Black Studies (BLST)

African American Studies is a vital program of critical and intellectual inquiry. This course offers students the opportunity to examine, from numerous disciplinary perspectives, the experiences and contributions of people of African descent in the United States. This course surveys key concepts and defining movements from 1609 to the present in order to uncover the roots of an African American cultural tradition in the West. We will explore the historical, cultural, economic, political, religious, literary, and social contributions and developments of African Americans from slavery to freedom to the present. Students are encouraged to make connections between the texts and to think critically and creatively across disciplinary boundaries. Topics discussed will include the articulation of the self, questions about identity, the struggle for equality, artistic expression, capitalism and violence, internationalism, political processes, and intersectionality. The course provides a solid foundation from which students may pursue more advanced and more specialized studies of the African American experience. The course will examine a variety of texts, including autobiography, propaganda, drama, sociological studies, artwork, and music.

The class will offer students an opportunity to learn about the histories and ideologies that underpin anti-black racism and the modes of resistance and theories of justice that have developed in response to and alongside these theories and histories. The African American experience spans four hundred years from the colonization of the US and the installation of trans-Atlantic slavery to the present day. Throughout the expansive history, African Americans have consistently created modes of self-fashioning even in the midst of institutionalized anti-black racism. African Americans developed rituals, traditions, music, art, dance, literature, and spiritual practices; kinship structures and communities; and political and social theories and practices that negotiate the contradiction at the core of US democracy. This course will both explore the history of anti-black racism and black innovation. Providing a historical overview from 1619 to the present, the course will cover the periods of enslavement, Reconstruction, the New Negro era, the Cold War, Civil Rights, Black Power, and contemporary period. In addition, the course will explore key topics including but not limited to: racial capitalism, health disparities, black internationalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and race and technology

This course will examine works written by Black playwrights in the 21st century. The course will investigate such questions as: What is Black Drama? Are there distinctly Black elements of style, form, and content? How does the political and social climate impact the form and content of contemporary Black drama? In addition to reading and watching plays, students will read critical and theoretical works on drama and contemporary Black cultural expression.

Historically the southern states in the U.S. have been at the epicenter of many evolutions and controversies of U.S. democracy and empire. Current economic, migratory, racial, and gender politics indicate new concerns about how important the region of the South will be to the future of the U.S., as well as global communities, which is why a course in Critical Southern Studies might be relevant and of interest to Georgetown students. From W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells, to James Baldwin and Trudier Harris, to Eddie Glaude Jr and Reverend William Barber, intellectual stalwarts in African American Studies and black public figures have consistently noted the importance of the southern United States to American governance, culture, and industry innovation. Increasingly, Black Studies and Southern Studies scholars have also demonstrated how the racial and capital logics of the U.S. South inform and influence those of marginalized geographies and peoples globally. This course will use the radical interdisciplinarity of Black Studies to engage New Southern Studies and the place of the South nationally and Diasporically in global futures.

Scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot contends that “not any fiction can pass for history” even as he also acknowledges the “overlap between what happened and that which is said to have happened.” In this course, we will explore the relationship between scholarly histories about black life in the US and the African Diaspora and the powerful stories that recount or provide alternatives to these histories (or the sociohistorical process) through written fiction narratives, film, and other media forms. The course will survey a range of histories and representations of black life from the early 1600s to the present day with particular emphasis on key moments in African American history. In examining a variety of forms that produced and popularized knowledge about blackness and black life in the past we will also address the ways these modes of knowledge production shape our understanding of the sociohistorical process, conceptions of change and memory, and our perspective on the present moment. As we cover this terrain we will be attentive to the possibilities and limits of using historical narrative, fiction, and films to detail black lived experiences including issues of difference, power, resistance, and survival. We will also examine the ways these histories about the past change over time and take on new urgency in particular moments.

A broad survey of Indigenous resistance and resurgence in the 20th and 21st century, this course considers how Native American and Indigenous peoples have and continue to resist settler colonialism, imperialism, land dispossession, racism, environmental exploitation, and systemic poverty across Turtle Island (North America). In this course, we will address large-scale movements, political mobilization, and direct action, alongside every-day acts of resistance and cultural revitalization. While analyzing the structural factors at the root of these movements, students will learn how Indigenous peoples have strategically utilized art, direct action, fashion, social media, music (and more) to defend their communities, traditions, and homelands for future generations. Through these stories of sovereignty, self-determination, and community resilience, we will also learn how these decolonial movements enable Indigenous communities to heal themselves and the land from the impacts of structural violence. As our objective is to reveal the wide-spread legacy and impact of Indigenous resistance, students will also be encouraged to examine the intersections between Indigenous resistance movements and those of other marginalized communities in the United States and beyond.

This course exposes students to the complex world of religions found across the African (West and West-Central) Diaspora. Starting on the continent, this course highlights various African indigenous religions then it highlights how African diasporic religions were produced via both the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Intra-American trade. We will explore well-known, perhaps infamous, traditions like Vodou, Santeria, Cambomble, and Hoodoo. Topics covered include: African religious beliefs, theological and philosophical notions of the Universe, time, power, and nature, the role of “evil” and ancestors, among other things. This course will also complicate notions of “religion,” asking what counts as a religion and what does religion do?

Of the roughly 12 million enslaved Africans who were forcefully transported to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, approximately 95% disembarked in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a result, the region has a rich history of Black revolt and sociopolitical organizing. This course will explore the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as their contributions to the foundations of the region’s societies and cultures. The course will also consider important intersections of Afro-Latin American identities by exploring the experiences of Afro-Latin American women and LGBTQ communities.

The course offers a survey of Black film from the early 20th century to the present. Course will highlight significant filmmakers, films, and movements from across the African Diaspora.

Will consider song, fiction, and drama of the 19th and 20th century that explicitly engages with the concept of America.

