initial inquiries open onto an investigation of a range of theoretical concepts that become particularly pertinent in Latin American contexts--concepts such as post-colonialism, migration, ethnicity, and globalization. Throughout the course, we will listen to many different styles and repertories of music and then work to understand them not only in relation to the readings that frame our discussions but also in relation to our own, North American contexts of music consumption and production. (Formerly Music 158).

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 3580, MUSC 3580

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3660 Movement Song: The Poetics of Liberation

This creative and critical poetry writing workshop will focus on the study of poets associated with antiwar, feminist, leftist, queer/trans and racial justice liberatory movements. We will study the work of Pablo Neruda, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Sean Bonney, Ntozake Shange, Jake Skeets, Chrystos, Natalie Diaz, Adelaide Ivánova, Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez in relationship to the communities and movements which their work engages. Students will also work on their own poetry and will formulate innovative ways to present their work to a wider audience in the forms of video poems, zines, broadsides, social media posts, podcasts and letter print posters.

Also Offered As: ENGL 3660, FNAR 3660, GSWS 3660, LALS 3660

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive

Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3665, GSWS 3665

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3700 Abolitionism: A Global History

This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.*

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3700, LALS 3700

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3770 Black Speculative Futures

Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar's exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3770, FNAR 3770

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3800 Undergraduate Research Seminar: Black@Penn

In this course, students will learn the basics of social science research, from the conception of a research project to its execution and analysis. Working individually and in teams, we will explore the basics of social science research methods—both qualitative and quantitative and extant research on the social, psychological, and academic experiences of Black college students. Using these as a starting point, students will develop and execute one or more research projects. This will include decisions about the topic to be studied, the scope of the project, methodology and design, data collection and analysis. Students will develop research skills and the ability to work both independently and collaboratively on such projects, what kinds of assumptions and/or conclusions can/cannot be drawn from different types of research, and methods for making the results of their research accessible to various audiences. This course satisfies either the Methodology requirement or the upper-level research requirement for the Africana Studies major.

Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 3510

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3804 Sighting Black Girlhood

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 3804

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6804

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3812 Afro-Latin America: Culture, History, and Society.

A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 3812, SPAN 3812

Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3814 The Caribbean and Its Diaspora: Culture, History, and Society

A thorough panorama of contemporary Caribbean societies and their diasporic communities, this course enhances the students' knowledge of the region's main historical, political, and sociocultural trends. We will examine Caribbean multiple narratives of survival and resilience within a global context, through the study of 20th and 21st-centuries literary, cinematographic, musical, visual and performative works. The cultural analysis will be supported by a theoretical framework encompassing critical Caribbean theories on identity and identification.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 3814, SPAN 3814

Prerequisite: SPAN 1800 OR SPAN 1900

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3840 Cuban Visual Culture

This course will focus on the urban history and cultural politics of contemporary Cuba with an emphasis on contemporary art and contemporary developments in the city of Havana. Students will learn about the Spanish influence on early colonial art, the development of formal academic art training and the changes to art instruction and the form and content of art created since the Revolution.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3840, LALS 3840

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3930 Cinema and Civil Rights

This undergraduate seminar will examine key moments in the history of civil rights through a cinematic lens. Over the course of the semester, we will explore how filmmakers have depicted the lives, aspirations, and strategies of those who have struggled for equal rights; how different struggles have intersected with each other; what aesthetic strategies have been adopted to represent freedom and the denial of it; and how effective cinematic efforts to contribute to increased freedom have been as well as what criteria we use to evaluate success or failure in the first place. Each week, we will watch a film and read a series of texts that will be drawn from a variety of arenas, including histories of civil rights; civil rights pamphlets and speeches; filmmaker interviews; film and media theory; memoirs; and theories of race, gender and sexuality. Course requirements: mutual respect; completion of all readings and screenings; participation in class discussion; weekly online responses; a final project that can be a research paper, film, art project, or community-based initiative.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 3930, CIMS 3930, ENGL 0599, GSWS 3930

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3931 The History of Foreign Aid and Intervention in Africa

This course examines the history, politics, and significance of foreign aid to Africa since the late 19th century. While we do not typically think about the European colonial period in Africa in terms of 'foreign aid,' that era introduced ideas and institutions which formed the foundations for modern aid policies and practices. So we start there and move forward into more contemporary times. In addition to examining the objectives behind foreign assistance and the intentions of donors and recipients, we will look at some of the consequences (intended or unintended) of various forms of foreign aid to Africa over the past century. While not designed to be a comprehensive history of development theory, of African economics, or of international aid organizations, the course will touch on all of these topics. Previous course work on Africa is strongly advised.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 3930

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3932 Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present

What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? How would such an approach to filmmaking challenge our understanding of terms like “authorship,” “amateur,” “exhibition,” “distribution,” “venue,” “completion,” “criticism,” “documentary,” “performance,” “narrative,” “community,” and “success”? How might we understand these U.S.-based works within a more expansive set of transnational conversations about the transformational capacities of collective media practices? This course will address these and other questions through a deep engagement with the films that make up the national traveling exhibition curated by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmerman, We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media, which foregrounds six major themes: Body Publics (public health and sexualities); Collaborative Knowledges (intergenerational dialogue); Environments of Race and Place (immigration, migration, and racial identities unique to specific environments); States of Violence (war and the American criminal justice system); Turf (gentrification, homelessness, housing, and urban space); and Wages of Work (job opportunities, occupations, wages, unemployment, and underemployment). As part of that engagement, we will study the history of a series of Community Media Centers from around the U.S., including Philadelphia’s own Scribe Video Center, founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah, this course’s co-instructor. This is an undergraduate seminar, but it also available to graduate students in the form of group-guided independent studies. The course requirements include: weekly screenings, readings, and seminar discussions with class members and visiting practitioners, and completing both short assignments and a longer research paper.

Also Offered As: ARTH 3931, CIMS 3931, COML 3931, ENGL 2970, GSWS 3931

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 6931

1 Course Unit

AFRC 3999 Independent Study

A study, under faculty supervision, of a problem, area or topic not included in the formal curriculum.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4000 Blacks in American Film and Television

This course is an examination and analysis of the changing images and achievements of African Americans in motion pictures and television. The first half of the course focuses on African-American film images from the early years of D.W. Griffith's "renegade bucks" in The Birth of a Nation (1915); to the comic servants played by Steppin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and others during the Depression era; to the post-World War II New Negro heroes and heroines of Pinky (1949) and The Defiant Ones (1958); to the rise of the new movement of African American directors such as Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Charles Burnett, (To Sleep With Anger) and John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood). The second half explores television images from the early sitcoms "Amos 'n Andy" and "Beulah" to the "Cosby Show," "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," and "Martin." Foremost this course will examine Black stereotypes in American films and television--and the manner in which those stereotypes have reflected national attitudes and outlooks during various historical periods. The in-class screenings and discussions will include such films as Show Boat (1936), the independently produced "race movies" of the 1930s and 1940s, Cabin in the Sky (1943), The Defiant Ones (1958), Imitation of Life (the 1959 remake) & Super Fly (1972).

