Results for AFRICAAM

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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 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.