Spring 2025
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2025
African American Studies UN3001 - Section 001
Sing a Black Girl's Song: The Non Fiction Writing of Ntozake Shange
Call Number: 10689 Points: 3
Day/Time: R 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
This undergraduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the nonfiction work of the renowned African-American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, whose archives are at Barnard College, her alma mater. Through readings, discussion, and visits to her archives, students will probe this lesser-examined aspect of Shange's oeuvre, including her essays on her life, the arts, food, and other artists and creators. This course invites participants to engage critically with Shange's essays and personal writings while delving into her archive.
Course Objectives:
Students will identify key themes and literary techniques in Shange's nonfiction and the historical and cultural context in which she wrote these works. We will examine how Shange's nonfiction contributes to her broader work and her perspectives on history, gender, feminism, and race as they intersect in her life as a Black woman artist. Students will develop critical thinking skills through close reading, analysis, and discussion of Shange's nonfiction and will improve their writing skills by composing reflections and essays on Shange's works. They will develop research skills and gain insights into Shange's creative process through firsthand engagement with Shange's archive at Barnard.
African American Studies UN3004 - Section 001
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Introduction to Black Geographies
Call Number: 17895 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers
This course will introduce students to Black geographies as a spatial expression of Black studies. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. In this course, we will think about space, place, landscape, and ecology through a Black geographic framework, paying attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation. The questions that animate this course are: what are Black geographies? What is the future of Black geographies outside of academia? How can centering a “Black sense of place” in turn transform the way we think about space, place, and power? How does Black Studies account for and understand Black spatial condition, experience, and imaginaries?
The course will begin with an engagement of key works on Black geographies. We will come to see institutional Black geographies as concerned with the Black spatial imaginaries formed in the aftermath of enslavement and colonialism in the Western hemisphere. As such, our readings will center experiences in the United States. We will cover such topics as Black method(s), racial capitalism, regional geographies, carceral geographies, and Black home and infrastructure.
Ultimately, students will be introduced to central themes, concepts and approaches that highlight the spatialization of race and the racialization of space through various technologies that signify places according to new rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, we will examine historical and contemporary macro-community and micro- sub-community (e.g., neighborhood) issues shaping the social, economic and political lives of Black people.
African American Studies UN3005 - Section 001
Introduction to Caribbean Art
Call Number: 17894 Points: 3
Day/Time: Tue/Thur: 2:40 p.m. - 3:55 p.m.
Instructor: Rachel Grace Newman
This course is a broad survey of art from the Caribbean region, spanning indigenous Taíno, Kalinago, and Garifuna art, contemporary art of the Caribbean and its diaspora, and art from the colonial era. The course will cover the history of the region including indigenous cultures from first Columbian contact to today, European exploration, arrivals, and conceptions of the “New World,” plantation economies, the transatlantic slave trade, the Haitian Revolution, art of maroon communities, and the syncretism of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices like Vodou, Santería, Palo Monte, and the Abakuá. Throughout the semester, we will examine definitions of the term “Caribbean.” We ask if the term should be limited geographically to the Caribbean basin or take on a more cultural valence, expanding to places like Louisiana and Brazil, both of which share significant historical and cultural similarities with the countries from the Caribbean basin. Major themes of the class will include the impacts of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the formation of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, and legacies of the colonial era in contemporary art.
***note there will be a discussion section for this course***
African American Studies UN3006 - Section 001
Black Archival Theory and Praxis
Call Number: 18442 Points: 3
Day/Time: Wed: 12 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers
Historically, archives have often served purposes of social control and territorial dominance through constructing normative accounts that assert authority about whose and which pasts are collectively significant. But Black people and Black communities have long documented their own histories , pointing to the possibility for archives to create “new histories of who we are (self-representation), who we were (identity construction), and who we want to be in this space (empowerment)” (Burgum, 2020, p. 9). Engaging historically displaced and disenfranchised communities as interpreters and investigators disrupts what counts as real knowledge and allows for a larger reading of archival data into alternative historical narratives – imagining not only what happened in the past, but also what could have been. What, then, are Black archives? What possibilities might they bring to assembling histories and experiences od Black life that are not reducible to presumed and documented experiences of racialized inequality and dispossession? How might we imagine, as Saidiya Hartman (2008) writes, “what cannot be verified…to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance”?This course seeks to answer these and other questions as students navigate claims to authority inherent to archives, and the potential for archives to transcend their role in preserving a normative past and serve as a site of imaginative politics for those whose pasts are not always deemed collectively significant. Our readings and conversations will be organized around several themes, including care, home, refusal, fugitivity, and repair. Through our study of everyday individuals participating in archival acts of observing, recording, collecting, framing, we will build understanding of how social, political, and economic processes and practices of the past continue to shape our lives.