Fall

Also Offered As: CIMS 4000

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4050 Religion, Social Justice & Urban Development

Urban development has been influenced by religious conceptions of social and economic justice. Progressive traditions within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Baha'i, Humanism and other religions and systems of moral thought have yielded powerful critiques of oppression and hierarchy as well as alternative economic frameworks for ownership, governance, production, labor, and community. Historical and contemporary case studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be considered, as we examine the ways in which religious responses to poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction have generated new forms of resistance and development.

Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 4050, URBS 4050

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4052 Africana Sacred Communities in the U.S.

This undergraduate seminar places contemporary Black spiritualities at the center of the study of African-descended peoples. Through recent books in the ethnography of Africana religions, spiritual communities in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America that have established communities in the United States will constitute the focus of our course readings and anchor our weekly discussions. As an advanced seminar, our meetings will allow participants to interrogate the authors of these ethnographies. We will assess how these accounts have conceptualized the African diaspora and the vantages (“insiders” and “outsiders”) from which they describe religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. Beyond considering the commonalities and distinctions in form and practice that characterize various African diasporic religious practices, participants will also work to understand the constructions of race and belonging, ethnic identity, gender, sexuality, class, and geographic location that affect the lives of Black religious adherents.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 4080

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4200 The US and Human Rights: Policies and Pratices

After an examination of the philosophical, legal, and political perspectives on Human Rights, this course will focus on US policies and practices relevant to Human Rights. Toward that end, emphasis will be placed on both the domestic and the international aspects of Human Rights as reflected in US policies and practices. Domestically, the course will discuss (1) the process of incorporating the International Bill of Human Rights into the American legal system and (2) the US position on and practices regarding the political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights of minorities and various other groups within the US. Internationally, the course will examine US Human Rights policies toward Africa. Specific cases of Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt, as well as other cases from the continent, will be presented in the assessment of US successes and failures in the pursuit of its Human Rights strategy in Africa. Readings will include research papers, reports, statutes, treaties, and cases.

Fall

Also Offered As: SOCI 2902

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4202 Black Childhoods

African-American Childhood is an upper-level seminar designed to introduce students to the literature on childhood and youth through the lens of African-American children's history. The class will demonstrate the relationship that race, gender, and age have in shaping children's experiences. Readings will focus on institutions serving African-American children, their participation in civil rights struggles, and the representation of African-American children in popular culture. The class will also consider children as political actors in major moments of African-American history. Class assignments will include two long research papers, presentations on course texts and a field trip. Students will strengthen their expository writing, as well as their primary and secondary research skills.

Fall

Also Offered As: HIST 4202

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4322 Understanding Africa

SPRING 2017 - UNDERSTANDING AFRICA: This course will explore the economic, social, and political realities facing sub-Saharan Africa today by placing them in historical and global contexts. Key themes will include colonial and precolonial history, nationalist movements and cold war politics, economic development and foreign aid, ethnic and political conflicts, media representation and popular culture. The course will focus on local and global dynamics that have a role in shaping the present day Africa.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4327 Fashioning the Black Body

The fundamental query underlying this course is what is the relationship between dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring and race, specifically blackness? This course will draw upon a number of disciplines and fields including history, performance theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and queer studies to examine how blackness is fashioned, and refashioned within the United States and globally. Throughout the course we will investigate how not only race--but attendant issues of gender, sexuality and citizenship have all been constructed and contested through dress. Finally, we will explore what new and more nuanced insights might fashion, dress, adornment, and corporeal figuring offer us for understanding black subjectivities more broadly.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4387 Black Feminist Approaches to History and Memory

Topics vary: Black Feminist Approaches to History & Memory - The term black feminism emerged in public discourse amid the social, political, and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. The roots of black feminism, however, are much older, easily reaching back to the work of black women abolitionists and social critics of the nineteenth century. The concept continued to grow and evolve in the work of twentieth century black women writers, journalists, activists, and educators as they sought to document black women's lives. Collectively, their work established black feminism as a political practice dedicated to the equality of all people. More recently, black feminism has been deployed as a tool for theoretical and scholarly analysis that is characterized by an understanding that race, class, gender, and sexuality are inextricably interconnected. Using materials such as slave narratives, social criticism, and archival sources, this course will explore the theoretical and practical applications of black feminist thought in nineteenth and twentieth century North American culture and politics. In particular, we will consider the symbols and practices (storytelling, myth-making, art, archival research) that black women use to document lives. We will ask: how do these methods of documentation inform our understanding of the past and the production of historical knowledge? How can we understand black feminism as both theory and practice? And what are the implications of black feminist approaches for current research and scholarship? We will give particular attention to concepts such as gender, race, memory, the archive, and embodied knowledge to complicate our understanding of historical documentation, epistemology, and authenticity. The course material will include scholarship by Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, Hazel Carby, Hershini Young, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Toni Morrison, and others. (Image: From In Praise of Shadows, Kara Walker (2009). See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 4387, HIST 0817, LALS 4387

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4400 African Art, 600-1400

This course examines the flourishing civilizations of the African continent between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the "Age of Discovery." Although material remains of the complex cultures that created exceptional works of art are rare, current archaeology is bringing much new information to the fore, allowing for the first time a preliminary survey of the burgeoning artistic production of the African continent while Europe was building its cathedrals. Bronze casting, gold work, terracotta and wood sculpture, and monumental architecture - the course takes a multi-media approach to understanding the rich foundations of African cultures and their deep interconnection with the rest of the world before the disruptive interventions of colonialism.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 4400

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4404 Black Geographies and the Meaning of Land Rights

This course will interweave issues of land dispossession and land rights, both in Africa and in the Americas, with endogenous concepts and practices of space and place. Specifically, this course will trace the the concept of property, as developed among Europeans and European descendants, and explore how this concept interacted with the formation of the concept of race in order to established forms of social control and domination. The first part of this course will focus on Africa generally using Kenya as a case study. The material will cover the impact of colonialism and its legacy on land rights after independence. This first part will also explore contemporary forms of land dispossession happening through international land investments, often termed land grabs. The second part of the course will turn to the experiences of African descendants in the Americas. Using a few case studies, this section will examine different countries, histories, and rural and urban areas to unravel how different types of control over land interact with social relationships and specifically with the formation of race and racism. In both sections, we will also look at forms of resistance and resilience as local populations demand not only access to and control over land, but also impose their own ideologies of what it means to occupy space. By the end of this course, students should be able to more fully articulate the significance of control over land as it impacts and effects social relationships and specifically how it relates to the formation and continuation of inequalities along racial lines. Students will apply the concepts learned throughout the course to their own independent research done on an area in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4406 Existence in Black

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.

