| source Duke (X) |
level |
department African and African American Studies (X) |
Freedom is a hall mark of the American experience and a problem in the American experience. It has also been a contested hallmark. This course explores the problem of freedom in the aftermath of emancipation in the U.S. Why and how was the meaning of freedom re-conceptualized? How did the process, design, and execution of emancipation expose tensions in the very meaning of freedomÂbetween political freedom and economic freedom? How did ideologies of race inform how Americans thought about (and legislated about) freedom and citizenship for former slaves? What were the legacies of the Reconstruction era for subsequent U.S. and the problems of race and freedom?
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
The main purpose of this course is to understand the ways in which economy,technology and ideology have developed and constructed the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While most of the course focuses on the period after the industrial revolution in Europe, some of the reading will go further back in time (e.g., the first part of Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man). One theme that will run throughout this course is the overwhelming impact of capitalism in creating a world of great wealth and systemic inequalities between regions of the globe and the implications of that inequality for human relations. Even as technology and commodities create a world market and a material culture spanning manifold cultures, machines become the index of "Western dominance." Ideologies of superiority become a powerful medium through which people in the "West" have perceived and still perceive the rest of the world in which technologies of mass communication play an important part in constructing and disseminating stereotypes.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
An overview of jazz history, with special attention to two leading figures,
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
An overview of jazz history, with special attention to two leading figures,
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
An overview of jazz history, with special attention to two leading figures,
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is a broad-strokes introduction to the history, politics, culture, aesthetics and religion of African peoples. Through a variety of sources-scholarly works by historians and anthropologists, as well as films, journalistic accounts and literary texts-we will explore the ways in which Africans across this massive continent have creatively responded to the slave trade, colonialism, economic exploitation, and to other more recent challenges in the face of a globalized, postcolonial world. A critical component of the class will involve interrogating Euro-American assumptions and hence representations of Africa, and the ways in which these are generally at odds with African realities. The need to think critically about such representations is particularly pressing at a moment when images of "Africa as failure" - as a place of famine, AIDS, feckless states, atrocities and civil war - are so pervasive and have come to dominate popular and mass media understandings of Africa's place in the world.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
An exploration of the role of selected West African
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This class is designed to work towards an understanding of the many functions, principles, style variations, and techniques involved in the African dance genre. Dance and music are deeply embedded in the belief patterns of many African societies and what is revealed culturally provides a lens for performing several styles of African dance.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
An exploration of the role of selected West African
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This class is designed to work towards an understanding of the many functions, principles, style variations, and techniques involved in the African dance genre. Dance and music are deeply embedded in the belief patterns of many African societies and what is revealed culturally provides a lens for performing several styles of African dance.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
Documentary writing course focusing on race and "storytelling" in the South, using fiction, autobiography, and traditional history books. Students will produce narratives using documentary research, interviews, and personal memories. Focus on twentieth-century racial politics.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This class is about race relations in the history of the USA. We begin the term with a discussion of the main concepts sociologists use to analyze racial matters. Central to this discussion is understanding that "racism" is not "prejudice," "ignorance," or a "set of beliefs" but a comprehensive historical system of racial domination organized by the logic of white supremacy. We follow this theoretical discussion with a brief discussion about the development of "whiteness" as a social category in the USA. However, the bulk of the time is dedicated to the systematic examination of the historical experiences of five racial minorities vis-a-vis whites. The five racial minoritry groups examines are African Americans, Chicanos/Mexican Americans, American Indians/Native Peoples, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans. We survey each group in a very structured manner. First, we review the most salient features of the history of the group in the USA. Afer this review, we proceed to discuss some of the general problems affecting the group through either a general interpretation of its history in the USA or through a historical case study of the group in one region of the USA. Finally, we examine the contemporary social statistics of the group vis-a-vis whites. We conclude the class with a discussion of some of the solutions that have been proposed to deal with the racial dilemmas plaguing the United States of America.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This course steps "behind the veil" of segregation, moving out of the visible world of the white supremacist South and into the invisible interior life of the regionÂs African Americans. Students of Dixie had long believed that segregation resulted in total oppression by whites and passive submission by blacks. But a massive oral history project, housed here at CDS, prompted scholars to overturn this interpretation and replace it with a complex picture of African American ingenuity, survival, and resistance. This course allows students to see Âfirst-hand what the South looks like from the perspective of the regionÂs long-repressed, but frequently misunderstood, black population. Behind the veil we see not only oppression but struggle and persistence, not just despair but hard work and strong communities, not just hate but love, hope, and humanity.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