African American Studies UN3940 - Section 001
Senior Thesis Seminar
Call Number: 10703 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday: 4:10 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Instructor: Megan French-Marcellin
Note: AFAM majors and concentrators ONLY
The Senior Seminar will afford thesis writers the chance to workshop their idea, conduct research and/or interviews, work with the IRB protocols (if necessary), learn to work with archival materials, and perform other research activities prior to writing the thesis. Students who choose to write a capstone paper or conduct a capstone project can choose an elective course the following semester. The Thesis Seminar, conducted in the spring semester, is a workshop-oriented course for Senior Thesis writers organized around honing their writing skills while providing guidance to students in their field/disciplinary-specific projects. For example, a student may choose to write a historical biography of an artist while another may pursue a sociological study of the effects of mass incarceration on voting rights. The instructor of the Thesis Seminar, working with a faculty adviser (dependent on the specific field of inquiry in the thesis), will provide feedback and supervise the writing schedule of the students.
African American Studies UN3930 - Section 002
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: With New Eyes: Visual Culture and Critical Social Analysis
Call Number: 18240 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tues 4:10 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Instructor: J. Faith Almiron
How do we see each other as belonging to the same humanity? How do artists, curators and performers challenge and navigate visual representations of the social world? How does sub-culture create counter-narratives against stereotyping? What alternative imagery must we produce to transform our selves and the world? How does creative expression enable radical strategies to negotiate or to transgress the subjective binaries of sexuality, gender? How do queer and transgender frameworks reconcieve race, culture and society? With a focus on the cultural production of the 20th and 21st century, this inter-disciplinary course examines the social constructions of race, gender, sexuality and class within cultural and historical contexts. Applying a critical Ethnic studies framework, we study visual culture through the historical origins of world fair displays to museums (bodies and art objects as ethnographic study), fashion (dress, style, culturally-coded representation, photography), popular culture and mainstream entertainment (film, television) to policy, social protest and cultural movements.
As a seminar, students should be prepared to participate in depth discussion on a weekly basis by completing the reading and viewing assignments. Since the central subject matter is visual culture based in African-American studies, an inter-disciplinary field, there is a strong multi-media element in the course. Students will be expected to view films regularly both online and in-class. Students are also strongly encouraged to attend outside exhibitions and performances for extra credit. Syllabus is subject to change.
GRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2025
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 001
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: The Writing in the Presence of Ancestors
Call Number: 10690 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
Note: Open to junior and seniors
"(I)t seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor...How the Black writer responds to that presence interests me."
Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984
When Alice Walker went "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," 1975, she embarked on a quest for a literary ancestor, an artist, and creator, who, as Toni Morrison writes in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984, is "of the tribe and in it." Who are these "timeless people" we call our ancestors? What stories, traditions, and wisdom have they passed on to help us better understand ourselves and each other? What is our role in preserving their stories? How might they inspire us to tell our own? Using the essays "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" and "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" as starting points, this graduate seminar explores the intricate relationship between writers and scholars and their literary ancestors who are also, at times, mentors and friends. We examine how they have delved into the lives and the works of their chosen literary ancestors, using scholarly analysis, personal reflections, memoir, travelogue, and other creative methods to probe, honor, challenge, and expand our view and understanding of their predecessors
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 002
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Writing and Editing the Black Studies Journal
Call Number: 10694 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Jafari S. Allen
Note: Open to junior and seniors
Think of this as Black study research design studio in which the integrity of “an imagined moral-intellectual community” and the practicalities of journal writing and publication are held in balance.