Spring

Also Offered As: HIST 0873, PHIL 4515

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4431 Mobilizing Decolonial Arts and Practice in the Black Atlantic and Beyond

This course will define CHOICE by looking at the transnational linkages connecting artistic,atter is related to African, African American, or other curatorial, personal, and political choices. An overarching question of the course will be "how do artists, activist, curators, and communities, question, select, translate, and disseminate the information needed to incite large-scale movements and global change and how can we, as a class, do the same through our own choices?" Students will examine the significance of theories arising from museum studies, curatorial studies, global social justice movements, as well as dance and diaspora studies. As a way of emphasizing the perspectives, artistic practices, the political engagement of marginalized groups, and the work of activists in the global south, this class will explore rituals, performances, and visual and expressive cultures. Looking closely at altar-making practices, ritual performances, religious coalitions, and resistant narratives, we will learn how artists, activists, and communities seek economic gain, resist oppression, express political opinions, and create tenable lives in difficult situations. The class is divided into sections including: Geographies, Bodies, Spaces, Words, Futures so that students can begin to deconstruct the colonial frameworks that structure their thinking in these areas. The assignments of the class will also afford students opportunities to learn from the work of local curators, activists, artists, exhibitions, and initiatives, including those at the Penn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Assembled.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4480 Neighborhood Displacement and Community Power

This course uses the history of black displacement to examine community power and advocacy. It examines the methods of advocacy (e.g. case, class, and legislative) and political action through which community activists can influence social policy development and community and institutional change. The course also analyzes selected strategies and tactics of change and seeks to develop alternative roles in the group advocacy, lobbying, public education and public relations, electoral politics, coalition building, and legal and ethical dilemmas in political action. Case studies of neighborhood displacement serve as central means of examining course topics.

Spring

Also Offered As: URBS 4480

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4500 Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Africa

This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource-rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.

Fall

Also Offered As: ANTH 3045, PSCI 4130, SOCI 2904

Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 5700

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4605 Topics in Black Feminism

This course examines the field of Black Feminism—or, the political, social, and economic forces that shape Black diasporic people’s gendered lives. Exploring iterations of Black feminism over time, it necessarily pluralizes feminism, paying attention to its meanings, uses, and applications across the African diaspora. Together, we'll ride the three waves of Black feminism to explore the ways Black women and Black femme’s political and cultural work has been consequential to notions of citizenship, belonging, culture and liberation. Drawing from Black Studies, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies we will ask: — How do Black women and Black femme's lives, labor, and cultural productions lay bare the limits of maleness and whiteness as dominant frames? — How have/do their lives suggest other modalities of living, knowledge production, relations of being, and critiques of power/violence? — How might we learn from the past in order to envision and build nourishing spaces for Black femmes today?

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4650 Race and Racism in the Contemporary World

This undergraduate seminar is for advanced undergraduates seeking to make sense of the upsurge in racist activism, combined with authoritarian populism and neo-fascist mobilization in many parts of the world. Contemporary manifestations of the phenomena noted above will be examined in a comparative and historical perspective to identify patterns and anomalies across various multiple nation-states. France, The United States, Britain, and Italy will be the countries examined.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: LALS 4650, PSCI 4190

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4800 Liberation and Ownership

Who is going to own what we all have a part of creating? The history of the Americas, and of all peoples everywhere, is an evolving answer to the question of ownership. Ownership is about: the ties that bind and those that separate; production, participation, and control; the creation of community and the imposition of hierarchies--racial, sexual, and others; dreams of possessing and the burdens of debt and ecological despoliation; dependency and the slave yearning to breathe free. Of all the issues relevant to democracy, oppression, injustice, and inequality, ownership is arguably the most important and least understood. Utilizing a variety of disciplinary perspectives--with a particular emphasis on radical and critical theories of liberation, and by focusing on particular global sites and processes of capitalism, students will assess and refine their views regarding ownership and liberation in light of their own social, political, religious, aesthetic, and ethical commitments.

Fall

Also Offered As: URBS 4800

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4880 Topics: Culture, Sexuality and Global Health

What does it mean to claim that "Homosexuality is un-African"? This course explores the linked histories of race, nation, gender and sexuality in Africa that such an ideological claim invokes, yet effaces. The polemics that produce statements like this play out through the disciplinary tensions that exist between African and sexuality/queer studies. These tensions have as much to do with the role played by the relation between sexuality and race within cultures of European colonization, as they have with the role of gender and sexuality within postcolonial power relations in Africa. Such antagonisms are sustained through the marginalization of gender and sexuality perspectives within postcolonial scholarship on Africa, as well as the bracketing of African perspectives in queer and feminist studies. This course will deconstruct these impasses by exploring scholarship at the margins of each area of study. Students will be encouraged to ask questions about how issues of race, ethnicity, nation, gender and sexuality are produced as suppressed presences in a range of texts, films and other materials. The course will include readings from postcolonial, gender, sexuality and African studies, anthropology, history, literary studies and Marxism, giving students a grounding in historical and contemporary perspectives at the intersection of African, queer and feminist studies.

Fall

Also Offered As: GSWS 4880

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4920 The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueno

The Inclusive City: Participatory Design at Taller Puertorriqueno seminar will provide students in and beyond the Architecture department with the opportunity to learn from and with Taller Puertorriqueno about community, spacemaking, and memorialization in the built environment. Students will learn about a neighborhood and engage in collaborative participatory design, engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, and working on a collaborative design project. Starting from a general (region-urban) to particular (neighborhood) methodology research on site across several categories, and engaging primary sources in the Taller archives, the students will generate relational territorial cartographies and mappings, allowing them to develop a master architectural plan that includes urban strategies, as well as dynamic processes of community development. As a truly interdisciplinary course, students will utilize design concepts, historical methods, and ethnoracial lenses of analysis to collaborate with Taller Puertorriqueno to develop targeted architectural solutions that align with the organization's programmatic goals.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 0874, LALS 4910, URBS 4910

1 Course Unit

AFRC 4990 Honors Course

Consult the Africana Studies Department for instructions. Suite 331A, 3401 Walnut or visit the department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu to submit an application.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5015 Black Social Movements: A Transnational Perspective

This course invites graduate students and advanced undergraduates with prior authorization to explore scholarship and primary materials on the transnational dimensions of black social movements. Recent phenomena such as the world- wide protest against the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd and the political assassination of Rio de Janeiro city council member Marielle Franco are two examples of the ways in which events involving black death in one locale resonate in multiple sites across the globe. Uprisings and demonstrations seemingly divided by language, culture and nation-state find common cause in collective action in response to patterns and instances of injustice and inequality. Course materials provide documentary evidence and analysis of the transnational circuitry of black social movement networks that have arisen in response to racisms targeting black and brown population. Members of scheduled castes in India, aboriginal populations in Australia and New Zealand, and Afro-descendent populations in the Americas and Europe, have become agents of change and forged substantive alliances and strategic coalitions with other social movement tendencies. Scholarship from social movement theory, Black Studies, comparative history and political theory help constitute the core reading for this course. Film, documentary narrative and autobiography will supplement reading assignments.

