Before Black Lives Matters Course

 

Fall 2024 Courses

SUB-TERM	COURSE	INSTRUCTOR
Fall Semester	AFEN BC3815, The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling T 2:10-4pm ONLINE	Kim Hall
Fall Semester	AFRS BC2004, Introduction to Africana Studies M,W 11:40-12:55PM	Abosede George
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3021,Queer Caribbean Critique T 10:10-12pm	Maja Horn
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3110 Colloquium: Caribbean Women Herstories W 4:10-6pm	Celia Naylor
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3160, Fanon`s Psychology of the Oppressed W 2:10-4pm	TBA
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3516, Environmental  Humanities in the Global South TH 2:10-4pm	Yvette Christianse
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3550, Queer Harlem T 4:10-6pm	Maleda Beligne
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3950, Black Americans Abroad TR 2:10-4pm	Tamara Walker
Fall Semester	AFRS BC3998, Africana Studies Senior Seminar 4:10-6pm	Monica Miller

 

Spring 2025 Courses

SUB-TEM	COURSE	INSTRUCTOR
Spring Semester	AFEN BC3135, Zora Neale Hurston T 10:10am-12pm	Monica Miller
Spring Semester	AFEN BC3196, Home to Harlem W12:10-2PM	Monica Miller
Spring Semester	AFEN BC3817, Black Shakespeare W4:10-6pm ONLINE	Kim Hall
Spring Semester	AFRS BC2005, Caribbean Culture and Societies MW 10:10-11:25am	Maja Horn
Spring Semester	AFRS BC2006, Introduction to Africana Diaspora TR 11:40am-12:55pm	Tamara Walker
Spring Semester	AFRS BC3532, Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem W 10:10-4pm	Diedra Harris-Kelley
Spring Semester	AFRS BC3550, Queer Harlem W 2:10-4PM	Maleda Beligne
Spring Semester	AFRS BC3552, Black Women Style and Performance W 10:10-12pm	Shirley Taylor
Spring Semester	AFRS BC3565, Apollo: History and Culture M 1:10-3pm	Shirley Taylor
Spring Semester	AFRS GU4100, Slavery and Freedom in Latin America 2:10-4pm	Tamara Walker
Spring Semester	ARCH BV3202, Advanced Architectural Design II MW 9-11:50am	Kadabri Baxi,

 

Caribbean Culture & Societies

The Department of Africana Studies offers a major and a minor:

Major

The Africana Studies major requires ten courses, to be distributed as follows:

I. Introductory Courses:

Each student will take 2 (of the 3) introductory Africana Studies courses. We strongly suggest students take Introduction to African Studies (AFRS 2004) AND either Caribbean Cultures and Societies (AFRS 2005) OR Introduction to the African Diaspora (AFRS 2006)

AFRS BC 2004x Introduction to African Studies: An interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the study of Africa, moving from pre-colonial through colonial and post-colonial periods to contemporary Africa. Focus will be on its history, societal relations, politics and the arts. The objective is to provide a critical survey of the history as well as the continuing debates in African studies.
  - 3 points.

AFRS BC2005 Caribbean Culture and Societies. Multidisciplinary exploration of the Anglophone, Hispanic, and Francophone Caribbean.  Discusses theories about the development and character of Caribbean societies; profiles representative islands; and explores enduring and contemporary issues in Caribbean Studies (race, color and class; politics and governance; political economy; the struggles for liberation; cultural identity and migration.) BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL).
- 3 points.

AFRS BC 2006y Introduction to the African Diaspora: An interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the African diaspora in the Americas: its motivations, dimensions, consequences, and the importance and stakes of its study. Beginning with the contacts between Africans and the Portuguese in the 15th century, this class will open up diverse paths of inquiry as students attempt to answer questions, clear up misconceptions, and challenge assumptions about the presence of Africans in the New World.
  - 3 points.

II. Language:

The college distributional requirement for languages (i.e., Foundations) stipulates that each student must complete two (2) courses in a single language.  For Africana majors the language studied must be of Africa or its diasporas (including Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Hausa, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili).

III. Harlem:

Each student will take a course on Harlem, chosen in consultation with her advisor, from among the offerings at Barnard or Columbia.

IV. Electives:

Each student will, with the approval of her advisor, select five electives. Of these five, one must be on Africa and one must concern issues of gender.

V. One Semester Colloquium in Africana Studies

AFRS BC3110 (Section 1)  - Africana Colloquium: Critical Race Theory  or

AFRS BC3110 (Section 2) - Africana Colloquium: Diasporas of the Indian Ocean

VI. Senior Seminar:

Students will complete a one-semester program of interdisciplinary research in preparation of a senior essay.
 

