Results for AFRICAAM

Modern jazz styles from Bebop to the current scene. Emphasis is on the significant artists of each style.

Introduces the language and sounds of jazz through listening, analysis, and compositional exercises. Students apply the fundamentals of music theory to the study of jazz. Prerequisite: Music 19, consent of instructor, or satisfactory demonstration of basic musical skills proficiency on qualifying examination on first day of class. This class is closed by design. Please register on the waitlist and show up on the first day of class to receive a permission number for enrollment.

Students to engage in an intellectual discussion about the African Diaspora with leading faculty at Stanford across departments including Education, Linguistics, Sociology, History, Political Science, English, and Theater & Performance Studies. Several lunches with guest speakers. This course will meet in the Program for African & African American Studies Office in Building 360 Room 362B (Main Quad). This course is limited to Freshman and Sophomore enrollment.

The Chocolate Heads Movement Band will engage in an interdisciplinary project-based course to develop collaborative choreography and installation art with visual and musical components. How can we attune our senses to perceive the subtleties of our surroundings? How can we learn to perceive the magic hiding in plain sight? The Autumn '23-'24 project will make use of remixing strategies, deep listening practices, and outdoor exploration to animate these questions in a multisensorial performance piece. We will cultivate an imaginary garden full of wild, surprising, and mysterious entities. Taking inspiration from landscape architecture, textiles, lighting, and projection design, we will bring the outside world in to create a dance and performance ecology. The course will feature collaborations with guest scientists, artists, and somatic practitioners. Our garden is open to all forms of creative expression and all levels of experience; we invite dancers, movers, and emerging creators of all styles and backgrounds. WEEK 1: TU 9/26--Introduction to the Project & CHs Band; THU 9/28--1st Audition Workshop. Contact Aleta Hayes (ahayes1@stanford.edu) for more information.

This course will examine the long tradition of Black expressive culture through clothing practices. We will specifically focus on the material history of how clothing has been used to refashion and retain Black identities from slavery to the millennial era. More than simply clothing people, Black fashion and dress challenged proscribed race, sex, and gendered notions of self. In the course we will examine scholars whose research on Black sartorial practices centers the narratives of marginalized cultural workers, privileging their voices to illuminate the archive of images and objects. Whether of working-class upbringing, activist and political participants, Black bourgeoisie, or one who aspires to a particular lifestyle, African American clothing culture represents an instance of Black signifying (a spectrum of Black performance styles and expressive culture) that rewrites everyday sartorial practices to reimagine the Black subject. To do this we will apply concepts emerging out of Black performance theory and visual culture, history, and cultural studies.

(Same as HISTORY 147. HISTORY 47 is 3 units; HISTORY 147 is 5 units.) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evolution of African and Afrikaner nationalism; the rise and fall of the apartheid state; the politics of post-apartheid transformation; and the AIDS crisis.

(Same as HISTORY 150C. 50C is 3 units; 150C is 5 units.) 100 years ago, women and most African-Americans couldn't vote; automobiles were rare and computers didn't exist; and the U.S. was a minor power in a world dominated by European empires. This course surveys politics, culture, and social movements to answer the question: How did we get from there to here? Suitable for non-majors and majors alike.

(History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.

Beginning in 16th century West Africa and ending in the 19th century United States, this course will survey the religious, cultural, and experiential histories of African-descended people in the Atlantic world. From the early histories of the slave trade to the violence of American racial hierarchies, we will delve into the cosmologies, practices, rituals, aesthetics, and other cultural expressions of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, with a particular emphasis on the United States. What did Africa mean to those displaced from their ancestral homelands? How did African descended people perceive, navigate, and resist their racialization? How did they reshape the Americas through their intellect, creativity, and culture? Prioritizing the voices, thought, and sensory registers of the persons involved in these historical processes, this course will explore African Americans' experiences - from the spectacular to the quotidian - as windows into the human experience.

Beginning in post-1865 and ending in the present-day, this course examines African American life, history, culture and the development of the field of African American Studies. This interdisciplinary course will explore various historical, political, social, and artistic themes that impact our understanding of Black life and identity. To do this, we will draw from a broad range of scholarship to introduce students to the intellectual history of African American Studies as a field of study--its genealogy, development, and major debates. Though most of the course will focus on the United States, time will be dedicated to how to place the history of African Americans in the United States within a global context. Students will be exposed to a range of topics to develop a critical understanding of various movements in Black history and key concepts such as Black feminisms, mass incarceration, transformative and restorative justice, Afrocentricity, Pan-Africanism, and the African Diaspora.