Spring

Also Offered As: LALS 5015, PSCI 5015, SOCI 5015

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5020 Brujas and Blackness: Transnational Feminist Perspectives of AfroLatinidad

Blackness and brujería are taboo topics within Latinx communities; both typically connote negative imagery and are actively avoided. Recently, the bruja identity has been reclaimed by many AfroLatinx women who see it as an outward expression of their AfroLatinidad and source of personal empowerment. Lara (2005) describes this as a bruja positionality – “the re-membering, revising, and constructing of knowledge as well as participation in other forms of social change…built on healing the internalized desconocimientos that demonize la Bruja and the transgressive spirituality and sexuality that she represents” (p 13). Latinx spiritual practices such as espiritismo, Santeria, Palo Monte, among others, will become avenues through which will explore key themes in Black/Latina/Chicana feminisms, including the politics of representation, stigmatization, multiple forms of state and interpersonal violence, intersecting forms of oppression, economic justice, reproductive justice, queerness/sexuality/lesbianism, and strategies of empowerment and resistance. Through a variety of course materials – academic articles, personal reflections, performance, and art – we will critically examine the construction of Afro-indigenous feminist identities within the contexts of Latin America and the diaspora.

Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms

Also Offered As: GSWS 5020, LALS 5020

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5030 Race in Latin America

In this course, we will examine historical, scholarly and community narratives about race and racialized communities in Latin America. Course texts and discussions will center Black and Indigenous histories and contemporary identities across the region. Our journey this semester will span from the pre-Columbian era to the present day, and will cover multiple Latin American geographies: the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. While we will focus most closely on the Spanish-speaking populations, we will also incorporate texts and discussion about populations speaking other languages in the region (Portuguese, French, Quechua, Kreyól, and English, for example). Finally, the diasporas of Latin America, particularly in the United States, will also figure in the discussions as sites of Latin American convergence, community and interaction in which race functions in various ways. As such, we will engage with a wide range of texts including books, articles (scholarly and popular), video, primary sources, and interviews.

Also Offered As: LALS 5030

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5060 Existence in Black

Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom, self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism.

Spring

Also Offered As: PHIL 6515

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5091 African Art Seminar

This seminar covers aspects of the arts and visual/material cultures in Africa, including the global African diaspora, throughout the continent's history. Topics will vary from semester to semester.

Also Offered As: ARTH 5090

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5100 African American History

Selected topics in African American History as determined by the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: HIST 5100

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5140 Africa and the Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean region represents an area with interwoven centuries of interactions, politically, historically, geographically and culturally. This area has witnessed continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The Indian Ocean world has served as an epicenter of global economy in pre-modern world and as such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. As part of the Indian Ocean World, the eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from Asia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions and the rest of the Indian Ocean world are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalent of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between the Indian Ocean world and the African shores are apparent in several archeological sites, as well as in the cultural practices of religion, language, architecture and modes of dress. The European colonial expansion, has allowed the populations in the Indian Ocean world to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and in addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5170 Topics in American Religion

From Marvin Gaye, to Tammy Faye Baker, to Sarah Palin and James Baldwin, Pentecostalism has influenced many, including politicians, preachers, writers, and the media. One of the fastest growing religious movements in the world, Pentecostalism continues to have a profound effect on the religious landscape. Pentecostalism's unique blend of charismatic worship, religious practices, and flamboyant, media-savvy leadership, has drawn millions into this understudies and often controversial religious movement. This course will chronicle the inception and growth of Pentecostalism in the United States, giving particular attention to beliefs, practices, gender, ethnicity, and Global Pentecostalism.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: RELS 5170

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5172 The Black Freedom Spirit: Readings in African American Religious History II

This graduate seminar introduces participants to the major works and themes in the field of African American religious history, covering the period of colonial encounters through the middle decades of the twentieth century. This graduate seminar focuses on histories of activism, organizing, and alternative forms of institution-building by religious women and men of African descent in African American Religious History. Our readings attend to the regional, gendered, sociopolitical, intellectual, and international dimensions of African American religious history. Seminar participants will also critically examine the place of Black Christianity (sometimes defined as Afro-Protestantism) in scholarly constructions of African American religions, acquiring the grounding to rethink, nuance, and expand the field beyond conventional focuses. The seminar’s primary aims are to help participants define interests within the field to pursue further study, to consider potential areas of research, and to aid preparation for doctoral examinations.

Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 5172

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5220 Psychology of the African-American

Using an Afro-centric philosophical understanding of the world, this course will focus on psychological issues related to African Americans, including the history of African American psychology, its application across the life span, and contemporary community issues.

Spring

Also Offered As: EDUC 5522

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5229 Dalit and Black Literatures: Caste, Race, and Representation

The aim of this course is to study the historical conversations and comparisons between caste and racial oppression and the forging of categories of caste and/as race in the Dalit and African American literatures. Beginning with a brief survey of the historical conversations between the Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, the course introduces some selected scholarly and literary debates on caste and/as racial discrimination, history of Afro-Dalit solidarity, literary representation of identities of caste and race and themes of freedom and equality. Selections of seminal texts and debates from the Dalit and African literary and cultural movements are included for discussion and analysis.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: SAST 5229

Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 2229, SAST 2229

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5240 Inequality & Race Policy

There is little question that inequality along the lines of race and ethnicity remain a constant problem in American society. And over time, the federal government has implemented several policy initiatives to address these inequities. However, less well understood is the success of these federal policies or the process in which they emerge from government as a viable solution. This course will provide an overview of the link between federal government action and changes in minority inequality. We will analyze several issue spaces that cover health, crime and incarceration, social policy and equal rights, education, welfare, and economics. We will take a multi-method approach to exploring the success of federal policies by conducting historical assessments and statistical analysis. Advanced undergraduates are welcome to take the course with permission.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: PSCI 5290

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5270 Market Women, Madames, Mistresses and Mother Superior

Market Women, Madames, Mistresses & Mother Superior studies gender, labor, sexuality, and race in the Caribbean. In our historical examination of primary source documents alongside literature, and popular media, we will question some of the iconic representations of Caribbean and Latin American women in order to understand the meaning, purpose and usages of these women s bodies as objects of praise, possession, obsession and/or ridicule by communities, governments and religions within and outside of the region. Beginning in the late-18th century and ending with contemporary migration narratives, this course considers the relationship between slave society and colonial pasts on gender performance in the modern Caribbean, Latin America, and their diasporas.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: GSWS 5270, LALS 5270

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5300 Black Performance Theory