Minor

Although the college requires students to declare the minor formally after they have completed course work for the minor, the Africana Studies Program strongly encourages students to meet with the Africana Studies Chair (or the minor advisor) to plan a course of study and fill out an "intent to minor" form.

The Africana minor consists of five courses to be distributed as follows: Choose any two from the introduction courses.

1.    AFRS BC 2004x Introduction to African Studies

2.    AFRS BC 2005 Caribbean Culture and Societies

3.    AFRS BC 2006y Introduction to the African Diaspora

4.    One course on Harlem to be chosen from electives offered at Barnard/Columbia

4-5. Two electives chosen by the students in consultation with the Director/minor advisor. 

Courses Recommended for First-Years

AFRS BC2004 Introduction to African Studies

AFRS BC2005 Caribbean Culture  and Societies

AFRS BC2006 Introduction to the African Diaspora

 

AFRS BC2004 INTRODUCTN TO AFRICAN STUDIES. 3.00 points.
Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the study of Africa, moving from pre-colonial through colonial and post-colonial periods to contemporary Africa. Focus will be on its history, societal relations, politics and the arts. The objective is to provide a critical survey of the history as well as the continuing debates in African Studies

Fall 2023: AFRS BC2004
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 2004	001/00003	M W 11:40am - 12:55pm 203 Diana Center	Abosede George	3.00	23/30

 

AFRS BC2005 CARIBBEAN CULTURE ＆ SOCIETIES. 3.00 points.
This course offers a chronological study of the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone insular Caribbean through the eyes of some of the region’s most important writers and thinkers. We will focus on issues that key Caribbean intellectuals--including two Nobel prize-winning authors--consider particularly enduring and relevant in Caribbean cultures and societies. Among these are, for example, colonization, slavery, national and postcolonial identity, race, class, popular culture, gender, sexuality, tourism and migration. This course will also serve as an introduction to some of the exciting work on the Caribbean by professors at Barnard College and Columbia University (faculty spotlights)

Spring 2024: AFRS BC2005
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 2005	001/00035	M W 10:10am - 11:25am 302 Milbank Hall	Maja Horn	3.00	21/20

 

AFRS BC2006 INTRODUCTION AFRICAN DIASPORA. 3.00 points.
Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the African diaspora in the Americas: its motivations, dimensions, consequences, and the importance and stakes of its study. Beginning with the contacts between Africans and the Portuguese in the 15th century, this class will open up diverse paths of inquiry as students attempt to answer questions, clear up misconceptions, and challenge assumptions about the presence of Africans in the New World

Spring 2024: AFRS BC2006
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 2006	001/00032	T Th 11:40am - 12:55pm 207 Milbank Hall	Tamara Walker	3.00	25/25

 

AFRS BC2010 Colonialism in Africa. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
This course will prepare students to examine diplomatic interactions involving African and European polities during the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the role that military force played in helping European nations secure access to territory and control of resources on the African continent. Students will also examine the vast array of forensic evidence (the broad range of ritual compacts and treaties, the forms of proof and the legal debates) that European merchants and political representatives used to secure entitlements to land and resources.

AFRS BC2115 BLACK FEMINIST PORTAL: TRANSFORMATIVE TEXTS. 4.00 points.
In the Spring of 2021, Black Feminist Portal will invite students engage a multi-generational literary and activist archive of survival and change. Using the emerging technology of the digital oracle, the course empowers students to engage the complexity of their own lives in this moment of historic change supported by the writing of Black women writers whose work is central to the formation of Black feminist theory, practice and possibility. Topics considered include: how the personal and the political shape each other, community accountability and responses to violence, and race and educational institutional change. There is also ample space in the course for students to focus on the transformations currently occurring in their own lives. This course will take place through a combination of asynchronous resources and live meetings via video conference and is made possible by a partnership with Black Feminist Film School which allows for the creation of in-depth materials that students can engage on their own time

AFRS BC2510 Food, Ethnicity & Globalization. 3 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Ethics and Values.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Prerequisites: None
Corequisites: None
When people produce, consume or refuse food, choices that often seem "natural," unthinking and highly personal are in fact daily acts of identity and belonging that place individuals in the global circulation of goods, people and resources. This course examines representations of food and foodways as a way of understanding the politics of representation and the complex interplay of race, ethnicity and gender. The course's units on Ethnicity, Migration and Identity; Food & Globalization; Food and Power; and the Politics of Pork, will allow students to understand foodways as key expressions or embodiments of cultural affiliations and food choices as linked to questions of morality and values.

AFRS BC3001 Politics of Gender in Contemporary South Africa.1.5 point.

This course will only take place from September 23rd through October 9th.