Focus is on classrooms with students from diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Studies, writing, and media representation of urban and diverse school settings; implications for transforming teaching and learning. Issues related to developing teachers with attitudes, dispositions, and skills necessary to teach diverse students. Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center.

(Graduate students register for EDUC 212 or SOC 229X). Combination of social science and historical perspectives trace the major developments, contexts, tensions, challenges, and policy issues of urban education.

This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

While centering the Black experience, this course will also take a comparative view of Diaspora Studies to establish modes of confluence and difference between the Black diaspora and other worldwide diasporas. Issues to be discussed will include questions of definition and nomenclature. What is a diaspora and what are its essential features? What are the differences between victim diasporas, labor diasporas, trade diasporas, and ethno-political diasporas? What is the relationship between place and belonging, between territory and memory? How have the experiences of migration and dislocation challenged the modern assumption that the nation-state should be the limit of identification? What effect has the emergence of new communications media had upon the coherence of cultural and political boundaries? How do these questions relate to ideas about cosmopolitanism and its relation to ethical universalism? All of these questions and many more form the subject matter of Global Black Diaspora Studies. The second part of the course will continue to examine the historical and contemporary movements of peoples and the complex issues of identity and experience to which these processes give rise, as well as the creative possibilities that flow from movement and being moved. This will be done through literary examples. Texts to be discussed will include Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Nella Larsen, Passing, Dionne Brand, What We All Long For, and NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names. This class focuses on literature but will also include film, non-fiction, and scholarly articles. No experience in literary study is expected, and grades are based on class discussion, short reflection papers, and an extended essay or creative project. There are no exams in this class.

An overview of the acute and chronic physical and psychological health impact of sexual abuse through the perspective of survivors of childhood, adolescent, young and middle adult, and elder abuse, including special populations such as pregnant women, military and veterans, prison inmates, individuals with mental or physical impairments. Also addresses: race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other demographic and societal factors, including issues specific to college culture. Professionals with expertise in sexual assault present behavioral and prevention efforts such as bystander intervention training, medical screening, counseling and other interventions to manage the emotional trauma of abuse. Undergraduates must enroll for 3 units. To receive a letter grade in any listing, students must enroll for 3 units. This course must be taken for a letter grade and a minimum of 3 units to be eligible for Ways credit. Enrollment limited to students with sophomore academic standing or above or consent of the instructor. Human Biology students must enroll in HUMBIO 124 or AFRICAAM 127 or FEMGEN 237. Med/Grad students should enroll in SOMGEN 237 for 2 units.

In this course students will be introduced to a series of Afro-contemporary dance warm ups and dance combinations that are drawn from a broad range of dance traditions of the African diaspora with a particular focus on Afro Brazilian, Afro Cuban and Haitian dance forms, modern dance techniques, and somatic movement practices. Our study of these dance disciplines will inform the movement vocabulary, technical training, class discussions, and choreography we experience in this course. Students will learn more about the dances and rhythms for the Orishas of Brazil and Cuba, and the Loa of Haiti. Dance combinations will consist of dynamic movement patterns that condition the body for strength, flexibility, endurance, musicality and coordination. Through this approach to our warm ups and class choreography, we will deepen our analysis and understanding of how African diaspora movement traditions are inherently embedded in many expressions of the broadly termed form known as contemporary modern dance.

The built environment and the energy systems that meet its requirements is a product of decisions forged in a context of historical inequity produced by cultural, political, and economic forces expressed through decisions at individual and institutional levels. This interdisciplinary course will examine the imprint of systemic racial inequity in the U.S. that has produced a clean energy divide and a heritage of environmental injustice. Drawing on current events, students will also explore contemporary strategies that center equity in the quest for rapid technology transitions in the energy sector to address climate change, public health, national security, and community resilience. Prerequisites: By permission of the instructor. Preferable to have completed Understand Energy ( CEE 107A/207A/ EarthSys 103/ CEE 107S/207S) or a similar course at another institution if a graduate student.