A consideration of the major forces that shaped the development of Caribbean societies during the 1700s. Themes covered include merchantilist empire, colonial institutions, imperial power, Atlantic culture, slavery, war and peace, the American revolution, French revolution, and Antislavery.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
ÂThe South in Black and White is a lecture and discussion course. We will focus on the history and culture of the 20th century South, a region of the heart, the mind, and the United States where democracy has been envisioned and embattled with global consequences. We will constitute a kind of front porch on Southern history, where we will join those whom Zora Neale Hurston called Âthe big picture talkers and hear their stories. Each week there will be music, poetry, film clips, and opportunities for discussion. There will be music, poetry, documents and stories every day. We will explore a history as rich and complicated, painful and delightful as the South itself.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
In her seminal essay ÂDeviance as Resistance, political scientist Cathy Cohen writes, ÂI continue to be interested in the possibility of constructing a field of investigation based in African American Studies and borrowing from queer theory and Black feminist analysis that is centered around the experiences of those who stand on the ~outside of state sanctioned, normalized White, middle- and upperclass, male heterosexuality. Substituting CohenÂs ÂAfrican-American Studies with ÂHip-Hop, the goal of ÂQueering Hip-Hop is to examine Hip-Hop Culture and Rap Music through the lens of black queer and black feminist analysis with a particular focus on iterations of Hip-Hop that challenge mainstream perceptions of Âwho and what hip-hop is. As such ÂQueering Hip-Hop is an attempt to do just thatÂrender the Âofficial history of hip-hop as Âstrange and ÂoppositionalÂ
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
Children's development does not occur in isolation. Children grow up in families with cultural backgrounds and beliefs; in neighborhoods that are homogeneous or diverse and have certain resources or risks; and children grow up with varying economic and social capital. This course focuses on the competing and overlapping definitions of race, culture and ethnicity and of other demographic indicators including socioeconomic status and community or neighborhood context. This course will examine how the psychological literature that has attempted to understand and disentangle these factors as they impact children and families in the following areas: parental beliefs and expectations; parents' disciplinary strategies and affection towards their children; children's mental health, academic, and career goals. This course will focus on African American, Latino, and Asian American youth.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
The overall goal of this course is to enhance students' understanding of the
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
In 2009 South Africa will celebrate fifteen years of democracy under an African National Congress (ANC) government, following forty-six years of apartheid under a National Party (NP) government. What should be celebrated and by whom?
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A continuation of 164A. The late nineteenth century to contemporary writers.
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James Baldwin: A Case Study in ÂThe American Century.Â
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This course focuses on the cultural politics of the Caribbean. How Caribbean peoples have attempted to define and redefine themselves in the face of difficult histories. We will study how power operates in the lives of people of different sociocultural backgrounds, namely African, Indian, Chinese and European, and their various understandings of their places in the world. As the Caribbean is one of the first if not the first really modern regions of the world, we will examine the meaning of this modernity as it has been understood and performed by Caribbean peoples primarily in the region as well as in those areas to which Caribbeans have migrated, namely the US, Great Britain and parts of South America. Novels, films, music, sociological and historical texts will be used to explore these issues.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
Inspired by a major shift in recent times towards modern and contemporary art historical studies in African art, this seminar enters this discourse via the notion of international cultural exchange, and critical and cultural responses to assorted colonial projects. Through examinations of official (or "royal") arts, religious expressions, visual semiotics, propaganda, and postmodernism, this seminar strives to make sense of the modern and contemporary in African art beyond explanations that largely hinge on "mimicry" and/or technical/aesthetic failure. Rather, the approach here is one which allows for artistic and visual trajectories in Africa that encompass universal, cosmopolitan, as well as more unconventional, introspective viewpoints.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is intended for graduate students who expect to be teaching about social inequalities, especially those of race, gender and class. What is the appropriate content to be teaching? What are the trade-offs among the various answers to that question? What are the trade-offs among various ways of presenting the content? How do our own characteristics--ideology, race, gender, age--affect the teaching process?
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines how people lay claims to belonging as citizens of nation-states. Focusing primarily on African and Indian descended populations in the Caribbean and the Pacific, we investigate how these populations invoke colonial constructions to reinvent themselves and how these reinventions work, to negotiate their racialized identities in these shared communities. What moments give rise to possibilities for fusions and confusions? These questions are woven through the lived realities of land, cultural heritage and time, in places like Trinidad, Guyana, and Fiji. We will consider the construction of histories and explore the general cultural politics that sustain and bolster claims of authenticity and belonging and unbelonging within these national spaces. What sorts of sociocultural and political strategies are deployed by such people to exclude others even as they both consciously and unconsciously connect across these troubling divides.
Score: 10.536665 Details | Listing | Web page