This module is designed to offer mid-senior level students with an interest in African Studies an intensive engagement with the politics of gender and sexualities in specific African contexts of the c21. Although the module will include discussion of aspects of the sexual and gendered operations of colonial praxis, the concentration will be on the ways in which post-flag democracy cultures have taken up the question of gender and sexualities. We will explore debates on the representation and realities of lesbian and transgendered experiences, the meaning of race-based identity-politics within “new” democracies, the narratives of “the body” as they emerge through medical and religious discourses on “women,”  and discourses of “e-masculinization” and militarism.     Note that this course will only run from September 16th through September 30th.

AFRS BC3002 HARLEM MOVEMENT LEGACIES. 4.00 points.
Harlem Movement Legacies is intended for you to explore the geography and culture of Harlem, New York City through movement. This course embodies the Akan principle of sankofa, looking back to move forward: We will explore the cultural roots of movement styles we engage with, come to understand their influence within the community, and their importance to the lives of their participants and viewers, all while looking toward the futures of these movement traditions. Students will engage with a mixture of concert, popular, and vernacular dance forms, exploring venues for dance practice and performance from The Apollo to the street. The topics covered during the semester are not intended to be exhaustive or reflect a chronological ordering, but rather a survey of the breadth of movement practices in Harlem. Students will have the opportunity to witness, embody, critically discuss and write about dance forms that have emerged and thrive Uptown. Most imp​​ortantly, the work students produce by the semester’s end will contribute to critical archival documentation of Harlem’s movement culture bearers. Experiential learning will take place through lectures, films, site visits, and attending classes, performances, or rehearsals. During the semester, you will be asked to apply critical thinking, reading, and writing skills to Dance­ related texts and choreography. By the end of the semester, you should be able to understand and interpret the language and form of movement work in the context of time and place. The big questions we will tackle during this course include: How do we see, write about and talk about dance? What is legacy? What are the dance and movement traditions in Harlem? What are the artistic impulses, pertinent issues, communities and contexts that bring this work to life? How are Harlem movement legacies honored and sustained? What is the future of these traditions? Dance itself is the primary source material for this course, and we will learn to read it closely as we ask these questions. The major assignments for this course will ask students to capture and interpret Harlem’s movement legacies through movement, oral storytelling, and writing

AFRS BC3020 Harlem Crossroads. 3 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Studies Harlem in the context of African-American and African diaspora culture and society as well as American urbanization. Primarily focusing on Harlem of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course offers students opportunities to discuss political economy, immigration, migration and the role of the city in social life.

AFRS BC3021 Queer Caribbean Critique. 4.00 points.
This seminar analyzes the different critical approaches to studying same-sex desire in the Caribbean region. The region’s long history of indigenous genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism, have made questions about “indigenous” and properly “local” forms of sexuality more complicated than in many other regions. In response, critics have worked to recover and account for local forms of same-sex sexuality and articulated their differences in critical and theoretical terms outside the language of “coming out” and LGBT identity politics. On the other hand, critics have emphasized how outside forces of colonialism, imperialism, and the globalization of LGBT politics have impacted and reshaped Caribbean same-sex desires and subjectivities. This course studies these various critical tendencies in the different contexts of the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch Caribbean

AFRS BC3055 Slave Resistance in the United States from the Colonial Era to the Civil War. 3 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Analyzes the multifaceted nature of slave resistance, its portrayal and theorization by scholars.  Critically examines the various pathways of resistance of enslaved Africans and African-Americans, both individually and collectively (e.g., running away, non-cooperation, theft, arson, as well as verbal and physical confrontation, revolts and insurrections).  Considers how gender shaped acts of resistance.

AFRS BC3065 Writing Diasporic Cities. 4 points.
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Ethics and Values.
This course considers representation of four cities in which diasporic communities have settled and negotiated the psychic and material terrain that stretches from a past homeland to a settled homeland.  We look at New York, London, Kinshasha, and Cape Town where communities of different African diasporas- historical and contemporary- as well as South Asian diasporas have settled.   Locally, we enter a space like the contemporary Malcolm Shabazz market to attend to the transnational, mercantilist as well as cultural public spheres that it creates.  We also look at earlier transmigrations by African Diasporic groups moving from Jamaica to Harlem to Marseilles.  We consider London in the 1980s and the early 2000s.   Thematically, we consider different kinds of displacement and their impact upon women.  We foreground race, ethnicity, nationalist discourses, global economies, and the publishing, distribution and marketing networks of the Arts produced in these cities.  We read across genres and consider graffiti in neighborhoods that have diasporic communities.

AFRS BC3100 Medicine and Power in African History. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Examines medical discourse and practice in Africa, emphasizing relationships between power and medical knowledge. Topics include: medicine and empire, tropical medicine, colonial public health and social control, labor, reproductive health, and HIV/AIDS.