In his 1995 documentary Black Is, Black Ain t Marlon Riggs traces a black cultural tradition while simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of blackness itself. He testifies that: Black is black, and black is blue. Black is bright. Black is you. Black can do you in. In Riggs configuration, black is a color, black is a feeling, black is a sound, black is materiality, and black is a life sentence. In an effort to raise critical questions around blackness, performance, race, and feeling, this course follows in the tradition of Riggs work. In other words, this graduate level course examines the notion of blackness through theorizations of performance. It pursues the following questions: What is blackness? How is blackness embodied, felt, heard, represented, and seen through performance? How is black performance political? Discussions and written work will interrogate the slipperiness of, desire for, and policing of blackness in order to trouble conceptions of race as a biological essence. Organized by keywords in the field of Black Performance Theory - and exploring varying performance forms (the play, the dance, the film, the photograph, the performance of everyday life, the television program, the exhibit, and even the tweet) - This course foregrounds the micro-politics through which black racialized subjects are shaped in the realm of culture. Performances will be consulted each meeting which we will use to interpret and complicate the day's readings. In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through black bodies.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5310 Mobilizing Decolonial Arts and Practice in the Black Atlantic and Beyond

This course will define CHOICE by looking at the transnational linkages connecting artistic,atter is related to African, African American, or other curatorial, personal, and political choices. An overarching question of the course will be "how do artists, activist, curators, and communities, question, select, translate, and disseminate the information needed to incite large-scale movements and global change and how can we, as a class, do the same through our own choices?" Students will examine the significance of theories arising from museum studies, curatorial studies, global social justice movements, as well as dance and diaspora studies. As a way of emphasizing the perspectives, artistic practices, the political engagement of marginalized groups, and the work of activists in the global south, this class will explore rituals, performances, and visual and expressive cultures. Looking closely at altar-making practices, ritual performances, religious coalitions, and resistant narratives, we will learn how artists, activists, and communities seek economic gain, resist oppression, express political opinions, and create tenable lives in difficult situations. The class is divided into sections including: Geographies, Bodies, Spaces, Words, Futures so that students can begin to deconstruct the colonial frameworks that structure their thinking in these areas. The assignments of the class will also afford students opportunities to learn from the work of local curators, activists, artists, exhibitions, and initiatives, including those at the Penn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Assembled.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5330 Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

Race and ethnicity are, above all, both converge as system of ideas by which men and women imagine the human body and their relationships within society. In this course we will question the concept of race and ethnicity and their place in modern society (1500 - 2020). While the course reviews the pre-1500 literature our focus will be on the last 500 years. This course reviews the research that has contributed to the ideas about ethnicity and race in human society. The review covers the discourse on race in political propaganda, religious doctrine, philosophy, history, biology and other human sciences.

Also Offered As: DEMG 5330, SOCI 5330

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5420 Archiving Jazz: Visuality And Materiality In The Phila Jazz Community 1945-2019

This seminar will be organized around three distinct pathways. First, it will serve as an introduction to Jazz Studies and thus be attentive to the ways that jazz music has sparked an interdisciplinary conversation that is wide-ranging and ongoing. Second, we will be partnering with the African American Museum of Philadelphia to consider jazz within the realm of visual art. In light of efforts to map the "black interior," how have visual artists (e.g. painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and photographers) sought to represent jazz? Third, we will endeavor to develop partnerships with the Philadelphia (and beyond) jazz community, especially as it pertains to creating and sustaining an archive that serves as way to understand jazz as an instrument of placemaking and also as a vehicle for jazz musicians to take ownership of their narratives. The seminar will meet at the African American Museum of Philadelphia and be team taught with members of the Museum staff. The course will culminate with a virtual exhibit of visual works and archival materials centering on Philadelphia's jazz community and (if funding is available) a free concert to be held at AAMP. Undergraduates are welcome to register for the course with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5190, URBS 5420

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5470 Topics in the Study of Religion

This course deals with various religious topics, such as Mass Religious Conversion.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: RELS 5470

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5490 Black France: History/Representation

Please check the department's website for the course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: FREN 5490

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5500 Critical Ethnography

"This graduate course introduces students to theories, practices, and critiques of critical ethnography. Ethnography -- an approach to the study of culture which anthropologist James Clifford described as a process that "translates experiences into text" - will have our full attention. This process of translation, although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance. We wrestle with notions of "the self" and "the other" at the intersection of imbricated cultural and performance worlds. Together we'll ask: How is ethnography both critical and performative? What is the relationship between theory and method? How can we evaluate ethnographic work? And finally, what kinds of ethnographers do we want to be? This course considers a range of ethnographic examples in order to analyze both the craft and the stakes of "translating experiences into text."

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 5500

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5573 Psychoeducational Interactions with Black Males

The founder(s) of this course wondered, in an overtly and covertly racist society: “What if we engaged practitioners, educators and researchers in training (social work, policy, criminal justice, counseling, education, health care, etc.) to develop a more empathic imagination and reflection of the Black male before they encounter them in practice?” Core tenets underlying this class are that racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are ignorant of this reality. Students will learn how to help the Black boys and men they engage to identify and challenge the effects of racial oppression on their academic, occupational, relational and cultural well-being, and to promote post-traumatic growth.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: EDUC 5573

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5600 Creating Black Sacred Cultures: Readings in African American Religious History

This graduate seminar entertains the history of African American cultural production primarily in the twentieth century through foundational and emerging works in the field. This seminar focuses on African American religious history, with a focus on the material, visual, auditory, and literary religious constructions of everyday worlds, lives, and professions. Our readings attend to intersectional dimensions of African American religious life, highlighting the connections of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, alternative religious identities, and region. A focus on Black cultural production and its producers enriches African American religious history. Seminar participants will engage the theoretical concerns and methodological approaches that illuminate the ways that Black women and men capture and (re)shape the meaning of their worlds in a variety of domestic, professional, social, and political settings. The seminar’s primary aims are to help participants define interests within the field to pursue further study, to consider potential areas of research, and to aid preparation for doctoral examinations.

Spring

Also Offered As: RELS 5600

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5700 Oil to Diamonds: The Political Economy of Natural Resources in Africa

This course examines the ways in which the processes of the extraction, refining, sale and use of natural resources – including oil and diamond – in Africa produce complex regional and global dynamics. We explore how values are placed on resources, how such values, the regimes of valuation, commodification and the social formations that are (re)produced by these regimes lead to cooperation and conflict in the contemporary African state, including in the relationships of resource-rich African countries with global powers. Specific cases will be examined against the backdrop of theoretical insights to encourage comparative analyses beyond Africa. Some audio-visual materials will be used to enhance the understanding of the political economy and sociality of natural resources.