This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to linguistic and conceptual tools to conduct literary and visual analysis. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aim¿ C¿saire, Albert Memmi, Ousmane Semb¿ne, Le¿la Sebbar, Mariama B¿, Maryse Cond¿, Dany Laferri¿re, Mati Diop, and special guest L¿onora Miano. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete FRENLANG 124 or successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.

Widely dispersed narratives by and about enslaved persons are our focus. We'll explore the concept of 'slave narrative' by comparing texts from the ancient Mediterranean, the Cape of Good Hope, West Africa and the United States. We'll consider famous autobiographies alongside less familiar material such as court trial records. What are the affordances, what are the limits of such narratives as historical evidence? What notions of enslaved experience emerge? How close can we come to understanding the experiences of the enslaved? How different do such experiences seem when compared across time and space? Note: graduates and advanced undergraduates wishing to read original Greek and Latin texts should register for Reading Greek and Roman Slavery (Classics 142/242) in addition.

(AFRICAAM/HISTORY 45B is 3 units; AFRICAAM/HISTORY 145B is 5 units.) CREATIVITY. AGENCY. RESILIENCE. This is the African history with which this course will engage. African scholars and knowledge production of Africa that explicitly engages with theories of race and global Blackness will take center stage. TRADE. RELIGION. CONQUEST. MIGRATION. These are the transformations of the 20th century which we shall interrogate and reposition. Yet these groundbreaking events did not happen in a vacuum. As historians, we also think about the continent's rich traditions and histories prior to the 20th century. FICTION. NONFICTION. FILM. MUSIC. Far from being peripheral to political transformation, African creative arts advanced discourse on gender, technology, and environmental history within the continent and without. We will listen to African creative artists not only as creators, but as agents for change.

How and why is land use a contested issue? How can we understand land injustice in light of the Anthropocene, that is, human-induced climate change? How do African knowledges, practices, and experiences inform global debates about environmental, political, and socio-economic well-being? This course considers how racial and colonial thinking and processes compounded discourses about land and examines examples of resistance, legacies of struggle, and possible futures. Centering African perspectives in a global context, we will examine how individual, institutional, and societal conceptions of land are revealed in narratives, practices, and policies created and circulated by Africans as well as outsiders in the continent. We will also analyze how these dynamics have had and continue to have repercussions across the globe. We will engage with diverse written, oral, audio-visual, and digital sources and associated methodologies to explore perceptions of land and land ownership, and discuss various forms of land use including agriculture, pastoralism, conservation, mining, and urbanization, and potential futures.

(Same as HISTORY 47. HISTORY 147 is 5 units; HISTORY 47 is 3 units) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evolution of African and Afrikaner nationalism; the rise and fall of the apartheid state; the politics of post-apartheid transformation; and the AIDS crisis.

(Same as HISTORY 50C. 50C is 3 units; 150C is 5 units.) 100 years ago, women and most African-Americans couldn't vote; automobiles were rare and computers didn't exist; and the U.S. was a minor power in a world dominated by European empires. This course surveys politics, culture, and social movements to answer the question: How did we get from there to here? Suitable for non-majors and majors alike.

What role do science and technology play in the creation of a just society? How do we confront and redress the impact of racism and bias within the history, theory, and practice of these disciplines? This course invites students to grapple with the complex intersections between race, inequality, justice, and the STEM fields. We orient to these questions from an artistically-informed position, asking how we can rally the embodied practices of artists to address how we think, make, and respond to each other. Combining readings from the history of science, technology, and medicine, ethics and pedagogy, as well as the fine and performing arts, we will embark together on understanding how our STEM practices have emerged, how we participate today, and what we can imagine for them in the future. The course will involve workshops, field trips (as possible), and invited guests. All students, from any discipline, field, interest, and background, are welcome! This course does build upon the STS 51 series from 2020-21, though it is not a prerequisite for this course. Please contact the professor if you have any questions!

Charting a course from colonial America to contemporary London, this course explores the long history of Black performance throughout an Atlantic diaspora. Defining performance as "forms of cultural staging," from Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez's Black Performance Theory, this course takes up scripted plays, live theatre, devised works, performance art, and cinematic performance in its survey of the field. We will engage with theorists, performer, artists, and revolutionaries such as Ignatius Sancho, Maria Stewart, William Wells Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Derek Walcott, Danai Gurira, and Yvonne Orji. We will address questions around Black identity, history, time, and futurity, as well as other essential strategies Black performers have engaged in their performance making. The course includes essential methodological readings for Black Studies as well as formational writings in Black performance theory and theatre studies. Students will establish a foothold in both AAAS (theory & methodology) and in performance history (plays and performances). As a WIM course, students will gain expertise in devising, drafting, and revising written essays.