AFRS BC3110 THE AFRICANA COLLOQUIUM. 4.00 points.
Prerequisites: Students must attend first day of class and admission will be decided then. Enrollment limited to 18 students. Priority will be given to Africana majors and CCIS students (Africana Studies, American Studies and Women's Studies majors; minors in Race and Ethnic Studies).

This course is concerned with two interrelated topics: 1) the long, complicated history of voyages to Latin America; and 2) the myriad and evolving ways voyagers to the region have portrayed its landscapes, people, food, festivals, and more. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a type of voyage characteristic of a given era, including: conquest voyages undertaken by figures such as Christopher Columbus and Hernán Cortés settler-colonial voyages undertaken by Iberians seeking new lives in the New World captive voyages undertaken by Africans destined for enslavement in households, cities, and rural environs freedom voyages undertaken by African Americans escaping from slavery sex-tourism voyages undertaken by North Americans and Europeans We will view these topics through a combination of different forms of media (such as letters, travel accounts, features, and films) and traditional scholarly sources that will help contextualize them

Fall 2023: AFRS BC3110
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3110	001/00001	W 2:10pm - 4:00pm 407 Barnard Hall	Maleda Belilgne	4.00	5/15
AFRS 3110	002/00005	T 10:10am - 12:00pm 119 Milstein Center	Monica Miller	4.00	5/15
Spring 2024: AFRS BC3110
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3110	001/00036	M W 9:00am - 10:15am 306 Milbank Hall	Khemani Gibson	4.00	0/20

AFRS BC3120 History of African-American Music. 3 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Survey interrogates the cultural and aesthetic development of a variety of interconnected musical genres - such as blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, R&B, hip-hop, classical and their ever changing same/names - viewed as complex human activities daringly danced at dangerous discourses inside and outside the American cultural mainstreams.

AFRS BC3121 Black Women in America. 4 points.
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS).

Prerequisites: Students must attend first day of class and admission will be decided then. Priority will be given to CCIS students (Africana Studies, American Studies and Women's Studies majors; minors in Race and Ethnic Studies). Enrollment limited to 20 students.
Examines the roles of black women in the U.S. as thinkers, activists and creators during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the intellectual work, social activism and cultural expression of African American women, we examine how they understood their lives, resisted oppression and struggled to change society. We will also discuss theoretical frameworks (such as "double jeopardy," or "intersectionality") developed for the study of black women. The seminar will encourage students to pay particular attention to the diversity of black women and critical issues facing Black women today. This course is the same as WMST BC3121.

AFRS BC3125 Diasporic Women at Work. 4 points.
This course is an exploration of different ways of conceptualizing the relationships between gender and labor over time, including critiques linking gendered labor to race and class. Grounded primarily in ethnography and political economy, we will look at some of the changes and continuities in the relationship between gender and forms of labor ranging from women in factories to affective labor/caring work in the African Diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and Latin America.

AFRS BC3134 Unheard Voices: African Women's Literature. 4 points.
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a 'mythic unity'? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora.

AFRS BC3144 Black Theater. 4 points.
Theatre is always reflecting, constructing, and resisting notions of community.  In this course we will explore the way in which Black Theatre, in particular African-American theatre, has served as an intervening agent in racial, cultural, and national identity by examining the relationship between Black theatre development and the historical circumstances surrounding that development.  In 1998, at a Theatre Communications Conference in Princeton New Jersey, August Wilson—one of the premier playwrights of the century as well as one of the most prolific African-American playwrights in American history—demanded a theatre for and by black Americans, “art that feeds the spirit and celebrates the life of black America.”  His statement raised considerable questions and inspired heated debates that crossed both racial and cultural boundaries.  In this course one of the questions we will explore is taken from August Wilson: Can we define American Black culture through plays written by Black playwrights (in particular African-American playwrights)?  Within the category of Black/African-American theatre, how does gender, culture, geography and class fit it?

AFRS BC3146 African American and African Writing and the Screen. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Focuses on the context and history of representations of African Americans and Africans in early American and other cinematographies; the simultaneous development of early film and the New Negro, Negritude and Pan African movements; and pioneer African American and African cinema.

 

AFRS BC3148 Literature of the Great Migration. 3 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
(Also ENGL BC 3148) Examination of fiction, poetry, essays and films about the Great Migration (1910-1950) of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North, focusing on literary production in New York and Chicago. (This course satisfies the Harlem Requirement for the Africana Studies major).

AFRS BC3150 RACE ＆PERFORMNCE IN CARIBBEAN. 4.00 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Sophomore Standing. Enrollment limited to 18 students.
Analysis of the shifting place and perception of Afro-Caribbean performance in Caribbean societies. This course takes a cross-cultural approach that examines performance through the lens of ethnography, anthropology, music and literary criticism.

