This intermediate-level course involves instructor lectures supplemented with students' accessing a wide variety of Swahili language materials (such as internet-based Swahili newspapers, video resources, and pictorial depiction of Swahili poems, artifacts, proverbs, songs, stories). Students will be involved in class conversations, presentations, and discussions to encourage them to interact effectively in Swahili. Emphasis will be placed on helping students to improve their reading, speaking, and writing skills. At the end of this course students should be able to use Swahili language within and beyond school. Prerequisite: A Swahili introductory course or the equivalent.
A multidisciplinary investigation into the lives and cultures of people of African descent in the Americas. Topics may include: the African background, religion and the Black church, popular culture, slavery and resistance, morality and literacy, the Civil Rights Movement, Black nationalism, theories of race and race relations. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.
This course deals with the African heritage, origins of white racial attitudes toward blacks, the slave system in colonial and ante-bellum America, and free Black society in North America. Specific emphasis will be placed on the Afro-American experience and on the relationship between blacks and whites in early American society. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.
This course focuses on links between Africa and other parts of the world, in particular Europe and Asia. Readings, lectures, and discussions will address travel and migration, economics and trade, identity formation, empire, and cultural production. Rather than viewing Africa as separate from global processes, the course will address historical phenomena across oceans, deserts, cultures, and languages to demonstrate both the diversity of experiences and the long-term global connections among disparate parts of the world. Open to all classes. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: NW.
This course will examine African American playwrights, drama, and theater from 1959 to the present. Further exploration will focus on the impact of civil rights, the Black Arts movement, and cultural aesthetics on the form, style, and content of African American plays. Readings will include plays of Hansberry, Baldwin, Baraka, Kennedy, Childress, Shange, Wolfe, Wilson, Parks and others. Open to all classes. Dist: ART; WCult: CI.
A cross-disciplinary study of the contributions and problems of African American intellectuals in the United States. Given time constraints, we will focus primarily on twentieth century figures and scholarship, to understand works by such thinkers as W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Zora Hurston, Carter Woodson, Ralph Ellison, E. Franklin Frazier, Angela Davis, Stephen Carter, Derrick Bell, Cornel West and Patricia Williams, as well as the social and intellectual contexts in which they found, and continue to find, themselves. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.
A study of the foundations of Black American literature and thought, from the colonial period through the era of Booker T. Washington. The course will concentrate on the way in which developing Afro-American literature met the challenges posed successively by slavery, abolition, emancipation, and the struggle to determine directions for the twentieth century. Selections will include: Wheatley, Life and Works; Brown, Clotel; Douglass, Narrative; Washington, Up from Slavery; DuBois, Souls of Black Folk; Dunbar, Sport of the Gods; Chestnut, House Behind the Cedars; Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man; and poems by F. W. Harper, Paul L. Dunbar and Ann Spencer. Dist: LIT; WCult: W.
This course examines jazz from its origins to the present, with special attention to pivotal figures in the history of jazz such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. Class work includes listening to, analyzing, and discussing a wide variety of recorded jazz performances, and watching jazz films. Class sessions include performances by visiting artists. Outside of class, students will attend live jazz performances, listen to recordings, and read about the artists who brought this music to life. The goal is to help increase understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of the great American art form called jazz. Dist: ART; WCult: W.
After an initial overview of colonialism in Africa, this course will concentrate on Southern Africa, with special emphasis on the historical development, effects, and implications of the racial situation in the Republic of South Africa. Readings will be drawn from primary and secondary materials and from works of fiction. Illustrative films will be shown, and some opportunity offered to compare the history of race relations in South Africa with that in other African countries and in the United States. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.
An introduction to the themes and foundational texts of postcolonial literature in English. We will read and discuss novels by writers from former British colonies in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the postcolonial diaspora, with attention to the particularities of their diverse cultures and colonial histories. Our study of the literary texts will incorporate critical and theoretical essays, oral presentations, and brief background lectures. Authors may include Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, V.S. Naipaul, Merle Hodge, Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Paule Marshall, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, Earl Lovelace, Arundhati Roy. Serves as prerequisite for FSP in Trinidad. Dist: LIT or INT; WCult: NW.
This course will examine the development of Santeria and Candomble and the contemporary factors--such as globalization, commercialization of tradition, and the spread of the evangelical movement--that have affected them. We will study the African Diaspora in this context and investigate what makes the diaspora in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean unique. In studying the history of Santeria and Candomble, we will consider the politics of race and cultural representation in their respective countries. Our main goal will be to discover how the conceptualization of self and community are linked to belief. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval.
In this course we will read, discuss and write about a selection of female-authored novels from the Anglophone Caribbean. The texts are: Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb; Espinet, Ramabai, The Swinging Bridge; Levy, Andrea, Small Island; Mootoo; Shani, Cereus Blooms at Night; Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea. We will relate the texts to the historical, social and cultural realities of the region; identify and analyze the major thematic concerns of individual writers; examine each writer's treatment of issues such as gender, class, ethnicity, family and identity; and evaluate technical aspects of these works of fiction, among them structure, characterization, language use (of particular significance in the Caribbean context), narrative perspective and voice. We will explore commonalities and differences among the texts. Students will be expected to present and develop ideas in academic essays which use a formal register of English, are well organized, and adhere to the required documentation style. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval.
Multidisciplinary in scope, the course will survey critical social change in African cultures and civilizations through a study of history, art, literature, religion, economy, and politics, paying particular attention to the cultural impact of colonial rule on contemporary societies and states. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.
This course is a continuation of History 16. Among the topics to be discussed are Black Reconstruction, segregation and disfranchisement, migration, nationalism, Blacks and the New Deal, the impact of war on Blacks, and the 1960s. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.