In 2013, CaShawn Thompson devised a Twitter hashtag, #blackgirlmagic, to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of black women. Twitter users quickly adopted the slogan, using the hashtag to celebrate everyday moments of beauty, accomplishment, and magic. The slogan offered a contemporary iteration of an historical alignment: namely, the concept of "magic" with both Black people as well as "blackness." This course explores the legacy of Black magic--and black magic--through performance texts including plays, poetry, films, and novels. We will investigate the creation of magical worlds, the discursive alignment of magic with blackness, and the contemporary manifestation of a historical phenomenon. We will cover, through lecture and discussion, the history of black magic representation as well as the relationship between magic and religion. Our goal will be to understand the impact and history of discursive alignments: what relationship does "black magic" have to and for "black bodies"? How do we understand a history of performance practice as being caught up in complicated legacies of suspicion, celebration, self-definition? The course will give participants a grounding in black performance texts, plays, and theoretical writings. *This course will also satisfy the TAPS department WIM requirement.*

Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a "spokesman for the race", although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work across many lesser-examined domains - poetry, music, theatre, sermon, photo-text, children's literature, public media, comedy and artistic collaboration. Placing his work in context with other writers of the 20C (Faulkner, Wright, Morrison) and capitalizing on a resurgence of interest in the writer (NYC just dedicated a year of celebration of Baldwin and there are 2 new journals dedicated to study of Baldwin), the course seeks to capture the power and influence of Baldwin's work during the Civil Rights era as well as his relevance in the "post-race" transnational 21st century, when his prescient questioning of the boundaries of race, sex, love, leadership and country assume new urgency.

How does race function in performance and dare we say live and in living color? How does one deconstruct discrimination at its roots?n nFrom a perspective of global solidarity and recognition of shared plight among BIPOC communities, we will read and perform plays that represent material and psychological conditions under a common supremacist regime. Where and when possible, we will host a member of the creative team of some plays in our class for a live discussion. Assigned materials include works by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amiri Baraka, Young Jean Lee, Ayad Akhtar, Susan Lori Parks, David Henry Hwang, Betty Shamieh, Jeremy O. Harris, and Christopher Demos Brown.n nThis class offers undergraduate students a discussion that does not center whiteness, but takes power, history, culture, philosophy, and hierarchy as core points of debate. In the first two weeks, we will establish the common terms of the discussion about stereotypes, representation, and historical claims, but then we will quickly move toward an advanced conversation about effective discourse and activism through art, performance, and cultural production. In this class, we assume that colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, and oppressive contemporary state apparatuses are real, undeniable, and manifest. Since our starting point is clear, our central question is not about recognizing or delineating the issues, but rather, it is a debate about how to identify the target of our criticism in order to counter oppression effectively and dismantle long-standing structures.n nNot all BIPOC communities are represented in this syllabus, as such claim of inclusion in a single quarter would be tokenistic and disingenuous. Instead, we will aspire to understand and negotiate some of the complexities related to race in several communities locally in the U.S. and beyond.

When working with experimental animation, what can we learn from the Shangaan about compositing, layering and collaging, from the Dogon about counter-rhythms and remixing, or from the Lakota about observation and improvisation? In this class, we will gain a deep understanding of and draw connections between experimental creative practices in selected indigenous/vernacular cultures across Africa and the Americas. We will do this in order to reimagine frameworks for approaching, creating and experiencing experimental media art outside Western canons. Assignments will require students to engage either their own origin stories, histories and/or other archives of their choice or interest. This source material can be personal, collective, public, general, formal, informal, real or imagined. We will look at different ways of approaching archival material (photographs, sound, video, writing, memory) for the purposes of connecting disparate elements into brief and cohesive or anti-cohesive animations. This is an introductory experimental animation class, so no prior experience of animation or video/sound editing is needed.