The main purpose of this course is to explore how—from the 18th century—beginning with Phillis Wheatley—to the 21st century—ending with Kamala Harris—Black people have used various forms of writing—poetry, fiction, autobiographies, essays, speeches turned essays, newspapers, and pamphlets—to express Black people’s visions for freedom, equality, and democracy. While some authors promote democratic inclusion, others emphasize the need to reimagine altogether American society’s social, political, and cultural fabrics. Students will leave this course with a better understanding of the roles that writing has played in shaping Black political activities, including how the act of writing itself constitutes a form or politics or political activity.

This course will introduce the history and contemporary context of Black technological and digital practices, innovation, and integration in everyday life using humanistic frameworks and methodologies. We will interrogate how the digital intersects with archive and memory, social movements, environment impacts/obsolescence, and culture. Special emphasis will be placed on ethical approaches to studying the digital, data collection and analysis, and how systemic issues are replicated and countered by Black digital practice. Throughout this course, we will orient our inquiries around the debates of what constitutes Black Digital Studies.

This course examines Black women in the US. We will certainly look at key historical figures, thinkers, activists, and cultural producers. We will also analyze the lived realities of Black women in racialized and racist America, especially in terms of class, sexism, and sexuality, seeking to identify strategies of resistance and empowerment.

The Black Family course examines the complex forces that shape the conditions and experiences of black family life. Using a mix of historical and contemporary texts, this course explores how economic and cultural forces, including labor, entertainment, and academia, have impacted the evolution and lived experiences of black family life. This course values complexity and highlights the numerous ways black people have transformed shelters into homes, which serve as critical nodes in the neighborhood and civic life.

This class will examine the cultural history and genealogy of black athletes who have been dominant and successful in three specific areas: sports, cultural arts, and politics. It will demonstrate how these athletes used each arena to create new knowledge about being human and black human beings despite the dehumanizing histories of slavery, colonization, and segregation in the Americas

This course surveys Black popular culture as Black social theory and an archive of Black life and politics, examining how Black pop culture shapes and influences national and global political, social, and cultural processes.

This course studies how pre-twentieth century black artists, activists, and cultural production imagined the possibilities for black freedom in light of the changing political and economic circumstances for black people in the antebellum and postbellum periods. Beginning with the black American spirituals, we will analyze a variety of cultural forms (literature, photography, speeches), topics (freedom, equality, civil rights), debates among black thinkers (Walker, Wheatley, Delaney, Stewart, Harper, Cooper, Wells, DuBois, Washington, Laney) in order to historicize and contextualize how black spaces have been thinking about, writing about, and debating about many of the contemporary conversations that animate African American Studies Accordingly, we will engage both primary and secondary texts (from the period and contemporary ones) to assist us in our task. Students should expect attendance, class participation, two exams, two short writing assignments, quizzes, and a final reader to assess their performance in the class.

With a focus on Black identities, this course will introduce how to critically investigate social media knowledge production, usage, and inventiveness with special attention to sexuality, gender, access and disability, and the body. Tracing the usage of chat rooms and blogging to the proliferation and popularity of hashtags and video production, we will plot an arc of Black social media practices that impact personal, political, and societal issues. This course will also emphasize ethical research practices based on considerations of data privacy.

What are you a fan of and how are you a fan of it? This course will integrate popular culture, media, and studying fans to examine how Black fans encounter and engage with their fandom objects. This course will critically engage historical Black fandoms and how they have evolved through situated Black Studies theories and critical interventions in studying Black participatory culture, cult media, and audience analysis. This course will provide students with critical media literacy skills that interrogate production, popularity, and consumption practices based on resonance and emotion. Further, we will deconstruct the debates on Black representation in the contemporary media moment.

This undergraduate discussion seminar introduces students to Afro-Indigenous Feminisms, an interdisciplinary field that connects Black and Indigenous feminist theories to uplift the personal and political experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous women, femmes, and two-spirit relatives. In this course, we will engage scholarly texts, art, film, music, and poetry. Our objective is to examine how Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous feminist analyze the intersections of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. Further, we will consider how Black and Indigenous communities build solidarity, while also reflecting on the tensions between movements for Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty. Guiding questions for this course includes: What are Black Feminism and Indigenous Feminisms? Where do these traditions converge and diverge, and how do they help us better understand Afro-Indigenous women’s experiences and identities? Ultimately, studying Afro-Indigenous Feminisms will equip students with critical tools to analyze power, race, identity, and history, while deepening their understanding of Afro-Indigeneity, gender, and the interconnected struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples.

From the U.S. to Brazil, Black women’s voices, movements, and visions have long reshaped struggles for freedom throughout the hemisphere. This course centers the Americas as a vital and interconnected site of Black feminist thought by tracing the transnational and intraregional migrations, exchanges, and solidarities that have forged hemispheric networks of critique, creativity, and resistance. Together, we will curate and extend these connections by placing thinkers, artists, activists, and movements from across the Americas in dialogue to explore how Black women have looked to one another, drawn from shared histories, and confronted overlapping systems of enslavement, colonialism, heteropatriarchal racial capitalism, and state violence. The course is thus an invitation for students to participate in ongoing dialogues that animate Black feminist thought and practice beyond borders.

This course examines the emergence and African Americans’ participation in the US Civil Rights and Black Power Movements from the 1930s to the 1990s. Situating these movements within the Long Black Freedom Struggle, this course will center on black people’s experiences as grassroots organizers, protesters, political leaders, theorists, and cultural workers It will also chart the significant events, organizations, and political debates that helped to form and transform the black freedom struggle during this period. The course will pay particular attention to the ways gender, sexual, cultural, and economic politics affected these movements and examine debates over the boundaries of blackness, state power, and visions of freedom. From this vantage point, we will begin to consider issues that have long plagued activists and theorists alike, including building solidarity, creating viable organizations, and developing strategies for enacting long-term social change, equity and people’s power.

