Courses Archive

(1-4) Course may be repeated for credit. One to four hours of lecture per week per unit. Prerequisites: Reading and Composition requirement, plus those set by instructor.Special topics in African Amer-ican literature.

(4) Four hours of seminar per week, plus community workshop teaching. Prerequisites: 156AC plus consent of instructor. The focus ofthis course is on the writing of poetry, and students undertake an intensive study of both the techniques of poetry and the social and cultural context of specific poetic traditions. Students must “imitate” the poems they study, write critical papers comparing poetic traditions, and complete an original manuscript of new poems. In addition, they must produce an on-campus poetry reading and are required to teach for five to seven weeks at one of the assigned Poetry for the People venues. This course satisfies the Arts and Lit-erature breadth requirement. This course satisfies the American Cultures requirement.

(4) Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Reading and Composition requirement.Anintroduction to representative works, themes, and discourses in Caribbean literatures—produced by authors from the Anglophone, Creolophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone areas within Plantation America. Includes examinations of indigenous folkways and nation languages as sources for a re-examination of Caribbean culture and literary history.

(4) Three hours of lecture per week. Pre-requisites: Reading and Composition requirement. 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.

(3) Three hours of seminar/discussion perweek. This course will focus on understanding urban schools as a part of a broader system of social stratification and the process by which students in urban schools come to a sense of themselves as students, as members of cultural and racial groups, and as young people in America. Topics include racial identity;race/ethnicity in schools; urban neighborhood cong-texts; and schooling in the juvenile justice system. Students will also integrate course readings with their own first-hand experience working in one of several off-campus sites. This course has a mandatory community engagement component for which students will earn 1 unit of field study (197) credit. Also listed as Education C181.

(4)Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion perweek. Prerequisites: 5B or 116 and 117 or History 125A-125B.Analysis of the theoretical and historical development of African Americans’ political forms and expression. Examination of local, state, and federal political processes and activities, and the development of black political ideologies, organizations, and movements.

(4) Three hours of lecture and one hour of discussion per week. This course will examine the origins of the African slave trade, and explore political,economic, demographic and cultural factors shaping African American life and culture prior to 1865.

(3) The course deals with the relevance of language to social issues in African societies. The focus will be on political developments in Africa and the use of language in fostering national identity, attaining cultural emancipation, as a tool of oppression, of maintenance of social relations, and of addressing issues of education, literacy, childhood development, etc. The course will examine such issues as the roots of national language policies as influenced by Africa’s reaction to colonialism; the role of western languages in African society and the attitudes towards African languages and cultures; the challenges of nation-building in modern African states; the use of African languages in government, education, technology; the role of language in gender issues, in religion, sports, as well as cultural responses to migration and African diaspora. There will be a review of the impact of globalization and information technology on African languages.

(4) Four hours of lecture per week. Anexamination of the structural and actual manifestations of Third World underdevelopment and the broad spectrum of theoretical positions put forward to explain it. Underdevelopment will be viewed from both the international and intranational perspective. 

(3) Three hours of lecture per week. Prerequisites: Reading and Composition requirement. Emphasis onsocial history and comparative analysis of race, class,and gender relations in American society. Examines both similarities and differences, and highlights genderpolitics.