Is water a human right or an entitlement? Who controls the water, and who should control the water, in California? Private companies? Nonprofits? Local residents? Federal, state, or local governments? This course will explore these questions in the context of urban California more generally, the players and the politics to make sense of a complex problem with deep historical roots; one that defines the new century in California urban life. The required readings and discussions cover cities from Oakland to Los Angeles, providing a platform for students to explore important environmental issues, past and present, affecting California municipalities undergoing rapid population change. In addition, our research focus will be on the cities located on the Central Coast of California: agricultural Salinas, Watsonville, and Castroville and towns along the Salinas Valley; tourist based Monterey, Pebble Beach, Carmel, Pacific Grove; the bedroom community of Prunedale to the north, and former military towns, Marina and Seaside, as all of these ethnically, socioeconomically diverse communities engage in political struggles over precious, and ever scarcer water resources, contend with catastrophic events such as droughts and floods, and fight battles over rights to clean water, entitlement, environmental racism, and equity. Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center.

This discussion-rich course is for students to learn design thinking to more confidently navigate life and careers as members and allies of the Black community. This course will allow students to navigate identity while building community to uplift Black voices through design thinking tools to help leverage their experiences and gain a competitive edge. Students will gain a deeper understanding of intersectionality, how to create and cultivate alignment, and learn to effectively navigate life design schemas, ideas, and options.

Looks do matter, notably when it comes to how one is perceived and treated in society. In this course we will investigate how various groups within the Caribbean region experience racialization and the methods they utilize to perform their various identities. In the first part of the class, we will address how race and color function in the Caribbean. How does an individual's appearance and how they are subsequently racialized affect their position and experiences in society? This will include an in-depth examination of racism and colorism: how they operate and how they differ. The second part of the class will be dedicated to ethnographic research that addresses how people in the Caribbean work to modify how they are racialized or perceived in their societies, often for a particular benefit or need. From skin bleaching in Jamaica, to hair straightening in the Dominican Republic, to codeswitching in Aruba, we will examine various examples of how different individuals in the Caribbean transform themselves to perform calculated (though sometimes simultaneously authentic) identities.

From street names to monuments, the material sediments of colonial time can be seen, heard, and felt in the diverse cultural archives of ancient and contemporary Africa. This seminar aims to examine the role of ethnographic practice in the political agendas of past and present African nations. In the quest to reconstruct an imaginary of Africa in space and time, students will explore these social constructs in light of the rise of archaeology during the height of European empire and colonization. Particularly in the last 50 years, revived interest in African cultural heritage and preservation raises complex questions about the problematic tensions between European, American, and African theories of archaeological and ethnographic practice.

Poetry Is Not a Luxury * These places of possibility within ourselves are dark... The titles of this course are words thought and dreamed by Audre Lorde in her essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (a version of which was first published in 1977). In this essay she writes: "For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare." In this course we will consider the powers, resuscitations, and strategies found in the texts of a constellation of contemporary Black poets whose work emerges out of Black feminist thought and practices. My hope is that we will together listen toward the possibilities of this work, and through experiments in reading and writing, realize some of what these texts make it possible for us to think and feel and write and be.

Presented by IDA, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. In this course we will explore science fiction and speculative fiction as readers, writers, creators, and organizers to learn how artists engage with futurist thinking to reimagine and build better worlds in the present. Together we will draw from scholarship across Indigenous, Latinx, Pasifika, Arab, African and Afro futurisms; as well as science fiction and other creative traditions to imagine and build better worlds rooted in liberation and solidarity. Students will explore the groundbreaking television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as one example of alternative futurisms and will be joined by a special visiting artist and actor from the show's original cast. Visits by guest artists from across genres will round out this year's IDA Spring Class. Does not fulfill the WR1 or WR2 requirement.

What stories do data tell? In this course, we will follow digital traces by excavating, interrogating, and pursuing the digital evidence in data. What is the relationship between narratives and digital evidence? How do we address the tension between computational data models, the complexity of the lived experience, and the plurality of voices and methods? How can we understand and identify biases in data structures, archives, and repositories? The course offers the opportunity for extensive hands-on practical work with records, archives, and data collections. Supported by readings on archival practice, data colonialism, and the socio-cultural context of algorithms we will discuss what a critical anthropological perspective can contribute to this debate.

From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We will focus on these engagements in vernacular cultural spaces, from storytelling traditions to music and move to ways academic and aesthetic movements have imagined these relationships. Finally, we will consider the implications for work with technologies in both school and community contexts for work in the pursuit of social and racial justice.