This seminar will examine the history of settler colonialism and the interwoven politics of race, gender, culture, and nation in Central America. Focusing on the social, cultural, and political mobilization of Afro-Central Americans, in particular, we will discuss the historical process by which these communities were formed during the colonial era, the emergence of anti-Black mestizx nationalism in the post-independence period, and historical struggles for Black autonomy and liberation in the contemporary moment. Students will learn how Black populations in the region have historically struggled against racial, gender, and economic oppression and the racialized and gendered limits of Central American citizenship. By engaging historical and ethnographic scholarship on Black populations in Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, as well as cultural productions by and about Afro-Central Americans, the course will provide students with a foundation for understanding larger racial formation patterns in the isthmus.

The central concern of this course is to investigate how race and racism have shaped black people’s experiences living in the United States. We will examine how race and racism have been (re)presented in African American literature, film, music, political manifestos, historical texts, and other cultural media, exploring the various ways that African American cultural producers and critics have engaged with these ubiquitous phenomena. Our readings and discussions of primary and secondary texts will consider the production and mutation of race and racism across historical epochs—from slavery to the post-civil rights era. The course rejects the notion of post-racialism and considers how this discourse re-entrenches racism. Moreover, we will consider, how, if at all, conversations surrounding race might move forward, and whether racism is so intractable that efforts to eradicate it might prove futile. That is, while exploring structural, representational, and material aspects of race and racism, we will keep our eyes focused on developing solutions to these problems. Of course, our energetic examinations of race and racism will take into consideration how other identities (class and gender, for example) nuance our understandings of race and racism.

Assignments may include short papers, two examinations, and a final writing and video project. Class participation and attendance will also factor in the grade calculation.

Ryan Coogler’s Southern gothic thriller Sinners has wowed audiences with its reckoning on black culture and most forcefully, black religion. Namely, the film showcases Hoodoo, an African American spiritual tradition, as a powerful system of thought and healing practice. Using Sinners as a cultural anchor, this course will explore a history of black religion in the United States, primarily focusing on the development of Hoodoo. By engaging texts in the fields of African American history, African American religion, cultural anthropology, and Black Studies, this course will examine how Hoodoo came to be and how it has changed over time. In addition, this course will also explore the intersection of gender and religion through the figure of the ‘Conjure woman.’ Students will engage film, tv, literature, and other popular media to investigate and challenge cultural representations and reception of Hoodoo. In all, this course urges students to consider Hoodoo as an intrinsic root of black life in the United States.

This course examines the impact of race and racism in the design and usage of digital technologies. We will frame this course through the historical precedents that perpetuate systemic discrimination and harm in digital technologies to the trajectory of current and future implications. To counter, we will also forefront the ways Black and indigenous communities have challenged the oft-touted universality of digital technologies design and usage. Additionally, this course will survey the intersection of race and digital technologies by concentrating on the ethics of “big data” and privacy, racial justice, gender and sexuality, access and disability, and sustainability and environmental justice impact our social and political existence.

This course examines Black public opinion, traditional institutional participation, and political philosophical contributions in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Using primary and secondary sources, this undergraduate course examines post-1960s radical feminists’ efforts to address and theorize race. While this course centers and highlights the theories of race feminists of color, particularly radical black feminists, this course will address how various radical feminists theorized how race impacted their feminist theories and praxis. In order to understand how radical feminists articulated their radical politics domestically and globally, students will review these feminists’ efforts to understand how race shapes their understanding of bodily integrity, sexuality, labor, gendered embodiment, anti-colonial/liberation struggles, and feminist solidarity.

This course provides an examination of black feminist theory and thought from the nineteenth century to the present. Black feminism emerged in academic contexts alongside third wave feminism in the late-twentieth century as a corrective to the Euro-centric and middle class tendencies of western feminism. The emergence of black feminism in university contexts, however, does not suggest black feminist theory began in the 1970s. Conversely as we will learn, black feminism dates back at least to the nineteenth century and consists of a robust and persistent critique of the limits of western democracy, the conscripts of normative gender and sexuality, and the ruses of power. We will examine how black feminism emerges in relationship to activist traditions by developing unique lines of inquiry and modes of evidence. We will conduct interpretative analysis of the work and thought that leading black women writers produced in academic and public contexts. We will examine the basic principles and practices of black feminism and consider the major issues that the theory and practices addresses as a means to resist patriarchal social structures. The course is designed to introduce students to the theoretical and activist contributions of black feminists working in a variety of fields as well as historical and social contexts. The course will also depend on students sharing examples of feminism in action that demonstrate the oscillation between theory and practice at the heart of black feminism.

Centering Black feminisms, this course will examine their utilization and influence on the digital. We will explore the strengths and challenges to Black feminist frameworks and theories as they are encountered in new media technologies and practices. Specifically, we will investigate how emotion and affect in digital practices spur community-making, social justice engagement, and extended formation of Black identities. We will also employ a Black feminist "ethics of care" approach to methodologies in studying the digital.

This undergraduate course reviews the United States of America's social welfare policy through a racial and gendered lens. To understand the welfare state's relationship to race and gender, we will situate our analysis of the welfare state within a critique of the United States' poverty knowledge production, political economy, and party politics. This course also examines how anti-black, anti-women and anti-welfare ideologies obscure and discredit contemporary welfare rights campaigns. Lastly, this course reviews how welfare reform has impacted different segments of the working class.

This course examines how different cultural media—film, literature, magazines, sports commentary, newspaper articles, and political cartoons—have represented Black men’s identities, and the tangible impacts that those portrayals have had material in American life, policy, politics, and culture. It, too, will examine the robust response that Black men and Black people more broadly have mounted to define themselves, and will showcase the impact their alternative representations have had in reshaping American culture, policy, life, and politics.