Fall

Also Offered As: ANTH 5700, SOCI 5700

Mutually Exclusive: AFRC 4500

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5701 Topics in Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture

This course treats some important aspect of African American and Afro-Diasporic literature and culture. Some recent versions of the course have focused on the emergence of African-American women writers, on the relation between African-American literature and cultural studies, and on the Harlem Renaissance. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5700, ENGL 5700

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5710 Visualizing W.E.B.DUBOIS

This seminar will focus on a project that views history as a result of our contemporary society in which biographical truths are constantly shifting. So the historical biographers write about the way they remembered and visualize the past, and not about the way that it happened. We will take Du Bois's biography in his own words and interrogate his narrative with the visual narratives of his life and influence produced by others. "Visualizing W.E.B Du Bois" focuses on photographic, film, and video representations intended to present some aspect of Du Bois's reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. Such projects include photos, materials originally shot on film stock, and digital images that can be either displayed in a book or magazine, and moving images made into a film or video for a TV show or released for screening in cinemas, or other broadcast mediums like YouTube and Vimeo.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: SOCI 5710

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5791 Globalism and National Identity in the Americas

This course examines the way that issues of universal, global, and national identity have been negotiated and challenged in art and visual culture of the Americas. It also aims to give students an introduction to the various theories and methodological practices that have been used to critique and explain these images and objects since the end of WWII. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5791, GSWS 5791, LALS 5791

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5792 Biography and Art History

Beginning with the ancient Greeks, people have created specific biographical structures as a way to understand and explain the artistic process.  Artists have often been labeled as natural prodigies possessing creative powers on par with the divine. This seminar will examine the role that biography plays in the assessment of visual art and the creative process over time and across European and American culture.  During the semester we will read art historical texts, watch biographical films, and debate the historical and post-structuralist critical theory that has helped to shape the current cultural construction of the artist. Throughout the seminar we will discuss the underlying debates around these various approaches to biography. This course is open to graduate students and undergraduate students with permission of the instructor.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 5792, CIMS 5792, GSWS 5792, LALS 5792

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5900 Introduction to Francophone Studies

An introduction to major literary movements and authors from five areas of Francophonie: the Maghreb, West Africa, Central Africa, the Caribbean and Quebec.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5900, FREN 5900

1 Course Unit

AFRC 5910 Francophone Postcolonial Studies

Please see the department's website for current course description: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/french/pc

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 5910, FREN 5910

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6020 Stereotype Threat, Impostor Phenomenon, and African Americans

This course critically examines stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon as they relate to African Americans. Both stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon negatively affect African Americans. The apprehension experienced by African Americans that they might behave in a manner that confirms an existing negative cultural stereotype is stereotype threat, which usually results in reduced effectiveness in African Americans' performance. Stereotype threat is linked with impostor phenomenon. Impostor phenomenon is an internal experience of intellectual phoniness in authentically talented individuals, in which they doubt their accomplishments and fear being exposed as a fraud. While stereotype threat relies on broad generalization, the impostor phenomenon describes feelings of personal inadequacy, especially in high-achieving African Americans. This course will explore the evolving meanings connected to both stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon in relation to African Americans.

Fall

Also Offered As: EDUC 5538

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6140 Tutankhamun’s Tomb: Its Treasures and Significance

This course examines the short life of the young boy king and what the discovery of his tomb and its contents mean in terms of Egypt’s long history and accomplishments.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: AAMW 6141, MELC 6140

Mutually Exclusive: MELC 2140

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6200 Exhibiting Black Bodies

This course concerns the exhbiting of Black Bodies in Museums and gallery spaces. We will trace the evolution of public history from the "Cabinets of Curiosity" in 18th and 19th Century Europe, through to the current institutional confirmation of the vindications traditions represented by Museu Afro Brasil (Sao Paulo, Brazil), National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington,D.C.), and the Museum of Black Civilization (Dakar, Senegal). We will give particular attention to "why these representations at these times in these places?." In the process of addressing these questions we will give voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content from those with the colonial mentality, to those with the abolitiionist and nationalist and Pan-African visions.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: SOCI 6600

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6240 Race, Poverty, & Place

In recent years, long-disinvested cities have become the site of renewed investment, population growth, and economic development in a phenomenon often described as gentrification. Nonetheless, socioeconomic inequality between races, ethnicities, genders, and places within the larger metropolitan area continue to persist, suggesting that a rising tide does not raise all boats. Planners must grapple with these issues of inequality and inequity, particularly the implementation of plans and policies that may in theory provide benefits to all, but in practice continue to accumulate benefits for a select few. This course examines the construction of race, the making of a place, and the persistence of poverty in racialized places in the city. This course will engage in a critical discussion of the aforementioned themes, such that the normative notions of race, capitalism, urbanism, gender, power, and space are upended to privilege more marginalized perspectives of these processes.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6320 Demography of Race

This course will examine demographic and statistical methods used to capture the impact of racial stratification in society. This course covers the skills and insights used by demographers and social statisticians in the study of racial data. A key challenge facing researchers is the interpretation of the vast amount of racial data generated by society. As these data do not directly answer important social questions, data analysis and statistics must be used to interpret them. The course will examine the logic used to communicate statistical results from racial data in various societies. We will question the scientific claims of social science methodology by extending the critical perspective to biases that may underlie research methods. We will discuss good and bad practices within the context of the historical developments of the methods.

Also Offered As: DEMG 6320, SOCI 6320

Mutually Exclusive: SOCI 3230

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6323 Multicultural Issues in Education

This course examines critical issues, problems, and perspectives in multicultural education. Intended to focus on access to literacy and educational opportunity, the course will engage class members in discussions around a variety of topics in educational practice, research, and policy. Specifically, the course will (1) review theoretical frameworks in multicultural education, (2) analyze the issues of race, racism, and culture in historical and contemporary perspective, and (3) identify obstacles to participation in the educational process by diverse cultural and ethnic groups. Students will be required to complete field experiences and classroom activities that enable them to reflect on their own belief systems, practices, and educational experiences. This is a Masters level course.

Also Offered As: EDUC 6323

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6400 Proseminar in Africana Studies

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

Fall

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6401 Proseminar in Africana Studies

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6410 Slavery in the Atlantic World

Using the lenses of labor, violence, gender, religion, and race, we will examine slavery in the Atlantic World, including Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States, from the 16th through the 19th centuries.

Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6450 Historical Research and Writing

This seminar is suitable for graduate students in any discipline in which historical research may be relevant. We will work with both secondary and primary sources, and students will have the opportunity to visit and undertake research in an archive.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6542 Brazilian Baroque

This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and visual culture of the Portuguese Empire with emphasis on Brazil and its relations with Africa and Asia.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 6542

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6550 Black Political Thought: Difference And Community

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century.

Also Offered As: GSWS 6550, LALS 6550

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6552 The State, Civil Society, and Democracy in Africa

This course examines the nature and dynamics of the state and civil society in Africa and how these determine the career of democracy, democratization and democratic rule in the continent. It considers different accounts of the state in Africa (or the African state), civil society and democracy in elaborating an informed understanding of the political, economic and social processes in the continent. How does the nature of the state in Africa account for the nature of the civil society and vice versa? How can the career of democracy in the continent illuminate our understanding of the nature of state-society relations? How robust is the relationship between civil society and the state? How can we account for the relationships among civil society, the state and democratic institutions and processes? What are the local, regional, and global forces that nurture and/or hinder democratic practices, including electoral democracy? These questions are confronted in light of their implications for, and complex interactions with, different social formations, institutions, groups, and social practices including gender, ethnicity, nationalism, race, religion, social protest, political institutions, economic formations, etc., etc.