AFRS BC3516 Environmental Humanities in the Global South. 4.00 points.
"This interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to make sense of the ‘sense of an ending’ that underlines all warnings about environmental crisis and climate change. Our interdisciplinary course has a doubled foundation out of which our readings and discussions will grow: communal understanding and knowledge about local environments, on one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and the data and information gathered by scientists." "We therefore begin with a simple question: what is the relation between the Humanities and the work of scientists? Scientists undertake painstaking, necessary research to provide communities and their governments with vital, necessary information. Individuals and communities interpret and translate this information, often affectively. An organization of scientists studying carbon levels across Africa can list the progressive increase in temperatures across Africa over a period of years and calculate anticipated increases. An image based on this data may visualize the projected rise:" "A glance reveals something dire based on the way we associate red with danger. Our course is oriented towards who lives beneath the surfaces of data and images that ‘draw a picture’ for us. We read for how communities and individuals explain and communicate their relation to the historical and changing environments. In other words, we attend to narration, in different forms—fiction, poetry, song, travelogue—to grasp how experiences are rendered comprehensible. There is a broad ‘where’ as well, and a fluid ‘when.’ ‘Where’ takes us into the portmanteau category of ‘The Global South.’ We bracket the scope of this category to focus upon specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa and diasporic African communities. ‘When’ permits us to think of time, the time of the world, the times of change and the times of aftermaths. Go into an archive, open a history book, a sacred text and you will encounter ‘endings.’ We enter British colonial archives to see how signs of ‘When’ also allows us to face an underlying dread that might be called a ‘sense of an ending’ and to see just how many such ‘endings’ have come to pass. This is how we enter the diasporic histories of environmental change related to colonialism and the enslavement and transportation of whose descendants live in the broader ‘Global South’ Africans

Fall 2023: AFRS BC3516
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3516	001/00006	Th 10:10am - 12:00pm 111 Milstein Center	Yvette Christianse	4.00	12/20

 

AFRS BC3517 African American Women and Music. 3 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Prerequisites: None
Corequisites: None
Examines the music making practices of African-American women in blues, gospel, jazz, and rock at different periods in the 20th century. Considers the content and context of these musical productions as well as artist biographies in order to understand the significance of music for these producers and their audiences.

AFRS BC3519 Race Before Race: Premodern Constructions of Social Difference. 4 points.
This course expands the reach of traditional analyses of race and ethnicity by demonstrating the key role of premodernity (Classical, Medieval and Early Modern eras) in developing modes of race thinking that shape the modern world. We will use intersectional approaches and critical race theory to examine both theorizing about race and primary materials that (re)produce race across time and in the present moment. What does it mean to look at premodernity through the eyes of the African Diaspora? Our examination of the different types of premodern race thinking will culminate in a collaborative class project in which students will be asked to apply critical race theory inflected approaches to editing an early modern text.

AFRS BC3528 Harlem on My Mind: The Political Economy of Harlem. 4 points.
Drawing on social histories, primary sources, fiction, and popular culture this course will explore the postwar history of Harlem. We will place Harlem in the broader context of New York City and explore how domestic and transnational migration patterns have shaped its history. Specific topics include: urbanization, migration and settlement patterns; racial liberalism and political incorporation; critical engagement with East Harlem as research cite for "culture of poverty" theorists; state criminalization of youth; underground, illegal and illicit economy from the 1960s to the 1990s; struggles over property and gentrification; and perhaps most importantly, exploring Harlem as cultural and political center of the Black World throughout the twentieth century.

AFRS BC3532 ROMARE BEARDEN:HOME IS HARLEM. 4.00 points.
Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students
Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem, is an exploration into one of the greatest American artists finding home in Harlem. The noted painter, collagist, intellectual and advocate for the arts, spent his childhood and young adult life in Harlem. Known for chronicling the African-American experience, he found rich sources for artistic expression in the Manhattan neighborhoods above 110th Street

Spring 2024: AFRS BC3532
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3532	001/00031	W 10:10am - 12:00pm 214 Milbank Hall	Deidra Harris-Kelley	4.00	10/18

AFRS BC3550 GAY HARLEM. 4.00 points.
This course explores representations of queer Harlem in African American literature, sonic culture, and performance. We will consider the history and making of Harlem, key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and the aesthetic innovations of writers and artists who defied the racial, sexual, and gendered conventions of their time. We will be guided by an intersectional approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality and the methods of Black queer studies, African American and African diaspora literary studies, as well as sound and performance scholarship. We will ask when, where, and what was/is gay Harlem; how we might excavate its histories; map its borders; and speculate on its material and imagined futures

Spring 2024: AFRS BC3550
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3550	001/00138	W 2:10pm - 4:00pm Room TBA	Maleda Belilgne	4.00	15/15

AFRS BC3551 Vibrations: Harlem, Jazz and Beyond. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Harlem Jazz Vibrations

AFRS BC3530 Performing Risk: James Baldwin's Harlem. 4 points.
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Literature (LIT).
Considering James Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction, and illuminating details of his biography, this seminar charts a critical geography of religion, sexuality, and race in mid-century Harlem. As part of Africana Studies ‘Harlem Semester’, students will engage and analyze a work-in-progress production of “The Gospel of James Baldwin” by MeShell Ndegeocello.