“This is an introduction to the complex world of academic publishing and is designed to give writers in a variety of disciplines (including Black Studies) practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals. …The goal of this course is to aid participants in taking their papers from classroom quality to journal quality and in overcoming anxiety about academic publishing in the process. (Laura Belcher, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks).
“[J]ournal work is not only not an arbitrary undertaking, and it is certainly not simply the practice of putting competent scholarly articles into print (though that is avowedly its formal function); rather, it is distinctive for being an intellectual undertaking that is pursued with a certain horizon in mind, namely, the collective constitution of an imagined moral-intellectual community.” (David Scott, Small Axe 50 July 2016)
The goal of this course is twofold: (1) In this writing-for-publication workshop course, graduate students will revise and submit for publication an original seminar paper, thesis, or conference paper, , in community-- closely following Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (second edition, 2019). Moreover, we will undertake a critical survey of the field of Black Studies (both as an autonomous field, and Black Studies within what Mary Patillo has called “unidisciplines”) through close reading of its journals.
Facilitating reflexive, critically engaged, and sustainable writing practices; and focusing on the past and future of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; our hybrid colloquy sessions will typically combine theoretical and methodological discussions, close readings of assigned journals, and ‘workshop’ elements— including sharing of work-in-progress and occasional short in class writing. We will meet in-person and virtually. Small group work will be required.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 003
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Reading W.E.B DuBois
Call Number: 10697 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Note: Open to junior and seniors
It is undeniable that W.E.B. DuBois’s extensive corpus engages with most socio-political, cultural, aesthetic, and religious aspects that define African Americans’ ontology. The ambition of this course is to read a selection of DuBois’s texts critically and in-depth. This critical reading of DuBois’s selected texts aims to show that W.E.B. DuBois was carrying out a social engineering agenda for African Americans from post-emancipation to becoming Black Americans. Secondly, that DuBois’s lifelong musings and writings about the experiences of African Americans have managed to frame African American people’s experiences as topics of sociological investigation.
DuBois’s genius grasped that defining African Americans as a distinct people required that their experiences be studied as topics of sociological investigation. Also, the course will elaborate how DuBois’s invention of the concept of the talented tenth was the apex of his relentless advancement of education as the social lift for African Americans. Lastly, the reading of DuBois’s selected texts will show that DuBois introduced the literary genre for African Americans’ inner life articulation by means of his concept of the ‘souls’ of Black folk. And that in DuBois’s mind, “soul” stands as the intersection of African Americans’ spirituality, oppression, communal and aesthetic experiences.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 004
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE:
Call Number: 15618 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Anthony Johnson
Note: Open to junior and seniors
This course will introduce students to the methods and practices of ethnographers on black life in urban settings. The goal of the course is to introduce students to ethnography as a methodology to understand and critically examine Black urban populations. Through readings of anthropological literature and other disciplinary texts, we will pay particular attention to the historical, cultural, social, economic, and political contexts that shape urban experiences for Black communities throughout the globe. We examine topics including food justice, post-colonial economies, environmental justice, and abolition to name a few of the topics critically engaged by scholars of black urban communities and the social forces that affect every day lived experiences.
The course will cover a range of geographic locations including U.S. cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, while also examining critical discussions of black urban life in Brazil, and Jamaica. We will closely examine how authors consider social formations in urban contexts, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. We will also explore how authors critique social forces that shape and inform the daily lives of black urban populations. The goal of the course is to better understand how ethnography can be used to critique and add depth to commonly held understandings of black cultural practices or representations.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 005
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Black Mourning in America
Call Number: 15626 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Nyle Fort
Note: Open to junior and seniors
Black grief does not begin or end at the funeral service. African Americans have and continue to remember, honor, and avenge the dead through music, storytelling, fashion, family traditions, religious rituals, protest, activism, and more. This course examines this long tradition of black mourning in America. Conceptually, it covers scholarship that speaks broadly to questions of loss, racial violence, black suffering, premature death, and collective resistance. Practically, it considers the cultural and political implications of funerals and eulogies; black museums and street memorials; the activism of bereaved mothers; recent protests against police killings; and invocations of the dead in electoral politics. Taken together, this course might interest students who are excited to learn about rituals, memorialization, museums, African American religion, policing, abolition, social movements, and the black radical tradition.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 006
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition
Call Number: 17396 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Obery Hendricks
Note: Open to junior and seniors
The classical prophetic political tradition derives from the biblical prophets who, with strong words, courageous deeds and abiding faith in the righteousness of their cause, struggled to transform oppressive, exploitive regimes of power into just and equitable political institutions that would “let justice roll down as water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” For millennia this tradition has been a touchstone for peoples throughout the world in their struggles for freedom.