Spring

Also Offered As: ANTH 6552

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6560 Politics and Social Movements in Contemporary Afro-Latin America

Over the past two decades there has been an explosion of research into Afro-Latin American populations in South America and the Caribbean. During this period a generation of scholars who were largely unsatisfied with the research methods and normative agendas of many scholars, activists and politicians of prior eras began to pose distinct research questions and methodological approaches to various subject matter. Afro-Latin identification and identity ( as both separate from and entangled with national identity) is a major theme in the new literature. Race, racism and inequality, Afro-Latin involvement in social movements, political parties and other forms of political articulation have also been prominent themes. In previous eras, scholars largely emphasized various iterations of purportedly racial and ostensibly cultural mixture such as Mestizaje and Democracia Racial to explain why race and racism did not play a prominent role in social and political mobilization. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, however, have found ways to identify attitudes, behaviors , demographic and socio-economic indicators that belie imagery and ideologies of social and political equality achieved through miscegenation (cultural and physical) in Latin America.

Fall

Also Offered As: LALS 6560, PSCI 6120

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6620 North Africa: History, Culture, Society

This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MELC 6620

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6665 Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive

Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 6665, GSWS 6665

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3665

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6740 Facing America

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 6740

Mutually Exclusive: ARTH 2740

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6770 Black Speculative Futures

Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ANTH 6770, ENGL 6770

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6781 African American Art

This course surveys the most important and interesting art produced in the United States (or by American artists living abroad) up through the 1950s. This period encompasses the history of both early and modern art in the U.S., from its first appearances to its rise to prominence and institutionalization. While tracking this history, the course examines art's relation to historical processes of modernization (industrialization, the development of transportation and communications, the spread of corporate organization in business, urbanization, technological development, the rise of mass media and mass markets, etc.) and to the economic polarization, social fragmentation, political conflict, and the cultural changes these developments entailed. In these circumstances, art is drawn simultaneously toward truth and fraud, realism and artifice, science and spirituality, commodification and ephemerality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, individualism and collectivity, the past and the future, professionalization and popularity, celebrating modern life and criticizing it.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: ARTH 6781

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6804 Sighting Black Girlhood

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?

Also Offered As: ANTH 6804

Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 3804

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6850 Modern Art in Africa and Europe

The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the self and how to represent it developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the visual practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the birth of photography, colonial masquerade, impressionism, symbols of power in royal arts, cubism, mass marketing and colonial self-fashioning, West African studio photography, world's fairs and the Musee de l'Homme, Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, anti-aesthetics, colonial arts education, National art schools in the age of African independence, humanism and South African photography under Apartheid.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 6850

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6910 Transatlantic Black Feminisms in Francophone Literatures

This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

Also Offered As: COML 6910, FREN 6910, GSWS 6910

1 Course Unit

AFRC 6971 Afro-Latin America

In-depth analysis of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. The course opens with a general examination of the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas, through the study of fundamental historical, political and sociocultural processes. This panoramic view provides the basic tools for the scrutiny of a broad selection of literary, musical, visual, performance, and cinematic works, which leads to the comprehension of the different ethical-aesthetic strategies used to express the Afro-diasporic experience. Essential concepts such as negritude, creolite, and mestizaje, as well as the most relevant theories on identity and identification in Latin America and the Caribbean, will be thoroughly examined, in articulation with the interpretation of artistic works. Power, nationalism, citizenship, violence, religious beliefs, family and community structures, migration, motherhood and fatherhood, national and gender identities, eroticism, and sexuality are some of the main issues discussed un this seminar.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 7971, LALS 6971, SPAN 6971

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7010 Readings in African American Religion

Readings in African American Religion: Traditional narratives of African American Religion go from slavery to civil rights to "freedom" without taking into account the complex religious lives and intellectual production of people of African descent in the Americas. This course will focus on African American Religion and the historical and theoretical frameworks that have shaped the study of this field. Readings will cover religious studies, anthropology history, and African American studies in order to provide an understanding of the varieties of religion and religious experiences with this particular segment of the African Diaspora.

Not Offered Every Year

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7060 Introduction to Africa and African Diaspora Thought

This course examines the processes by which African peoples have established epistemological, cosmological, and religious systems both prior to and after the institution of Western slavery.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7080 Cultural and Literary Theory of Africa and the African Diaspora

This course introduces students to the theoretical strategies underlying the construction of coherent communities and systems of representation and how those strategies influence the uses of expressive culture over time. Topics vary. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana Studies.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

Fall or Spring

Also Offered As: COML 7080, ENGL 7080

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7100 Political Economy and Social History of Africa and the African Diaspora

This course provides the opportunity for students to investigate the relationship between the emergence of African peoples as historical subjects and their location within specific geopolitical and economic circumstances. Topics vary.

Two Term Class, Student must enter first term; credit given after both terms are complete

Also Offered As: PSCI 7290

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7200 Graduate Prospectus and Grant-Writing Seminar

This course is intended to help students to write a strong dissertation proposal/prospectus. A proposal is a detailed plan for a long journey of of conceptualization, research, and writing that will lead to the first major, independent scholarly contribution. Students will work closely with advisors, peers, and the professor in the course, to develop the questions, methodological approaches, and theoretical perspectives that will guide their research and writing. At the end of the semester, each student will have completed a proposal, and will be ready to defend it.

Fall or Spring

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7230 Multicultural Issues in Education

This course examines critical issues, problems, and perspectives in multicultural education. Intended to focus on access to literacy and educational opportunity, the course will engage class members in discussions around a variety of topics in educational practice, research, and policy. Specifically, the course will (1) review theoretical frameworks in multicultural education, (2) analyze the issues of race, racism, and culture in historical and contemporary perspective, and (3) identify obstacles to participation in the educational process by diverse cultural and ethnic groups. Students will be required to complete field experiences and classroom activities that enable them to reflect on their own belief systems, practices, and educational experiences.