This course will examine Black cinematic movements. It investigates the imagery, aesthetics, themes, and politics of how Black filmmakers throughout the African Diaspora narrate, translate, and adapt Black experience, histories, and cultures to the big screen. Topics and periods that may be covered: silent and race movies, anthrpology films, musicals, Blaxploitation, Third Cinema, Black Independents, Black New Wave, LA Rebellion, New Queer Cinema, Hollywood, Atlanta/Southern Studio, ARRAY, Black women filmmakers, film festivals and workshops, community schools, and new media.

The course surveys Black street dance and performance styles in historical and contemporary contexts. Students explore how vernacular performance styles communicate embodied histories of resistance and community solidarity. Readings and media examine rural performance styles, marching bands, carnival, social dances and more, focusing on dialogic exchange. The course emphasizes research, performance practice, and project-based learning

Black women are often at the forefront of musical movements and innovations, sonically, politically, and aesthetically. This course explores the work of Black women musical performers from vaudeville and blues through neo-soul and hip-hop with attention to Black feminist themes in their work

What is the relationship between humans and nature? What are the root causes of environmental problems? How can we build sustainable societies? Black activists, artists, scholars, and folks have engaged these questions throughout American history— and shaped policy, living and labor practices, and the landscape itself in the process. This course examines how black ecological thought has both challenged and contributed to dominant environmental frameworks across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Will explore the role of religion in the cultural production of James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others.

Will explore the art and activism of three artists key to the Civil Rights Movement Period. Engaging fiction, drama, and music, among other genres, we will consider the domestic and diasporic impact of their work. will explore the art and activism of three artists key to the Civil Rights Movement Period. Engaging fiction, drama, and music, among other genres, we will consider the domestic and diasporic impact of their work.

Speculation about a new world, a more racially equitable one where Black people are free, has long been a part of Black discursive practices in literature, visual art, and music. This course surveys Black speculative practices through the lens of Afrofuturism, a long-established but recently resurgent aesthetic field of inquiry into Black futures, with attention to how speculation often serves as a poignant radical critique of the status quo.

Race and politics similarly combine lived experience, history, decision-making, and formal structuring to create and recreate the dynamic patchwork impacting our everyday lives. In this course, we will get to the roots of racial formation and the boundaries the political sphere in order to more adequately account for the scope of influence of these concepts. We will discuss the political experiences of several racial groups in the U.S. - Black, white, Latino/a, and Asian American - while also exploring the creation of new racialized frameworks, as in the case of Arab/Muslim populations. We will also be expanding our understanding of politics beyond national electoral and institutional affairs in order to explore representation, bureaucracy, and state and local politics. Students will leave this course with a better understanding of how racial and political identities are developed, be capable of identifying specific challenges to establishing equity, and, more importantly, develop the capacity to provide innovative solutions that account for and move away from ongoing oppressions.

The primary concern of this course is to consider how rhythm and blues culture has participated in debates about black politics, black enfranchisement, and black identity in the post-civil rights era. It will pay attention to how black cultural producers capitalized on the commercialization of blackness to gain greater exposure and expand the boundaries of blackness.

This class will introduce students to social and political constructions of race and sexuality, while also charting how black representations and constructions of genders and sexualities in popular culture of Black people in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, and the Caribbean have addressed the sexual violence, medical exploitation and apartheid, and sexual colonization of Eurocentric ideals of sexuality and eroticism rooted in racism, capitalism, and erotophobia.

Employing a hemispheric approach, this seminar examines the historical and contemporary experiences of Black women in the Americas, with a specific focus on the politics of care. We will explore the contours, challenges, and implications of the historical expectation for Black women (cis and trans) to sacrifice their specific interests in the name of care for the “broader” collective. We will also consider how Black women’s care has shaped various spheres of life from the domestic and communal to that of organized politics, as well as how their care work has historically intersected with structures of gender, race, class, and colonialism.

What are reparations? Do Black people deserve reparations? Do Black communities deserve reparations? What forms could reparations take? How could reparations be distributed? What effects could reparations have in closing racial equity gaps in all facets of society? What obstacles stand in the way of discussing or achieving reparations? These are some of the very important questions that will animate this course’s study as it considers historical and contemporary debates about reparations for the descendants of formerly enslaved African Americans. We will pay attention to the initiatives in Evanston, IL as well as the State of California’s Final Reparations Report when we examine how contemporary local and state governments have begun to approach this topic. Students will be expected to think energetically, creatively, imaginatively, and precisely in order to develop reparations proposals throughout the course of the semester. The course will situate reparations discussions alongside racial equity ones in order to develop solutions for the persistent racial inequities. We will ask and answer hard questions while considering pragmatic and practical ways to implement policies and achieve equity, or diminish inequities.

This course examines the proliferation of black cultural production--literature, film, visual culture--that emerged during the 1990s—in the third decade following legislative achievements that the modern civil rights movement made possible. The course considers how black culture and black cultural producers imagined possibilities for black life, politics, culture, and self-expression during this watershed moment of black cultural expression. The course pays attention to how the achievements of the modern civil rights movements and the subsequent backlashes to these advancements emerge and re-emerge during the 1990s. The course investigates the visions for black life that different black artists put forward that promote black thriving as well as imagines additional ones.

This course, Roots and Routes of Black Internationalism, explores major currents and some paths less well tread that mark the roots and routes of black internationalism from the nineteenth century to the present. Structured chronologically and geographically with African American internationalism serving as a grounding point, the course explores political struggles, visions of freedom, and liberation movements among African descended people as they emerged in key sites across the globe. Drawing on foundational primary sources and contemporary scholarly studies, we will be attentive to critical issues in the imagining and conception of black internationalism including diaspora, colonialism, Pan-Africa, communism and the transnational. We will also explore the ways local and global networks, sites of engagement and solidarities were imagined, created and contested; the importance of class, gender, and race; and the implications of histories of slavery, expansion, and democracy in the making of black internationalism.