This course will examine the social and economic history of Africa to 1800. Several interrelated themes of social organization, the expansion of trade, rise of new social classes, the emergence and disintegration of various states and European intervention will be discussed. Through our readings, we will visit every major historical region of Africa (north, east, central, west and south) at least once during the semester to illuminate the various themes. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.
The Spanish discovery and conquest of this continent created Latin America and the Caribbean out of the diverse and complex realities of the pre-Columbian world. Since colonial times Latin American and Caribbean cultures have developed against a background of cultural repression, racial conflict, political domination, colonial exploitation, and gender inequality. And yet, in the midst of all this turmoil, Latin America and the Caribbean have produced an extraordinary variety and wealth of artistic creations, ranging from literature to the visual arts, from music to film. In this course we will turn to some of the works by Latin American and Caribbean artists and writers in an attempt to illuminate and explore some of the wonders of the cultural dynamics that shape the many faces of what we call Latin America and the Caribbean. Dist: LIT; WCult: NW.
Throughout the history of the United States, African Americans have offered alternative visions of their nation’s future and alternative definitions of their nation’s progress. Not limited to reforming the worst social ills, these discourses have called for a fundamental restructuring of our political, economic, and social relations. A radical tradition provided the intellectual continuity and ideological coherence of these critiques, and it allowed African Americans to cultivate and pass on a legacy of social resistance. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.
African American Fiction Since 1990 (Identical to African and African American Studies 36). This course will explore African American prose fiction published since 1990 in an effort to probe the complicated question “What is Black fiction?” We shall also read extensively in African American literary criticism and theory with an eye toward learning how they have shaped the canon of African American literature. We will study novels by Morrison, Charles Johnson, Whitehead, Sienna, Octavia Butler and Beatty and examine how they challenge the paradigms of Black literature. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI, pending faculty approval.
This interdisciplinary course explores the constructions of gender identities in different African sociocultural contexts. The emphasis is on contemporary Africa, although we will discuss some of the historical frameworks of these identities. We will read historical accounts of gender in some pre-colonial African societies, investigate the impact of colonialism, and examine gender in some anticolonial movements. We will also analyze gender in urban and rural contexts, and address such questions as homosexuality and gay rights. WCult: CI.
This course focuses on processes, relationships, and experiences that have shaped, and continue to shape, the lives of Africans in many different contexts. These include issues of ecology and food production, age, gender, ethnicity, exchange, colonialism, apartheid, and development. We will then embark on in depth readings of ethnographies that engage these issues and themes. In the processes we will move beyond prevailing stereotypes about Africa, to engage the full complexity of its contemporary realities. Prerequisite: One introductory course in anthropology or in AAAS or by permission. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.
This course is intended as an introduction to contemporary political, economic, social, and environmental issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will begin with a brief historical overview, focusing on the legacies of the colonial era. It will then look critically at a number of modern-day concerns, including agriculture and food security, environmental degradation, health and disease, urbanization, economic aid and restructuring, and the politics of ethnicity and democratization. While we will examine each subject by way of select case studies, emphasis throughout will be on the diversity and changing nature of the African continent. This course will also consider how Africa’s problems are portrayed and understood (and often misunderstood) by the rest of the world. Dist: SOC or INT; WCult: NW.
This course contrasts the most important approaches to development in Africa as they are used to explain the structure of political economy and politics in specific African countries. Special attention is paid to the consequences of external agencies, including external relations with industrialized countries and the World Bank, and the internal relations based on the interaction of the African state, ethnicity, patronage, class and local capitalism. Selected countries will be analyzed in detail. Prerequisite Government 4, or permission of the instructor. Dist: SOC or INT: WCult: NW.
This course offers an introduction to the history of North Africa from its conversion to Islam to its current, transnational political and social formations. Focusing on religion and conversion, Sufism and mysticism, French and Italian colonialism, trade and economic history, environment, the region’s engagement with the Sahara, literature and culture, and migration, assignments will emphasize major themes in the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the region. Open to all classes. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.
This course aims to introduce students to the formation of Islam in the Maghrib, Saharan Africa, and Africa south of the desert. Assignments will address continuities with and differences from the practices of Muslims in other parts of the world while emphasizing the central role the religion has played in the unfolding of history in various parts of Africa. Topics covered will include conversion, popular religion and mysticism, cultural formations, and social organization. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.
In this course we will explore the emergence of Black feminism(s)/womanism(s) in twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. We will specifically address how the work of African-American women artists-scholars critiques sexism, racism, classicism, ethnocentrism and heterosexism within the U.S. context. In order to examine Black feminism(s) and womanism(s) in popular culture from myriad perspectives, the required readings for this course reflect a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as a range of genres. Open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.
This course explores how the experience of slavery and abolition in Brazil has formed a major theme for Brazilian authors from the nineteenth century to today. Key literary texts will be paired with period art, historical writings, films, and music. We will examine how the Brazilian Empire was part of the larger Atlantic world yet its history of slavery and abolition was distinct from tht of the U.S. Dist. Lit: WCult: NW, pending faculty approval.
Available to students who wish to independently explore aspects of African and African American Studies which are not included in courses currently offered at Dartmouth. Open to qualified students with permission of the course instructorand the Chair. (Obtain Proposal Form in the program office.) No student may take more than two such courses without the approval of the program. Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
For senior African and African American Studies majors toward the culminating experience, with permission of selected instructor and the Chair. (Obtain Proposal Form in the program office.)
The honors student will pursue the project under guidance of selected faculty member and with permission of the Chair. See "A Guide to Honors in African and African American Studies" in the program office.