Required for seniors. Weekly colloquia with AAAS Director and Associate Director to assist with refinement of research topic, advisor support, literature review, research, and thesis writing. Readings include foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in the interdisciplinary fields of African and African American studies and comparative race studies. Readings assist students situate their individual research interests and project within the larger. Students may also enroll in AFRICAAM 200Y in Winter and AFRICAAM 200Z in Spring for additional research units (up to 10 units total).

Winter. Required for students writing an Honors Thesis. Optional for Students writing a Senior Thesis.

Spring. Required for students writing an Honors Thesis. Optional for Students writing a Senior Thesis.

Gesturing toward adrienne maree brown's notion of 'emergent strategy,' this course asks us to think in the most radical and imaginative ways possible about two systemic failures that animate what Achille Mbembe has called 'necropolitics' decisions on who lives, and who dies: the police, and climate change. We will look at both the material aspects of police and prison abolition, and climate change and environmental justice, and theoretical approaches to the same. Using works by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Alex Vitale, Dino Gilio-Whittaker, Candace Fukijane, Ben Ehrenreich, Amitav Ghosh, Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler, our texts put the imagination and the political will to work. This seminar course will be capped at 25 enrollments. I expect to offer this course annually.

This seminar will examine women and their gendered experience of activism, organizing, living, and leading in the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.

This course examines core themes in contemporary Black feminisms in the United States. Each week the class will explore topics such as Black womxn's history, representation in new media, policy initiatives, and activism in areas of work and equal pay, relationships, family, mass incarceration, reproductive justice, and other topics. We will specifically focus on how the historical representation of marginalized womxn and girls have been used to shape legal, political and economic practice and social custom.

This hybrid course is designed to provide an examination of activism through the lens of community. This course is part of the Community Engaged Learning Course curriculum in the Department of African & African American Studies and will introduce students to community-based organizing and activism and how community-ties can be harnessed to build viable movements in today's society.

This course investigates the relationship between culture, revolutionary decolonization, and post-colonial trajectories. It probes the multilayered development of 20th and 21st-century African literature amid decolonization and Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives and the debates they generated about African literary aesthetics, African languages, the production of history, and the role of the intellectual. We will journey through national cultural movements, international congresses, and pan-African festivals to explore the following questions: What role did writers and artists play in shaping the discourse of revolutionary decolonization throughout the continent and in the diaspora? How have literary texts, films, and works of African cultural thought shaped and engaged with concepts such as "African unity" and "African cultural renaissance"? How have these notions influenced the imaginaries of post-independence nations, engendered new subjectivities, and impacted gender and generational dynamics? How did the ways of knowing and modes of writing promoted and developed in these contexts shape African futures?

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement. If you have any questions about enrollment or need a permission number, please contact Farrah Moreno (farrahm@stanford.edu).

This seminar will explore the impact and relative salience of racial/ethnic identity on select issues including: discrimination, social justice, mental health and academic performance. Theoretical perspectives on identity development will be reviewed, along with research on other social identity variables, such as social class, gender and regional identifications. New areas within this field such as the complexity of multiracial identity status and intersectional invisibility will also be discussed. Though the class will be rooted in psychology and psychological models of identity formation, no prior exposure to psychology is assumed and other disciplines-including cultural studies, feminist studies, and literature-will be incorporated into the course materials. Students will work with community partners to better understand the nuances of racial and ethnic identity development in different contexts. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center)

The colonial era saw widespread extraction of cultural treasures by European powers across the globe. Greece, Egypt, and other countries have maintained that these objects belong at home rather than in the museums of London, Paris, and New York. This class invites you to consider the role of African art in debates about ownership, access, and aesthetics. Stanford University, for example, has a large collection of African objects in the Cantor Museum, while in nearby San Francisco, the renowned De Young Museum has a significant selection in its Africa gallery.Classes will chart the "scramble for art" that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among European colonial powers on the African continent. We will also examine the role of North American collectors in extracting African cultural treasures from the continent, and the burgeoning ethnographic museum culture that showcased these objects at universities and museums across the U.S. We will consider how practices of museum curation throughout the twentieth century shaped and defined fundamental categories including the notion of "African art" itself. Students will discuss pressing questions of agency, justice, and power. We will consider early calls from African countries for repatriation of their objects and the ongoing state of these debates today, including the current call for the return of the famed and controversial Benin Bronzes and the efforts of museums like the De Young, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard's Peabody Museum, and the UCLA Fowler Museum to ethically engage with their African holdings. Throughout the class, our guiding question will be: who owns the past? Are these cultural treasures the property of all humanity (as many museums would argue), or of the specific countries and communities who lay claim to them?