AFRS BC3552 BLACK WOMEN STYLE＆PERFRMNCE. 4.00 points.
Black Women, the Apollo, and the Politics of Style

Spring 2024: AFRS BC3552
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3552	001/00067	M 10:10am - 12:00pm 406 Barnard Hall	Shirley Taylor	4.00	9/18

AFRS BC3554 Blackness and Comedic Performance in the U.S.. 4 points.
This course explores the history of race and comedic performance and, in particular, how comedy has historically shaped as well as challenged racial, gender and sexual identities from the mid-1800s to the present. From the performance of blackness by white blackface minstrels in the 1830s and 40s to vaudeville at the turn of the 20 th century, early film comedies, and the work of more recent stand-up comedians, the course will seek to answer some of the social questions posed by these performers. For example, does comedy more often reflect gender, ethnic, and racial stereotypes or challenge them? How do we account for the persistent emphasis upon racial and gender differences? Can comedy be “politically correct” and still be funny? How important is “in-group” laughter to comedy’s success and what should we make of the uncomfortable laughter of those not in the in-group? We will explore the work of comics from Bert Williams, Stepin Fetchit, and Hattie McDaniel to Moms Mabley, Chris Rock and Wanda Sykes. We will investigate the work of these comics through the ideas of modern thinkers who have written on the cultural history of American humor and the social and personal aspects of jokes and comedy. We will read and view the works of these comedians as well as important theoretical texts on humor that provide us with analytical tools to investigate how comedic performance has historically constituted blackness and African-American intellectual history.

AFRS BC3556 Ethnography of Black America. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
This course critically examines ethnographic texts about Blacks in the United States, focusing as much on what they proffer about Black American culture as on the various socio-political contexts in which this body of scholarship has been produced. The goal is to advance an understanding of the larger social forces undergirding the production not only of formations of Black culture, but also of knowledge about Black America. A further goal is to foster a critical understanding of the anthropological enterprise itself.

AFRS BC3560 Human Rights and Social Change in Sub-Saharan Africa. 4 points.
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Reason and Value (REA)., BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Ethics and Values.
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Examines the evolution of the ideas, institutions and practices associated with social justice in Africa and their relationship to contemporary international human rights movement and focuses on the role of human rights in social change. A number of themes will re-occur throughout the course, notably tensions between norms and reality, cultural diversity, economic and political asymmetries, the role of external actors, and women as rights providers. Countries of special interest include Liberia, Senegal, South African and Tanzania.

AFRS BC3562 Caribbean Sexualities. 4 points.
The seminar offers an interdisciplinary study of sexualities in the Caribbean from the conquest to the contemporary moment. The principal focus will be on how sexualities intersect with questions of gender, race, nation, and diaspora in the Anglophone, Francophone and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. We will approach the study of Caribbean sexualities from various disciplines and areas of study, including history, anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, literary studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. The first part of the seminar addresses Caribbean sexuality in the context of conquest, colonization and slavery, and then national independence. The remainder of the course addresses areas that have drawn particularly intense scholarly debates, including Caribbean family formation, masculinity, and same-sex desire, as well as sex tourism, and the gender and sexual politics of Caribbean popular music and dance.

AFRS BC3563 Translating Hispaniola. 4 points.
BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Cultures in Comparison (CUL).
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Students will look at the extent to which the nation-language border separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic represents the legacy of a colonial history whose influence in many ways undermines regional community in the Caribbean to the present day. Beginning with Christopher Columbus’ fraught “discovery” of Hispaniola and ending with the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath, the course explores social, political, and cultural phenomena common to both nations – among which, slavery and freedom, Euro-North American imperialist intervention, and diaspora and migration – as these issues manifest in primary and secondary works of creative fiction, history, anthropology, and political theory. From oral histories to newspaper articles to short fiction by Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, this course traces the history of a divided Caribbean family. Students will engage with recently created digital humanities resources concerning Haiti and the Dominican Republic and also develop interactive, web-based tools that allow for a more nuanced and expansive understanding of Hispaniola’s transnational past, present, and futures. Please note that there is no language requirement for this course.