Fall

Also Offered As: EDUC 7323

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7400 Seminar in African-American Music

Seminar on selected topics in African American Music. See department website (under course tab) for current term course description: https://music.sas.upenn.edu

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: MUSC 7400

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7708 Black Classicisms

This course will explore heterogeneous responses to ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literature, art, and political thought of Africa and the Black Diaspora, ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present day and encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. We will analyze how African and black diasporic writers, artists, and thinkers have engaged with and re-imagined Greco-Roman Classics, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and as a source of radical self-expression. Throughout, we will consider the reciprocal dynamic by which dialogues with ancient Greek and Roman classics contribute to the polyphony of black texts and these same texts write back to and signify on the Greek and Roman Classics, diversifying the horizon of expectation for their future interpretation. Writers and artists whose work we will examine include Romare Bearden; Dionne Brand; Gwendolyn Brooks; Aimé Césaire; Austin Clarke; Anna Julia Cooper; Rita Dove; W.E.B. Du Bois; Ralph Ellison; Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona; C.L.R. James; June Jordan; Toni Morrison; Harryette Mullen; Marlene Nourbese Philip; Ola Rotimi; William Sanders Scarborough; Wole Soyinka; Mary Church Terrell; Derek Walcott; Booker T. Washington; Phillis Wheatley; and Richard Wright. We will study these writers in the context of national and transnational histories and networks and in dialogue with relevant theoretical debates. Work for assessment will include a 15-page research paper and the preparation of a teaching syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black Classical Receptions.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: CLST 7708, COML 7708

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7903 Recent Critical Issues in Archival Theories

This seminar examines the literary, historical, and visual matter of the archive in order to generate new method of analysis in cultural studies. Different instructors may emphasize different aspects of the field. Please see the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 7903, ENGL 7903

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7904 New Directions in Black Thought and Literature

This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: COML 7904, ENGL 7904, GSWS 7904

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7910 African Film and Media Pedagogy

This graduate seminar offers an intensive, critical, and collaborative study of contemporary African film and media production. The past three decades have seen an unprecedented shift in the African media landscape. Not only has the wide availability of satellite media across the continent made international film and television programing part of African popular culture, but moreover the growing film industries within the continent, most notably Nollywood, have altered how Africans are carving an image of themselves on the big and small screens. In partnership with local, regional, and international film and media centers, we will study a range of films--features, shorts, documentaries, and television shows--paying close attention to the means and sites of production as well as the formal qualities that distinguish these works. Many of the films we will analyze stand out both for their exceptional aesthetic quality as well as their remarkable ability to confront pressing political and social themes. But we will also think about trash: what counts as trashy media, and for whom? Who watches it, where, and why? Other questions we will ask include: What particular indigenous modes of storytelling do African films employ? What categories begin to emerge under the umbrella category of "African film and media," and where do diasporan film and media practitioners and critics fit in this landscape? How are these films tackling some of the urgent questions of our times, including migration and globalization; ethnic, political, and economic polarization; gender and sexuality; and massive urbanization and industrialization sweeping Africa and other parts of the Global South? What role do festivals in various countries play in shaping media production and distribution? How important is the concept of authorship in this context? And how do these films challenge the dominant western trope of Africa as a spectacle, instead offering novel ways of picturing everyday African experiences that we rarely glimpse in western media? To explore these questions, we will visit multiple sites of film production, distribution, exhibition, and education, including Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, Sankofa Films in Washington, D.C., and the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Location and knowledge production are inextricably connected, and by considering African media production from these multiple sites, and collaborating with multiple stakeholders, this course offers a directly engaged pedagogy of the complex artistic, cultural, social, and political dynamics of African audiovisual creation. The travel component of this course entails a day trip to Washington, D.C. during the semester (tentative date: April 2, 2020) and a week-long trip to Addis Ababa at the end of the spring term (students applying for this course should be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa May 30, 2020-June 7, 2020). All expenses for travel, accommodation, and food will be covered, but students will need to hold a passport. Ultimately, this course aims to use film and media production to intervene in a larger discourse on how Africa is figured in the global humanities, not as an absent or passive actor but one actively engaged in producing art and humanistic knowledge that has much to teach us and the world. Admission to the course will be by permission only and students are required to submit a short statement of interest (max. 250 words) to dagw@english.upenn.edu and redkaren@sas.upenn.edu. Students must be prepared to travel to Addis Ababa and Washington D.C. as described in the syllabus, and must hold a passport.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ARTH 7910

1 Course Unit

AFRC 7920 Study of a Genre: The Manifesto

If ubiquity confers significance, the manifesto is a major literary form, and yet it has been relatively marginalized in genre studies, where attention to the manifesto has been largely devoted to anthologies. In this seminar we will focus on the manifesto as a genre by exploring its histories, rhetorics, definitions and reception from a Black Studies framework. Associated with politics, art, literature, pedagogy, film, and new technologies, the manifesto involves the taking of an engaged position that is tied to the moment of its enunciation. The manifesto's individual or collective authors seek to provoke radical change through critique and the modeling of new ways of being though language and images. Included on the syllabus will be anticolonial, anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ manifestos of the 18th through 21st centuries from throughout the Black world . In addition to leading class discussion, students will be responsible for a seminar paper or a final project to be developed in consultation with the instructor.

Also Offered As: COML 7920, ENGL 7920

1 Course Unit

AFRC 9005 Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race, Class and Gender

This writing workshop explores the influence of identity, primarily race, class, gender, and sexuality, on the ways we convey our personal truths to the world.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 9005, GSWS 9005, MLA 5005, URBS 9005

1 Course Unit

AFRC 9006 Learning from James Baldwin

This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art.

Also Offered As: ENGL 9006, GSWS 9006, MLA 5006, URBS 9006

1 Course Unit

AFRC 9016 Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender

In this workshop, we will address the ways race, class, and gender impact our lives, our work, and our culture. As a class, we will create connection and community by practicing deep listening, daily writing, deep reading, and the sharing of ideas and observations.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 9016, GSWS 9016, MLA 5016, URBS 9016

1 Course Unit

AFRC 9017 Considering Race, Class and Punishment in the American Prison System

This writing seminar will sharpen and expand our writing, while bringing to our hearts and minds a deeper understanding of the reality of imprisonment in the United States. This system never goes away. This year it is locking up more than 2,300,000 men, women and children—the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment in the world. Even when we know the statistics and watch shows about crime and jail on TV, what do we really know about life behind bars? For a year? Ten years? Life? As a young journalist, I saw how the criminal justice system was used to suppress Black leadership. I felt drawn to teach creative writing at Holmesburg Prison, to eventually investigate the state prison system, interview prisoners, make friendships, write a newspaper series, magazine articles, and my first book on the subject. For nearly five decades, I’ve observed the human cost of a prison system that connects and damages all of our lives and keeps people from poverty in place. In this course, we will seek insights in books and stories written from prisoners’ personal experiences. We’ll also read scholars—Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Angela Davis and others—who shed light on the historical repetitions and political exploitations. Guest speakers will include public defenders, parolees, former prisoners, and those fighting for prisoners’ rights and re-entry. Students will gain a more intimate understanding of how the legacies of slavery, racism, the prejudices of class, caste, and misogyny intersect and determine who goes to prison and who does not. Students will free-write for ten minutes a day, every day, and write personal reflections on readings, films, and guest speakers. Responses will lead to essays or stories that students write and present for class discussion. These key pieces may draw from observation, facts and imagination, and may traverse literary nonfiction, memoir, fiction, or poetry. We will present the best of your work in a reading at the end of the semester.

Not Offered Every Year

Also Offered As: ENGL 9017, GSWS 9017, MLA 5017, URBS 9017

1 Course Unit