This course explores how African American writers in the late twentieth century reimagined black leadership and civil rights in light of the achievements of the modern civil rights movement and its continued work.

This course examines and frames the philosophical contributions of a wide range of pro-Black thinkers. This includes scholars, but also novelists, activists, organizers and especially insights from secondarily marginalized community members.

This course combines literary and cultural studies approaches to examinations of how reading and various literacy practices in Black and Latino communities have served as an important strategy for resistance and liberation movements across the globe. We will determine broader meanings of literacy, and we will theorize on the role literacy and language plays in the formation of identity and issues of self-determination stemming from class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

This course historically examines the manifold ways urban centers have shaped and impacted black people. Since emancipation, countless Black Americans have dreamed of and traveled to urban centers to gain access to better jobs, entertainment, and housing. In this course, students will learn the economic role urban centers play in the United States’ economy, They also will explore the economic, political, and social reasons why Black Americans have historically moved to be closer to these geographical centers. Students will also examine how urbanism continues to intersect with patriarchal logic and anti-black racism. Moreover, students will learn how these structural and ideological dynamics shape African Americans’ experiences with housing, employment, recreation, social welfare, healthcare, and politics. Lastly, this course will center explore African Americans’ voices and experiences, with a close review of how they created spaces to feel joy, intimacy, respect, and (a taste of) freedom.

This course will examine how and why mixed feelings about constructs of race are resolved or unresolved when blackness and sexuality are present. The course will move throughout history: from Dido Belle and Samuel Coleridge Taylor to Georgetown's Patrick Healy to the notable radical interracial relationships and solidarities of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, Grace Chin Lee and James Boggs, Elizabeth Catlett and Francisco Mora, Leroi Jones and Hettie Cohen to contemporary individual multi-racial figures such as Zendaya, Naomi Osaka, Maya Rudolph, Patrick Mahomes, J. Cole, Logic, Kamala Harris, and Barrack Obama. Using novels, film, art, and music, it will highlight the history, culture, and affective movements of interracial sexual practices, bi-racial, and mixed race individuals and communities throughout the African Diaspora. With attention to Black-White, Black-Indigenous, Black-Latino, and Black-Asian relations, the course will investigate the following: legislation regulating racial contact, narratives of passing, trans-racial adoption, sexuality, desire, gender, queerness, slumming, class and labor, and solidarity movements.

Black performance has resisted oppression across several historical frames. In this course, you will read, watch, and listen to performances that illustrate various forms of artistic protest from the African Diaspora. Students will study historical black performance styles and identify ways in which patterns of resistance from the past contribute to ongoing social justice movements. After investigating the history of Black performance as social protest, students will produce a reflective manifesto for achieving racial equity through performance. The course incorporates an online learning tool about Black Performance as Social Protest.

This course examines how historical contexts and political movements inform writing black lives. We will examine how biographers know the “truth” of one’s own, or another’s life, and how to tell the truth in a form that is compelling and clear. What archives to biographers draw from in order to tell their stories? Do the archives of African Americans differ from Americans in general? What styes of storytelling are the most compelling for the given content? How do biographers account for audience in the stories that they tell? Students will read biographies, autobiographies, essays, and a graphic novel and watch biopics. They will be required to write different portions of biographic texts, including early memories, historical contexts, important life events, and descriptions of personal relationships. We will engage with biographical texts about Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and O.J. Simpson. In addition to weekly reading and discussion assignments, students will do preliminary research and present material on a biographical sketches that they will write.

Though its disciplinary reach is extensive, Black Geographies exists primarily at the intersection of Geography and Black Studies as a means of interrogating the spatial dimensions of Black life, culture, politics, and epistemic traditions in ways that not only critique the “politically neutral” analyses of space common in Geography, but also offer alternative ways of comprehending space from Black perspectives, traditions, and histories. “Black” in this seminar is always global, though never monolithic. We will consider the spatiality of global Blackness and its various resonances and dissonances. We will draw from several books, articles, essays, films, and other media to engage Black geographic thought and practice from several different global locations and disciplines, and we’ll have some guiding questions to follow our path together through the semester.

Chattel slavery, described as America’s original sin, permeates American culture, despite historical and contemporary attempts to deny its lasting effects. That is, the racial and economic ideas that supported and propelled slavery still exist and have taken on new forms. They have also contributed to the systemic racial inequalities and restricted liberties that currently impact Black communities. In this course, we will pay attention to how and why Black people—from writers, to film producers, to elected officials, to activists, to educators—have worked diligently to record and acknowledge this pivotal period of American history. We will pay careful attention to the mechanisms they use to demonstrate how the aftermath of slavery effectively kept slavery alive from Reconstruction until now. We will look at a wide-range of texts and cultural objects and we will consider the solutions they propose to engage the historical and contemporary effects of slavery.

This course will center on the writings of one of the most important writers of the 21st century, Ta-Nehisi Coates. We will be especially engaged with his important and influential essays first in The Atlantic and later in his book, We Were Eight Years in Power and his book, Between the World and Me. As a public intellectual, Coates has used the power of his pen to advance a number of issues essential to African American life and experience, including reparations, slavery, representation, leadership, racism, politics, police murders, and mass incarceration. Literacy, in the African American tradition, is a tool of activism; how does Coates contribute to the tradition of activism? We will examine the substance and effectiveness of Coates's writerly activism as we also learn from the public histories Coates examines. We will read Coates with a number of his interlocutors, including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, and Angela Davis. This course is reading intensive, and students should expect reading quizzes, short writing assignments, a researched seminar paper/project, and great class discussions.