AFRS BC3567 BLACKNESS" IN FRENCH. 4.00 points.
Blackness in French
AFRS BC3570 Africana Issues: Diasporas of the Indian Ocean. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
The Indian Ocean has been called the cradle of globalization, a claim bolstered by seasonal monsoon winds and the trade that these enabled. We will consider the aesthetic histories of such trade by engaging literary and other cultural exchanges (including film, visual arts, music, and dance). What did the Zulu prophet Isaiah Shembe learn from Gujarati poets? Other than a major slaving center and source of spices, what role did Zanzibar play in the development of music and literary forms that look to Oman as well as the East Coast of Africa? We focus on four sites: Durban (South Africa), Bombay (India), Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Port Louis (Mauritius). This course will be taught simultaneously between Barnard in New York and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Students from both campuses will be encouraged to interact electronically and to establish a blog and website. The course will also have live-streamed guest speakers from chosen sites around the Indian Ocean.

AFRS BC3585 POOR IN AMERICA: THE EXPERIENCE AND IMPACT OF FINANCIAL DEPRIVATION. 4.00 points.
This course focuses on the life experiences and impact of poverty in the contemporary United States. We will be exploring the consequences of financial and material deprivation on work, housing, health, parenting, children, as well as the limits and opportunities for inter-generational mobility and how each of these intersect with gender, racial and ethnic identities. We will be learning about the experiences of individual persons as well as how these particular experiences reflect the overarching patterns of social, political and economic trends in the United States. The course will incorporate a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives to shed light on the challenges faced by persons living in poverty. In addition, there will be an emphasis on learning about and critically assessing methodological approaches applied in the literature. No prior knowledge of methods is required and any technical references will be explained in class

AFRS BC3589 BLK SEXUAL PLTCS U.S.POP CLTR. 4.00 points.
Black Feminism(s)/Womanism(s)
AFRS BC3590 The Middle Passage. 4 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Prerequisites: Admission to this seminar is by application only. Applications will be made available on the Africana Studies website: www.barnard.edu/africana
In addition to learning about the history of the Middle Passage, students will examine literary and political responses to this forced immigration out of Africa. Identifying responses to slave holding pasts, the seminar culminates in a visit to an historic site of importance in the Middle Passage.

AFRS BC3998 SENIOR SEMINAR. 4.00 points.
A program of interdisciplinary research leading to the writing of the senior essay. All Africana majors must complete the one-semester Africana Studies Senior Seminar in the fall and submit a senior essay as one of the requirements for this course. A student who has successfully completed the Africana Studies Senior Seminar, has demonstrated the ability to complete a senior thesis, and has obtained approval from the faculty member teaching the Senior Seminar may take an Independent Study with a Barnard or Columbia faculty member or a second thesis seminar in another department in order to complete a senior thesis in Africana Studies in the spring semester

Fall 2023: AFRS BC3998
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3998	001/00007	M 12:10pm - 2:00pm 205 Barnard Hall	Celia Naylor	4.00	3/5

 

AFRS BC3532 ROMARE BEARDEN:HOME IS HARLEM. 4.00 points.
Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students
Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem, is an exploration into one of the greatest American artists finding home in Harlem. The noted painter, collagist, intellectual and advocate for the arts, spent his childhood and young adult life in Harlem. Known for chronicling the African-American experience, he found rich sources for artistic expression in the Manhattan neighborhoods above 110th Street

Spring 2024: AFRS BC3532
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 3532	001/00031	W 10:10am - 12:00pm 214 Milbank Hall	Deidra Harris-Kelley	4.00	10/18

 

AFRS GU4000 HARLEM AND MOSCOW. 3.00 points.
Prerequisites: NA The Russian Revolution of 1917 is widely acknowledged as a watershed moment in the global struggle for worker’s rights, but it also played a considerable role in the fights against racism and colonialism (Lenin considered both tools of capitalist exploitation). In Soviet Russia’s project to make racial equality a central feature of communism, two urban locales featured prominently: its capital city of Moscow and the burgeoning Black cultural center that was Harlem, New York. This course will explore cross-cultural encounters between Moscow and Harlem as a way to ask larger questions about race, class, and solidarity across difference. Students can expect to read novels, memoirs, and cultural reportage from Harlem Renaissance figures (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Dorothy West) who traveled to Moscow. Students will also learn about the role of race in early Soviet culture, particularly visual culture (films, children’s media, propaganda posters, etc.). This course includes a field trip to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