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. It explores how concepts, identities, and practices of gender and sexuality have changed in shifting social, cultural, political, and economic contexts across the continent and in connection with global currents. This historical journey encompasses European colonialism, independence, postcolonial nation-building, and current times. Course materials include African novels, films, material culture and multinational scholarly research and primary sources. We will also engage multidisciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and theories as tools for critical thinking, writing and varied modes of producing knowledge. Gender and sexuality(ies) as examined in this course act as gateways to explore transformations in : selfhood, peoplehood, and life stage; health, medicine, reproduction, and the body; law and criminality; marriage, kinship, family, and community; politics, power and protest; feminism(s); popular culture; religion and belief; LGBTQI+ themes; and the history of emotions, including love, joy, desire, pain, and trauma.

This course looks at major dramatic works by James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Both of these queer black writers had prophetic things to say about the world-historical significance of major dramas on the 20th Century including civil rights, revolution, gender, colonialism, racism, sexism, war, nationalism and as well as aesthetics and politics.

In 2013, CaShawn Thompson devised a Twitter hashtag, #blackgirlmagic, to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of black women. Twitter users quickly adopted the slogan, using the hashtag to celebrate everyday moments of beauty, accomplishment, and magic. The slogan offered a contemporary iteration of an historical alignment: namely, the concept of "magic" with both Black people as well as "blackness." This course explores the legacy of Black magic--and black magic--through performance texts including plays, poetry, films, and novels. We will investigate the creation of magical worlds, the discursive alignment of magic with blackness, and the contemporary manifestation of a historical phenomenon. We will cover, through lecture and discussion, the history of black magic representation as well as the relationship between magic and religion. Our goal will be to understand the impact and history of discursive alignments: what relationship does "black magic" have to and for "black bodies"? How do we understand a history of performance practice as being caught up in complicated legacies of suspicion, celebration, self-definition? The course will give participants a grounding in black performance texts, plays, and theoretical writings. *This course will also satisfy the TAPS department WIM requirement.*

From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.

Despite the systemic inequalities of the Hollywood system, there is a robust, stylistically diverse cohort of African-American writer/directors at work, including Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Ryan Coogler. Jenkins' films (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), are aesthetically lush, intimate, and understated. DuVernay (When They See Us) foregrounds racial history and injustice in her feature films, television, and documentary work. Coogler followed his realist Fruitvale Station with two powerful genre films with black protagonists (Creed, Black Panther - this last the highest-grossing film by a black director).

From the rave reviews garnered by Angelina Weld Grimke's lynching play, Rachel to recent work by Lynn Nottage on Rwanda, black women playwrights have addressed key issues in modern culture and politics. We will analyze and perform work written by black women in the U.S., Britain and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics include: sexuality, surrealism, colonialism, freedom, violence, colorism, love, history, community and more. Playwrights include: Angelina Grimke, Lorriane Hansberry, Winsome Pinnock, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan- Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, Pearl Cleage, Sarah Jones, Anna DeVeare Smith, Alice Childress, Lydia Diamond and Zora Neale Hurston.)

Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photographs, and paintings by, among others, Lucille Clifton, Audrey Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Toi Derricotte, Gordon Parks, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Featuring intense discussion and emphasis on developing powers of black aliveness in one's own writing.

In this course, we will think critically about what we have come to call the African diaspora. We will travel the world virtually while exploring a selection of classic and understudied texts, in order to interrogate the relationship between culture, race, gender and identity in the "old" and "new" African diasporas. From literary texts to popular culture, we will relate each weekly reading to a hot topic. Our goal is to think cross-culturally and cross-linguistically about the themes covered by putting exciting works in conversation. The diverse topics and concepts discussed will include race, class, gender, identity, sexuality, migration, Afro-Caribbean religions, performance, violence, the body, metissage, Negritude, Negrismo, multiculturalism, nationalism, Afropolitanism and Afropean identities.