This course will explore the particular role of the prophetic political tradition in the ongoing struggle of African Americans for political equity and justice. Its purview will range from the earliest days of the American republic to the close of the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist eras. Persons and movement that will be considered include the [???] poems of Phyllis Wheatley; David Walker’s revolutionary Appeal; Frederick Douglass and the abolition movement; the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington; modes of black political resistance during the Reconstruction period; the radical historiography of W. E. B. DuBois; Ethiopianism in the nineteenth century black church; Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching movement; A. Phillip Randolph and radical labor politics; historically black religious denominations and cults (including African Methodism, the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna); Adam Clayton Powell’s radical legislative agenda; Black Liberation Theology; Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and the Civil Rights movement; Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts movement; and the prophetic literary expressions of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 008
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: “Black Studies x French Studies”
Call Number: 17398 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Veronique Charles
How might an increase understanding of the lived experiences of blackness in French-language worlds and the development of Black Thought therein enrich our approach to African Diaspora Studies? “Black Studies x French Studies” is an advanced seminar where students will read both canonical and lesser-studied works in Black Studies that emerged from French-language contexts. Through lectures, readings, films, and the use of Columbia’s collection, we will discuss important texts and themes in the contemporary (re)formation of Black French Studies as a field of inquiry. Students will consider the gains of reading works of Black French Studies within their historical, geo-linguistic contexts as well as the complication and paucity of translation. Proficiency in French is an advantage but not a requirement.
African American Studies GR6999 - Section 001
THESIS RESEARCH-GRADUATE
Call Number: TBD Points: 4
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers
Note: AFAM masters students ONLY
African-American Studies GU4080 section 009
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: BLACK POETICS: WRITING IN THE WAKE OF BLACK STUDY
Call Number 18923
Day/Time: Tuesdays, 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Instructor: Samiya Bashir
This workshop invites writers at all levels—from curious beginners to seasoned poets—to explore the intertwined practices of Black poetics and Black study. We will explore how Black writers and thinkers have used poetry as a radical space for inquiry, resistance, and liberation. Together, we’ll engage poetry as both a creative act and a method of inquiry—a way of asking questions, holding conversations, and imagining new worlds.
Participants will experiment with how their own poetry can engage the practices of Black study. Through a combination of close readings, creative writing exercises, and collaborative workshops, we’ll trace the poetics of Black study across time, engaging with the works of Black poets and theorists like Phillis Wheatley, Lucille Clifton, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and contemporary luminaries like Terrance Hayes, Dionne Brand, Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Danez Smith. We’ll consider how their poetic forms emerge from and respond to histories of displacement, protest, and the radical possibilities of collectivity.
This workshop is more than a space to write; it’s a space to reckon. How can your work converse with history, theory, and community? How does it resist and respond to systemic silencing? How do our own poems participate in Black study? How can they interrogate systems of power while building worlds rooted in joy, love, and freedom? Should they? Participants will craft new work that reflects these inquiries, blending the personal and the political, the experimental and the ancestral. We’ll also look beyond the page, considering how performance, music, and visual art intersect with our work.
This workshop is a space for exploration, reflection, and bold creation. Whether you’re just beginning to experiment with poetry or looking to push your craft further, this class offers tools and frameworks for writing poems that engage history, theory, and community. Come as you are—whether you’re stepping into poetry for the first time or refining your voice—and leave with a deeper understanding of Black poetics and its capacity to shape, challenge, and expand how we imagine freedom through the written word.