AFRS GU4001 Afro-Latin America in the Artistic Imagination. 4.00 points.
How have painters, filmmakers, novelists, and other artists portrayed the history of Africans and their descendants in Latin America? How do those portrayals – of the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, abolition, and contemporary social movements, to name a few examples – compare to scholarly approaches to those same subjects? To answer these and other questions, this class brings together a wide array of materials covering more than five hundred years of Afro-Latin American history. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a topic relevant to the history of Afro-Latin America in a given era, as viewed through both artistic and scholarly sources. Students will come to class prepared to consider what each has to offer to our understanding of the past. We will also debate the possibilities of using art to disseminate historical knowledge, and whether there any dangers to privileging artistic over scholarly approaches to history (or vice versa). In addition, because NYC is home to so many museums, archives, and cultural institutions relevant to our subject, it will serve as an experiential laboratory where we will spend several of our class meetings. Learning outcomes. By the end of the semester, students will be skilled at the following:  analyzing artistic and scholarly sources on their own terms  discussing them in relation to one another  evaluating the utility of these diverse materials to the process of understanding the past

Fall 2023: AFRS GU4001
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFRS 4001	001/00002	Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm 406 Barnard Hall	Tamara Walker	4.00	8/16

FRS GU4321 Pandemics of Harlem. 4.00 points.
This course will be co-taught by three people who worked in Harlem in the 1990s, in the middle of “mad” plagues: AIDS, HIV, crack cocaine addiction, violence, trauma and mental illness related to violence, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, asthma, obesity and sedentary lifestyles. The course will build on the experiences and published papers of the group, but also bring in contemporary conversations related to underlying issues of serial forced displacement, which created the context for the plagues. Conceived as a collaborative colloquium linking instructors and students across three institutions, the course will be on-line with a combination of synchronous and asynchronous work. Assignments are structured to promote collaborative learning across institutional boundaries. Conditions permitting, students from the three schools -- Barnard, The New School, BMCC -- will have the opportunity to participate in the CLIMB project, a collective recovery project in Northern Manhattan that addresses the connection between the health of people and the quality of the built environment. Jordan-Young (Barnard) will take responsibility for organizing course logistics, and all students will be given access to the Columbia Courseworks site for access to readings and other materials, discussion boards, and assignments. The instructors will rotate the role of “host”/facilitator for the modules. Synchronous sessions will use a combination of live and pre-recorded brief lectures, in-class exercises, and small group discussions. Non-Barnard instructors may opt in or out of specific assignments, and will grade the participation and assignments for their respective students. (The Barnard College students will be responsible for all assignments listed in this syllabus.) Instructors will closely collaborate throughout the semester to monitor and adjust the course, especially the processes for collaboration, as needed

AFEN BC3009 TONI MORRISON: AN ETHICAL POETICS. 4.00 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
Toni Morrison set herself a challenge: to engage language in complex literary ways in order to reveal the ‘fact’ of race in the lived experiences of Americans—those made to bear the burden of being ‘raced,’ those exercising the prerogative of ‘racing,’ and those who imagine that none of this applies to them. We travel with her artistic path from The Bluest Eye to her later novels to learn how her choice to create figurative, logical narratives seek their own understanding of the ethics of what she called the “manageable, doable, modern human activity” of living in ‘the house of race.’

AFEN BC3134 UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN. 4.00 points.
Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora

AFEN BC3815 SHANGE ＆ DIGITAL STORYTELLING. 4.00 points.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at http://bit.ly/Ntozake2019. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Students who successfully complete into this course will be eligible to take the second half of the course in Spring 2019. NOTE: There will be three extra sessions scheduled in the Digital Humanities Center.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Ntozake Shanges stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in Feminist history. In a unique collaboration between Barnard, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and the International Center for Photography, and with support by the Mellon funded Barnard Teaches grant, this year long seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shanges work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. You can find more information and apply for the course at http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. On Twitter @ShangeWorlds

AFEN BC3816 The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling. 4 points.
Prerequisites: AFEN BC3815 or equivalent.
This course has a prerequisite and an application: http://bit.ly/AFEN3816. This hands-on, project based course introduces students to the use of digital tools and sources to organize and manage their archival research, creatively interpret their findings, and communicate their results to the public. This semester, the course is somewhat different from the usual research course in that, rather than simply going more deeply into the course focus, you will be asked to apply your knowledge to make new things. Working with the Barnard Digital Humanities Center, you will develop projects that teach some aspect of Shange's work and or feminist movements. But while making these new things, we will have ongoing discussions about the nature of digital life and evolving protocols for digital work. You will make plans to visit the archive appropriate to your project (in most cases this will be the Barnard Archives, but they might include sites such as The Billy Rose Theatre Division at the NYPL, or the Amiri Baraka collection at Columbia University) as well as doing background reading for your project.  By the end of the semester, you'll have sharpened your research skills while also acquiring digital, teamwork, and project management skills that will be useful in other classes and beyond.

AFEN BC3817 Black Shakespeare. 4.00 points.
This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s Othello will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor

Spring 2024: AFEN BC3817
Course Number	Section/Call Number	Times/Location	Instructor	Points	Enrollment
AFEN 3817	001/00034	W 4:10pm - 6:00pm Online Only	Kim F Hall	4.00	15/15