Examines the writings and political documents that inform 20th century's radical black history.

How are the histories of Indigenous survival and resistance in the Chesapeake Bay remembered—and how are they systematically erased? Engaging the fields of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, History, and more, this advanced seminar examines how Indigenous communities throughout the Mid-Atlantic have navigated, resisted, and adapted to the intertwined legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and racialization across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Through the interdisciplinary analysis of historical texts, law, popular culture, and public memory, students will interrogate regional and national narratives of Indigenous extinction—examining the central roles of racial formation and anti-Blackness in the settler colonial project of Indigenous erasure. Most importantly, this course centers stories of Indigenous survivance, a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor to celebrate the creative, embodied, and collective strategies through which Indigenous communities have continuously asserted their presence upon their homelands—refusing to disappear.

This course surveys Black popular culture as Black social theory and an archive of Black life and politics, examining how Black pop culture shapes and influences national and global political, social, and cultural processes.

This course explores Black Central American cultural production, including literary, visual, and multimedia texts, as a transnational archive of memory, resistance, and belonging. From poetry, fiction, and memoir to photography, film, and visual art, Afro-descendant and Afro-Indigenous creators from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama contest racialized geographies, colonial legacies, and nationalist exclusions. Their work engages themes of gender, language, land, migration, and cultural survival, often written, imaged, or filmed in relation to the Caribbean Coast, a region long positioned as a racialized periphery in the Central American imaginary. By reading literature alongside visual art, film, photography, and performance, students will consider how these works circulate across borders and illuminate the complexities of displacement, survival, and belonging in the Americas. Primary texts will be paired with critical works in Black feminist theory, diaspora studies, and cultural histories of Black Central America, framing cultural production not only as regional expression but as a hemispheric and world-making practice.

This course will explore how African American, African Diaspora, or Africana Studies can better implement agendas of environmental justice into its mission as a field? It also asks how African American and African Diasporic arts and cultures helped imagine changes in technology, science, and policies concerned with the environment?

This course will provide an interdisciplinary examination of how and when Black, Brown, and Indigenous cultures and philosophies of embodiment have challenged and intervened on U.S. drug policy history and politics. Drawing from behavioral studies, policy, film, music, literature, and art, the course will place Black, Brown, and Indigenous spirituality, ritual, culture, experimentation and illicit economies side-by-side and in conversation with histories of colonization, spiritual conversion, capitalism, pharmaceutical industries, and contemporary scientific research to better understand the role that constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and empire play in our past and contemporary understanding of drug abuse, drug addiction, and drug regulation.

This course will frame the effects of race on the digital as a space and place as well as how we can use the digital to demonstrate how race changes our physical spaces and places. We will utilize analysis of race as it intersects with memory, archives, gentrification, oral histories, and the digitization of space and place. This course will provide students with experience in conceptualizing research projects that explore and examine the day-to-day lives of communities that are both online and offline.

Studies suggest that more than half of the United States’ racial wealth gap is attributable to housing inequities. This course explores why. This class will explore Black people’s housing options since their formal relocation and eventual settlement in the United States. Throughout this historical period, Black people have had to navigate uneven and inconsistent access to the housing market. To understand this complicated history, students will learn how social difference (with special attention paid to class, race, and gender) has impacted the policy, development, and regulation of housing in the United States. Moreover, students will discover how existing policies may reinforce or challenge Black communities’ attempts to build wealth and reduce poverty. Lastly, this course will provide students with a basic understanding of how social difference impacts the economics of housing, including supply and demand, finance, and housing consumption.

Since the inception of transatlantic racial slavery and European settler colonialism in the Americas, women of African descent have drawn on their embodied experiences and cultural and artistic traditions to resist gendered anti-Black oppression in a number of ways. From the patchwork quilts of enslaved African women in the nineteenth century to the political and artistic movements of Black women artists and cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Black women throughout the Americas have used art and culture to not only survive and combat gendered racism but also to imagine alternative social arrangements and ways of being in the world. This third year seminar will explore the themes, methods, and questions that have animated Black women’s visual art in the Americas. Additionally, the course will ask the following questions: What are the contours of and continuities between Black women’s visual art in the Americas? What insights might a hemispheric lens yield in the study of Black women’s art? Lastly, what is the relationship between Black women’s art and their social and political struggles throughout the hemisphere?

For historians interested in the lives of Black and Indigenous people, queer and 2-Spirit relatives, women, the working-class, and other marginalized communities, the traditional archive can be a difficult place to navigate. How do we uplift the experiences of those pushed to the margins of history? If their stories have not been preserved in archival collections, then where can we find them? Can we imagine beyond the many biases, mistakes, misinterpretations of the documentary record? In this reading-intensive methods course, students will engage the works of Black and Indigenous historians who utilize speculative fiction and critical fabulation to reveal histories lost to enslavement, settler colonialism, and sexism. Through these texts and their own speculative history project, students will learn the merits, challenges, and impact of combining rigorous archival research, critical theory, and creative narrative in order to re-imagine the past.

This course will explore the art and activism of three artists key to the Civil Rights Movement Period. Engaging fiction, drama, and music, among other genres, we will consider the domestic and diasporic impact of their work.

This seminar will examine the life work and the afterlife of James Baldwin, one of the 20th century's most important writers, activists, and social justice advocates. His work spans a number of genres (essays, short stories, plays, novels) and engages topics such as race, racism, music, film, politics, love, nation, gender, history, sexuality, and intimacy. A self-proclaimed witness, Baldwin offers a critical view of American society from the 1940s to 1980s.

