AFRICAAM 18A: Jazz History: Ragtime to Bebop, 1900-1940 (AMSTUD 18A, MUSIC 18A)
From the beginning of jazz to the war years.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
AFRICAAM 18B: Jazz History: Bebop to Present, 1940-Present (AMSTUD 18B, MUSIC 18B)
Modern jazz styles from Bebop to the current scene. Emphasis is on the significant artists of each style.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II
AFRICAAM 20A: Jazz Theory (MUSIC 20A)
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.
Last offered: Autumn 2023
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
AFRICAAM 30: The Egyptians (CLASSICS 82, HISTORY 48, HISTORY 148)
This course traces the emergence and development of the distinctive cultural world of the ancient Egyptians over nearly 4,000 years. Through archaeological and textual evidence, we will investigate the social structures, religious beliefs, and expressive traditions that framed life and death in this extraordinary region. Students with or without prior background are equally encouraged.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 43: Introduction to English III: Introduction to African American Literature (AMSTUD 12A)
In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement, can critics still speak, coherently, of "African American literature"? And how does this political conception of African American literary production compare with accounts grounded in black language and culture? Taking up Warren's intervention, this course will explore African American literature from its earliest manifestations in the spirituals and slave narratives to texts composed at the height of desegregation and decolonization struggles at mid-century and beyond. English majors must take this class for 5 units.
Last offered: Spring 2022
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
AFRICAAM 113A: African American Ecologies (ENGLISH 113A)
African American perspectives on the environment have long been suppressed in mainstream ecological discourse, despite the importance of questions of land, labor, and resource to the historical and ongoing experiences of Black people in the United States. Against this exclusion, this course takes up African American literature as a unique site of ecological knowledge and environmental thought. Drawing on texts, art, music, and film from the late nineteenth century to the present, this course considers planetary problems of ecological catastrophe and climatic change in relation to the everyday structures of U.S.-American racial politics. Through close analyses of texts and films set on plantations and steamships, in gardens and coal mines, students will explore the environmental dimensions of African American literature, and gain a deeper understanding of the real-world histories with which these works engage. Texts will include novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Percival Everett, and Toni M
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African American perspectives on the environment have long been suppressed in mainstream ecological discourse, despite the importance of questions of land, labor, and resource to the historical and ongoing experiences of Black people in the United States. Against this exclusion, this course takes up African American literature as a unique site of ecological knowledge and environmental thought. Drawing on texts, art, music, and film from the late nineteenth century to the present, this course considers planetary problems of ecological catastrophe and climatic change in relation to the everyday structures of U.S.-American racial politics. Through close analyses of texts and films set on plantations and steamships, in gardens and coal mines, students will explore the environmental dimensions of African American literature, and gain a deeper understanding of the real-world histories with which these works engage. Texts will include novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Percival Everett, and Toni Morrison, short stories and essays by Charles Chesnutt, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine McKittrick, and adrienne marie brown, and films and multimedia works by Julie Dash, Stephanie Dinkins, and Jordan Peele. Important topics will include the ecology of the plantation, black feminist ecological thought, and the significance of water in African American life and culture.
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
AFRICAAM 133: Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean (COMPLIT 133, COMPLIT 233A, CSRE 133E, FRENCH 133, JEWISHST 143)
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 Csaire, Albert Memmi, Ousmane Sembne, Lela Sebbar, Mariama B, Maryse Cond, Dany Laferrire, Mati Diop, and special guest ¿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.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
AFRICAAM 134: Black Music Revealed: Black composers, performers, and themes from the 18th century to the present (CSRE 35N, MUSIC 35N)
Online seminar on the achievements of Black composers and performers in ragtime, jazz, and classical music, from Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose music influenced Mozart, and George Bridgetower, for whom Beethoven composed his "Kreutzer" Sonata, to Anthony Davis's opera "The Central Park Five". Students will examine issues of cultural borrowing in operas by Mozart and Verdi, and shows like Showboat and Porgy and Bess. Guest speakers will include composers and performers. Students will work together in groups to produce materials on course topics in coordination with the African American Museum & Library at Oakland. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center)
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
AFRICAAM 140: Black Ecologies (EARTHSYS 146J, ENGLISH 146)
Black literature and media have long served as important sites of ecological thought and as blueprints for resistance to the combined matrices of imperialism, racialized dispossession, and extractivism. In exploring key works by Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, adrienne maree brown, Julie Dash, and others, we will unpack and complicate the idea of the human, and prioritize intersectional approaches to thinking with the violence of climate catastrophe. In so doing, we will approach ecology as both subject and method, and investigate possibilities for radically other futures outside the entrapments of racial capitalism and environmental degradation. While our course texts index the disastrous effects of racial capitalism and accompanying ecocide, they also chart different modes of thinking-living-acting where "Black livingness" (McKittrick) is a central aspect of ecology.
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
AFRICAAM 145B: Foundations of African Studies I: Africa in the 20th Century (HISTORY 145B)
This course deals with three great transformations connecting African experiences and global change: the impact of the industrial revolution, colonization and colonialism, and the meanings and experiences of decolonization. It is a course about Africans and how they responded to the challenges and opportunities of colonialism and independence. Main themes include: African patterns of society and development on the eve of colonial conquest; African reactions to the imposition of colonial rule; transformation of African societies during the period of colonial rule; and African responses to the challenges of colonialism and decolonization. This course is a core course for the African Studies track and fulfils the WIM requirement for the major.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Ayodele, M. (PI)
;
Parker, G. (PI)
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