African American Studies

• CAS AA 505: Black Community and Social Change
  Forces within the larger society that enhance and/or inhibit development of the black community. Assesses potential of the black community to initiate and implement changes affecting its own development locally and nationally. Also offered as CAS HI 555.
• CAS AA 507: Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
  A study of the major writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Explores how they proclaimed a renewal of racial consciousness and cultural pride, and how they challenged racial and cultural barriers in American society. Also offered as CAS EN 377.
• CAS AA 510: African American Drama
  A study of African American and Afro-Caribbean dramatic literature. Focus on the work of August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott in the context of Western drama. Also offered as CAS EN 588.
• CAS AA 514: Comparative Slavery
  The institution of slavery in history with a special focus on slavery and the slave trade in Africa and the Americas in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Attention to cultural and political issues as well as economic and social aspects of slavery. Also offered as CAS HI 584.
• CAS AA 537: Studies in West Indian Literature: Caribbean Fiction
  Topics vary from semester to semester.
• CAS AA 538: Studies in West Indian Literature: Caribbean Poetry
  Study of twentieth-century Caribbean poetry written in English(es), surveying anthologies and concentrating on major figured (Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Goodison, Eric Roach). Emphases: the function of poets in small societies, and their choices concerning linguistic and aesthetic traditions. Also offered as CAS EN 586.
• CAS AA 559: Reckoning with the Past: Reparations and Justice in Comparative Perspective
  Meets with CAS IR 559 and PO 559. The debate about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation in the United States examined critically as conversation about, and movement for, retrospective justice. Includes discussion of war crimes tribunals and truth commissions. Also offered as CAS IR 559 and CAS PO 559.
• CAS AA 564: From Slavery to Freedom: Abolition in Comparative Perspective
  How did legalized slavery, a world-wide practice for thousands of years, end? The process of abolition in the Americas, Africa, and elsewhere is examined and compared to the later regulation of forced labor and to contemporary slavery. Also offered as CAS PO 564.
• CAS AA 571: African American Art
  Studies African American art and craft production from the early nineteenth century to the present against the background of the diaspora, reconstruction, and the modernist movements of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Also offered as CAS AH 571.
• CAS AA 580: The History of Racial Thought
  Study of racial thinking and feeling in Europe and the United States since the fifteenth century. Racial thinking in the context of Western encounters with non-European people and Jews; its relation to social, economic, cultural, and political trends. Also offered as CAS HI 580.
• CAS AA 586: African Americans Abroad
  Develops awareness of the global nature of the African American experience through study of Black Americans' involvement in aspects of world development besides slavery and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Focus on Europe and the Americas; some attention to Africa and Asia. Also offered as CAS HI 586.
• CAS AA 588: Women, Power, and Culture in Africa
  Understanding the role of women in African history. Topics include the Atlantic slave trade, power, religion, the economy, resistance movements, health, the state, and kinship. Emphasis on the period before independence. Also offered as CAS HI 588.
• CAS AA 590: The World and the West
  Explores relations between the West and the Third World from 1850, focusing on national and cultural movements in the Third World, and places the African American struggle for freedom in the United States in global and comparative perspective. Also offered as CAS HI 590.

Back to full list of Courses