Courses Archive

4B. Africa: History and Culture. (4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Emphasis on social, political, and economic change in 20th century Africa; with further emphasis upon the roles of modernization, urbanization, and the emergence of contemporary African states.

R1B. Freshman Composition. (4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Prerequisites: UC Entry Level Writing Requirement and 1A. Formerly 1B. Continued training in expository and argumentative writing, with more emphasis on literary interpretation. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. ALTERNATE TITLE: Race, Gender, Sexuality in African American Literature

R1A. Freshman Composition. (4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. Prerequisites: UC Entry Level Writing Requirement. Formerly 1A. Training in expository, argumentative, and other styles of writing. The assignments will focus on themes and issues in African American life and culture. Satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. ALTERNATE TITLE: Literature of Africa and its Diaspora

The student will complete a primary research and writing project based on study of an advanced topic with faculty sponsor. Fulfills department thesis requirement. Application and details at departmental adviser's office. Students must enroll for both semesters of the sequence.

The student will complete a primary research and writing project based on study of an advanced topic with faculty sponsor. Fulfills department thesis requirement. Application and details at departmental adviser's office. Students must enroll for both semesters of the sequence.

This course examines theories of culture and contemporary issues in popular culture. The course focuses on the instrumentality of culture as a vehicle of domination and resistance. The goal of the course is to provide the student with a critical vocabulary for cultural analysis. Key issues to be examined are ideology, hegemony, articulation, race and gender formation. Students must have a willingness to engage new and difficult ideas.

This seminar will explore the history and status of African American Studies as a unversity discipline. The beginning of the seminar will investigate the origins of the discipline. We will also analyze the responses of universities to the challenge to establish departments Black Studies. The scope and direction of African American Studies, as it has emerged and evolved over the last forty years, will be assessed. Finally, we will attempt to project the future directions of the discipline. During the last half of the semester, we will read and discuss five important works in the Social Sciences from your MA exam reading list. In addition to readings and class discussions, the seminar will include guest lecturers, documentary films and videos.

(4) This course is intended to provide students with an initial background for the composition of the position paper discussing the theories and methodologies of the study of the African Diaspora necessary for passing department qualifying exams.  It will introduce some of the theoretical frameworks for, and approaches to, scholarship concerning the African Diaspora.   In the last two decades some of the central predicates of the relatively new field of African American or Black Studies have been challenged and reconceptualized:  In the past, studies in the field tended to assume the centrality of national identities and the nation-state as a foundation for analysis.  The concept of “diaspora” instead centers a developing understanding of how several centuries of the forced (and more recently, voluntary) expatriation of millions of Africans to European colonies in the Americas, and to Europe and Asia have given rise to 1) cross-oceanic transfers of bodies, labor, goods and capital—conceptualizations of diaspora that assume the centrality of the nation-state and homelands, and emphasize displacement, dispossession and migration as the concept’s defining characteristics—but also have given rise to 2) the complex circulation of a wide array of cultural practices and production (such as music, dance, fashion, and religion) and the dynamic creation of relational networks across or in defiance of borders and other demarcations of the “national,” conceptualizations which emphasize the discursive, psychic and affective dimensions of the lived experience of transnational diaspora.  The course will examine some of the texts that founded this intervention in the field, as well as examples of cross-disciplinary scholarship that take up the challenge of diaspora as an analytic and conceptual category, and expand its meaning in different ways.

(4) Four hours of seminar per week. A review of competing epistemologies in qualitative research of African Americans.