Courses Archive

This course explores African American fiction written during the 1970s and 1980s that attempt to re-present the ur-text of African American literature--and/or to represent for contemporary readers the lives of African slaves in the United States. In what ways do these authors imagine the experience and effects of slavery from their vantage point a century after emancipation, and with the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements shaping the context of their writing?

Introduction to the Research-to Performance Method, African American aesthetics and dramatic performance techniques. Course will survey wide range of writings on performance and investigate applications through exercises and improvisations. Students will also assist in information gathering for works in progress.

This course uses film to investigate the central role of race in American culture and history. Using films as the primary texts, the course will explore the relationship between these films and the social and political contexts from which they emerged. Looking at both mainstream and independent cinema, the course will chart the continuities and varieties of representations and negotiations of "race." The course spans the 20th century, covering (among other topics) Jim Crow in silent film, Hollywood westerns and melodramas, borderland crime dramas, documentary film, and experimental cinema. This class will concentrate on the history of African Americans in film, but we will also watch movies that consider how the overlapping histories of whiteness and ethnicity, American Indians, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, the "Third World" and "multiculturalism" have been represented in film. Themes covered include representing race and nation; the borderlands; passing and miscegenation; the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

This course examines the the spatial configurations of inequality and poverty and their relationship to race through an analysis of the historical, theoretical and ethnographic conceptualizations, practices, and lived experiences of that relationship.

With emphasis given to the organization of labor after slavery, this course will explore the history of African American cultural, institutions and protest traditions from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.

This is an upper division course dealing with the relevance of language to social issues in African societies. It will focus on political developments in Africa and the use of language in fostering national identity; attaining cultural emancipation; and as a tool of oppression, of maintenance of social relations, and of addressing issues of education and 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, and technology; the role of language in dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and other health issues; minority languages, endangered languages, and language preservation; cultural responses to migration and African diaspora: the use of African languages in the age of globalization and information technology.

An examination of the movement of individuals, ideas, ideologies, and institutions between minority American communities in the U.S. (African Americans, Asians, Chicanos) and their cultures of origin, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course will utilize the concepts of "migration," "diaspora," "otherness," "multiculturalism," and "global village" and will draw largely on social science perspectives.

This course reviews and expands students' knowledge of fundamental structures from Elementary Swahili and appropriate cultural contexts of these structures in oral and written communication. More grammar and vocabulary in a culturally and socially appropriate context is developed. Speaking ability is expanded through oral exercises, individual reports, class discussions, and recordings available at the Berkeley Language Center. Writing and reading are expanded through compositions, written exercises, and independent reading projects with texts available through Berkeley's African Library Collection and supplemented by instructor's materials.

Emphasis on the social experience of African Americans. An interdisciplinary approach designed to help students understand the forces and ideas that are influencing the individual and collective African American experience.