Special topics in African American Studies

First-person narratives, from the epistolary form to the personal essay to the memoir, have been central to how Black intellectuals communicate within the broader tradition of Black Studies. This course examines various first-person narratives to understand how these works speak beyond the individual to place, space, time, and memory. It is concerned with how Black memoirs signify on Black Studies and Black life, providing another methodological window into some of the field’s primary concerns.

This advanced level course historically traces the economic, political, and cultural hurdles and opportunities capitalism has afforded African Americans. With an analytical focus on African-American elites, this course examines the wealth-building strategies African-American entrepreneurs and capitalists developed and expanded post-Emancipation. Situating this examination within a broader review of capitalism’s evolution in the United States and abroad, students will learn the political theories and intellectual debates that African Americans have about capitalism and its effects on their community.

This course will examine the significance of Black LGBTQ writers, filmmakers, politicians, artists, and musicians to D.C. as the nation's capital and its evolution from the early 20th century to present. We will also examine how these figures and their contributions travel and impact national and international conversations about race, gender, sexuality, and class.

This seminar examines anti-black racism within the criminal justice system to consider whether racial equity within the criminal justice system is even possible. In particular, we will analyze and debate how anti-black racism governs laws, policies, policing, juror selection, prosecutorial discretion, and the rights of the accused. We will think about how the norms and discourses we take for granted may reinforce and embed racism, and we will consider how philosophies that underwrite the criminal justice system parallel those of other American social institutions, including education. We will pay close attention to how race and racism intersect with other identities and oppressions as we attempt to understand the historical and contemporary dimensions of these problems. We will explore how humanistic and social science methodologies and theories can help us to contest ideas of color-blindness and race-neutrality that ultimately retrench black inequality. Beyond thinking about the problem, this course will challenge its participants to develop solutions to some aspect of the criminal justice system and/or a related institution. Students will have the opportunity to develop racial-bias training for police departments, juror bias-training, and other solutions that alleviate racial inequity in the criminal justice system. The purpose of the course is to provide thought-leadership on some of the key issues in criminal justice that stymie racial economic empowerment and justice and to propose new models for engaging these topics. While criminal justice remains our primary focal point, employment, housing, and education inequality and reform necessarily factors into our discussion. Students enrolling in the course can expect to attendance, participation, two-short papers, an in-class presentation, midterm exam, and final project to determine their grades. They should also expect roundtable discussions where we problem solve and flesh out solutions to the problems.

This undergraduate seminar examines Black and Indigenous relationships to land and water, emphasizing the central role of the environment and ecological knowledge in struggles for liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty in the United States. How did the land aid enslaved peoples navigating a way towards freedom? How did the tidewaters of the Chesapeake protect Native tribes from the violence of settler colonialism? And, of course, in what ways have these communities defended the land in return? With particular attention to the Chesapeake Bay region, students will have the opportunity to expand their knowledge of the rivers, forests, and other more-than-human beings around them. At the same time, they will analyze how racism, settler colonialism, eurocentrism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism have historically and contemporarily dominated ecological knowledge—shaping these environments, along with the entire Earth. Ultimately, through the ecological practices and ancestral knowledge of Black and Indigenous communities, the course will ask students to consider new pathways towards liberated and sustainable futures.

In the summer of 2020, the United States experienced the largest social movement in its history. Four years later, the country found itself in a political climate seemingly inhospitable to the protest demands shared that historic summer. This course explores the complicated political history of Black social movements in the United States. Since Emancipation, Black communities have led sophisticated and evolving campaigns to achieve goals such as social and economic justice, yet the full realization of these goals remains elusive. This course explores how race has impacted the development of social movements in the United States and how it has informed counter-movements. To understand this history, students will learn how social differences, such as race and gender, inform social movement theory and historical organizing efforts.

Will examine the challenge that theories of black visual culture pose to performance theory. Even within a postructuralist context in which all identity categories are constructed, performance theorists such as Judith Butler, Richard Schechner, and Joseph Roach suggest that discrete acts of authorship participate in reinforcing individual identity. Performance theory also suggests that individual acts emerge in relationship to historical strictures that encourage normative manifestations of identity. In other words, the appearance of normative identities follows a progressive history. While individual acts and progressive histories function as the tributaries that feed normative identities, blackness often appears contrary to the individual act or historical evidence. This class will place classic theories of black visual culture and identity (double consciousness, Frantz Fanon's description of black ontology, primitivism) in conversation with key texts from performance theory to articulate how blackness redirects the temporality of performance.

This course will examine the literary, cultural and political work of laureate Toni Morrison. Morrison is one of the most incisive theorist of African American life, and her essays, novels, and interviews all work toward the liberation of African Americans by exposing and revealing both the "more beautiful, and more terrible" (Baldwin) of African American life in the US.

Course examines the genealogies and debates of black queer studies, as well as representations of gender non-conformity and fluid sexualities in literature and film produced by Black Candian, Black European, Afro-Indigenous, Afro Asian, Afro-Latina , and Black U.S. communities . It will focus on six major issues and concerns: 1) impact of slavery and colonization 2) migration, immigration and transnationalism, 3) how forms and aesthetics signify class differences of gender and sexuality 4) private and public spaces and representations for black queer identity and culture, 5) spirituality and queerness, and 6) consumption/abjection of black queer bodies and cultures.

This course exposes students to the concepts of speculative blackness and Afrofuturism as a way to understand the significance of black discourses about being human, as well as black expressions of race, gender, and sexuality, to the developing area of space studies and space commerce and the existing area of cyberstudies that superficially address race, gender, and sexuality.

Students read international plays and study Black expressive cultures in historical and cultural contexts. They analyze Caribbean, Black Europe and African dramatic works. The course will center on intertwined histories expressed through performance and the arts. Black World Drama is a seminar class in which students develop several short papers and presentations about selected topics.