China's engagement with Africa during the last decade has generated media attention that generally portrays China as either Africa's economic saviour or as its new imperial overlord. This course will both survey these analyses but also suggest that the China-Africa phenomenon needs to be understood as a series of engagements ? economic, political, but also social and cultural ? between a range of Chinese and African actors that have both potential benefits and costs for all those involved. Interdisciplinary in nature, the course will explore the history of China's relationship with Africa and the continuities and breaks in this relationship. Instead of producing a monolithic picture for the whole African continent, the course will focus on various African countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Ethiopia, Congo, South Africa, Sudan, Ghana and Mali for more contextualised discussions. It will also problematise the idea of 'China' as solely representative of the People's Republic of China (PRC). It will begin with an overview of the literature in order to familiarise the students with the historiography. Then it will run in a chronological order, first discussing China's ancient connections with the African continent the before moving to the more crucial period of intense interactions in the mid-20th century. We will pay particular attention to questions such as socialist ideology, Afro-Asianism, economic competition, revolution, and liberation movements. The rest of the course will deal with China's political, economic and social activities on the African continent since early 2000 until today. The class will analyse economic relations in the form of mineral extraction, the extent and form of China's engagement with political change on the continent, and the ways in which Chinese migrants have interacted with African societies. It will also explore how Africans are seeking to shape their unequal relationship with Chinese influences and to negotiate advantages for themselves in both Chinese-influenced Africa and in China itself. The course will seek to locate China's recent engagement with Africa in the context of the continent's many centuries of interaction with global flows of goods, peoples, and ideas.

This course examines how Black Americans helped shape and have been shaped by American Popular Culture. We will examine the historical relationship of people of African descent to mainstream culture through a critical examination of "popular" representations of "Blackness." This course will include a discussion of new media and traditional media experienced in the digital age. This course will also consider the impact of U.S. "Black" popular culture on the African diaspora, and African diasporic influences on present-day "Black" popular culture. In this course, students should develop a critical consciousness and literacy regarding issues of popular representations of Black urbanity, Afro-Surrealism, Afrofuturism, and gendered issues of Black identity. To do this, we will draw from abroad range of scholarship, theory, and concepts in media studies, cultural studies, performance theory, visual culture, and history. We will engage in the work of scholars such as: Stuart Hall, Herman Gray, E. Patrick Johnson, Marlon Riggs, Mark Anthony Neal, Moya Bailey, Simone C. Drake, and Ann duCille.

More enslaved people from Africa were forced to Brazil than any other country and Brazil was the last country to abolish the practice of slavery in the Americas. How do these two facts impact the cultural history of Brazil? How and why was the country mythologized as a 'racial democracy' in the twentieth century? This class engages these questions to explore the origins, development, and centrality of Afro-Brazilian culture. We will immerse ourselves in the cities of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, explore samba and Carnaval, take a dive into syncretic religious practices such as Candomblé, observe dances like capoeira, and study literary and artistic expressions from an anti-racist perspective to gain a fuller picture of Brazilian society today. Taught in English.

This course will take a close look at Toni Morrison's oeuvre to explore question of Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature. Texts to be looked at will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, Beloved, Love, and Playing in the Dark, among others.

This seminar explores the intersections of language and race/racism/racialization in the public schooling experiences of students of color. We will briefly trace the historical emergence of the related fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, explore how each of these scholarly traditions approaches the study of language, and identify key points of overlap and tension between the two fields before considering recent examples of inter-disciplinary scholarship on language and race in urban schools. Issues to be addressed include language variation and change, language and identity, bilingualism and multilingualism, language ideologies, and classroom discourse. We will pay particular attention to the implications of relevant literature for teaching and learning in urban classrooms.

This course uses social theories of difference to examine the intersections of disability, race and culture. The course will examine these concepts drawing from scholarship published in history, sociology of education, urban sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, social studies of science, cultural psychology, educational and cultural anthropology, comparative education and special education. Implications for policy, research and practice will be covered.

This lab-based course is an overview of research methods that are used in the development of Black educators, including survey research, individual and focus group interviews, ethnographic methods, and documentary activism. Lab participants will be guided through critical thinking about the professional and personal development of Black educators while assessing the utility and relevance of research-based responses to that development in partnership with a particular educational organization or agency.