The course expands studies of race to transnational settings. Students will consider paradigms of race, nation, ethnicity, religion and heritage. Comparative readings and viewings immerse students in the study of how colonialism, trade, migration, and cultural exchange have shaped complex racial identities across the Americas, East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

This course examines the digital tools, design questions, methods, and methodologies to develop a public-facing digital humanities project. Through an extended study of various Black Digital Studies projects, this course will demonstrate how research questions are built, tested, and demonstrated using digital tools. Students will design a project that is focused on digital and technological phenomena or one that encapsulates broader aspects of social life. Upon completion of this course, students will have completed a prototype or concept and a grant application for further development of their projects.

This course explores contemporary representations of love, sex, and relationships in Black culture, and considers how American politics and public policy often call upon Black relationships in public discourses. We will analyze different types of texts—including literature, music, films, magazine articles, and public policies to examine their roles in distributing ideas about love, marriage, and sex. We will read a range of theoretical texts as well to contextualize and shape our thinking. Some of the questions we will return to throughout the semester are: 1) How do the overlapping categories of race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality shape our views about love, sex, and relationships? 2) What factors compel people to marry, remain single, or “live-together”? 3) What are the advantages and disadvantages (personal and political) of love, sex, and/or relationships? 4) What relationships exist between “love” and “sex,” and “love” and “relationships,” and or “sex” and “relationships?” 5) Should the state and/or church define and regulate what types of relationships have political/economic advantages?

This advanced undergraduate seminar will consider the contours of colonialism’s legacies in Latin America and the Caribbean and the role of art and culture in coloniality’s enduring presence in the region. Through careful study of cultural production such as painting, poetry, the novel, and film, the course will elucidate how gendered anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity has been central to the colonial imagination in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to examining white/mestizx cultural production, the course will also attend to Black and Indigenous cultural production. In doing so, the course will map the contours of both colonial imaginaries and Black and Indigenous counter-imaginaries from the colonial period to the present.

This course explores why Black Studies as a field should be engaged with the development of policy and law related to regulating space and aerospace technology, as well as why space law and policy would benefit from Black Studies interventions. It does so by examining African Diasporic ethics and philosophies about extraterrestrial life forms and outer space; in addition to illuminating policy and cultural responses to the space race from Black writers, artists, politicians, policymakers, legal scholars, and filmmakers from across the globe. Using methods and approaches from Black Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Queer Legal Theory, Crip theory, and African American literature, we will explore why and how Black people’s limited access to institutional power, technology, and private corporatization has not kept them from developing arguments and theories relevant to developments in space policy and law.

This course will examine Black philosophies of funk, time, space, sensation, and embodiment in non-digital, short form storytelling. From short stories and poems to songs and choreography, to episodic television and short films, we will discover how Black storytellers have laid the foundation for an Anti-AI movement rooted in sensory preservation and kinesthetic evolution.

Advanced Topics and Methods is an intensive course on the interdisciplinary research methods used in African American Studies and how they are employed to study the African American experience and the African diaspora. The course’s main goals are to provide students with the building blocks to enable them to read and critique scholarly work in African American studies as well as to conduct their own original research. Under the instructor’s guidance, students will survey and investigate the influences of various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches and concerns in the inter-discipline; determine their intellectual uses and applications; discuss some of the criticisms of these methods, particularly as they relate to contemporary thinking about local, national, and international Black experiences; and deploy these methodologies in their individual research projects. Starting with a review of the history, culture, philosophy and worldview of the lived experiences of peoples of African descent, the course moves on to provide students with the interdisciplinary methods and techniques used in scholarly research and writing under the rubric of African American Studies. Students will become familiar with the major theoretical paradigms guiding research in African American Studies. From there, the course will focus on principles that are applicable to all forms of research methodologies from surveys to historiography to ethnography, including research ethics, how to frame a research question, how to conduct a literature review, how to design a research project, and how to present research findings.

Advanced Topics and Methods is an intensive course on the interdisciplinary research methods used in African American Studies and how they are employed to study the African American experience and the African diaspora. The course’s main goals are to provide students with the building blocks to enable them to read and critique scholarly work in African American studies as well as to conduct their own original research. Under the instructor’s guidance, students will survey and investigate the influences of various theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches and concerns in the inter-discipline; determine their intellectual uses and applications; discuss some of the criticisms of these methods, particularly as they relate to contemporary thinking about local, national, and international Black experiences; and deploy these methodologies in their individual research projects. Starting with a review of the history, culture, philosophy and worldview of the lived experiences of peoples of African descent, the course moves on to provide students with the interdisciplinary methods and techniques used in scholarly research and writing under the rubric of African American Studies. Students will become familiar with the major theoretical paradigms guiding research in African American Studies. From there, the course will focus on principles that are applicable to all forms of research methodologies from surveys to historiography to ethnography, including research ethics, how to frame a research question, how to conduct a literature review, how to design a research project, and how to present research findings.

In this course, students will begin the process of researching for their thesis: conducting research, analyzing research, constructing a thesis, and developing approach/method for thesis

In this coustudents should be present and defend their thesis paper/project.rse, students will write, revise, and finalize a traditional thesis paper or develop, revise, finalize a non-traditional thesis project. By April,

This course explores why Black Studies as a field should be engaged with the development of policy and law related to regulating space and aerospace technology, as well as why space law and policy would benefit from Black Studies interventions. It does so by examining African Diasporic ethics and philosophies about extraterrestrial life forms and outer space; in addition to illuminating policy and cultural responses to the space race from Black writers, artists, politicians, policymakers, legal scholars, and filmmakers from across the globe. Using methods and approaches from Black Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Queer Legal Theory, Crip theory, and African American literature, we will explore why and how Black people’s limited access to institutional power, technology, and private corporatization has not kept them from developing arguments and theories relevant to developments in space policy and law.