Courses

Further information concerning planned graduate course offerings can be obtained by calling the Afro-American Studies Department office at (413) 545-2751, or by visiting the department's website at www.umass.edu/afroam/.

All courses carry 4 credits unless otherwise specified.

AFROAM 597E. Dalits and African Americans (Undergraduate/Graduate)
The purpose of this seminar is to begin to explore similarities, differences, connections, and convergences between the Dalit population of India and African Americans in the United States. We will read short histories of both peoples, studies that focus on examples of historic interactions, and studies comparing leading figures of both groups. Most of the reading will center on the 20th century (i.e., India during the periods of colonization, anti-colonization, and independence) and on African Americans from emancipation to the end of legal segregation. There is a rich and rapidly growing scholarship on these topics, so view this seminar as an opening to a complex and important subject. Good books to read, discussion format, class presentation on one of the books, and final paper. Credit, 3

AFROAM 601. Slavery
This seminar will focus on the rise of slavery in the United States until its destruction during the Civil War. We will study slavery as a political and economic institution as well as a day-to-day lived experience. Within this historical framework, the emphasis will be on broad themes and interpretations, such as the construction of race and racism, the debate origins of slavery, the nature of slave communities and culture, gender and slavery, slavery in a comparative perspective, slave resistance, and the politics of slavery.

AFROAM 652. Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
An intensive study of the literature and orature associated with the Harlem Renaissance, from the philosophical underpinnings supplied by Du Bois, Johnson, Locke, Garvey, and Randolph to the varied poetic visions of Hughes, Spencer, Brown, Cullen, and McKay to the fictional explorations of Toomer, Hurston, Fisher, Larsen, Fauset, and Thurman to the inspiration supplied by blues, jazz, and folklore of the African American tradition. Journals connected with the movement, the contributions of interested patrons, such as Van Vechten, Cunard, and the Spingarns, and the relations of the Harlem Renaissance to other contemporary American literary currents (realism, naturalism, and modernism.)

AFROAM 691F. Black Political Struggle in America: 1776-Present
An historical examination of the black political struggle for equality and citizenship in America—the obstacles placed in the path of that struggle by the American political system in general and by the American state in particular—and the countless ways in which racial politics have shaped the system that is called American Democracy.

AFROAM 691M. The Life and Thought of C.L.R. James
This seminar will entail the reading of several of James’ major works as well as a substantial selection from his political writings and correspondence. The purpose is to acquaint you with James’ own words on a variety of the political, social, and cultural issues that he addressed during his lifetime. We also will do some reading in the secondary literature that attempts, with varying success, to situate James in various contexts.

AFROAM 692A. Literary Theory
This course will take up literary theory since 1965 and how it has influenced and has been influenced by the study of African American literature and culture. The idea here is not to be comprehensive, but rather, to use the term popular a few years back, to stage a series of interventions into the sometimes troubled relationship between “high” theory and its successors and African American Studies. Our task will not simply be to examine different “schools” of critical theory, but to consider how theory has informed and challenged African American literary studies and vice versa.  We will also seek to historicize various critical moments or movements rather than simply view them as pieces of an intellectual toolbox.

AFROAM 692J. African American Literary Movements
The New Negro Harlem Renaissance writers (1920s), the Chicago Writers (1930s and 1940s), the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movement writers (1960s and 1970s), and Black Womanist/Gender issues writers (1980s) mark four distinct periods of heightened literary production among African American writers. Participants in this course will investigate formative themes and concepts (protest/social literature, Pan-Africanism, uplift, Black aesthetic, among others) that have shaped these movements and will examine the cross-talk—shared concepts, ideas, and ideals—that gives these movements as well as twentieth-century African American literature certain recognizable features that have been shaped and reshaped over time.

AFROAM 693A. Africana Music
This course explores contemporary life in Africa and the Diaspora through a study of African and African American music. Focusing on black music genres like Afrobeat, Soul, Makosa, Jazz, Kwaito, Highlife, Juju, R&B, Hiplife, Hip hop, among others, this course will adopt an ethnomusicological approach to a study of the peoples, their unique histories, and their cultures. The course will explore ethnic groups across the Africana world, including Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Congo, and the United States. Ultimately, the material covered in this course will provide both an overarching and nuanced understanding of the Black world through its varied soundscapes.

AFROAM 693R. Race, Caste and Capital, 3 credits. (Meets with WGSS 693R)
The seminar will examine the co-constitutive historical formations of race and caste in relation to the expansion of capitalism and European high colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather than seeing this as a period for the 'origins' of race or caste, the course will examine the ways in which race and caste were discursively mediated in the period of high colonialism to shape the kind of racialized hierarchies that we are familiar with today. The course puts the urgent concerns of African American Studies, South Asian Studies and heterodox economics, with an emphasis on questions of political economy, together in a semester-long inquiry into how racialized hierarchies have been essential to producing and maintaining class stratification and geopolitical power. We will primarily draw from the American Black Radical and the South Asian Dalit Radical traditions for our readings in this course. These readings will focus on how European colonial and imperial regimes of power necessitated and furthered racialized hierarchies through regimes of chattel slavery, indentured servitude and bonded labor. We will also aim to understand how these regimes elicited some of the most radical and revolutionary struggles for liberation in the world. While our readings will be wide ranging in scope, our discussions will focus on the fairly specific question of what relation we can postulate, based on historical evidence and historiographical critiques, between contemporary instantiations of race and caste in different parts of the world? We will necessarily pay close attention to axes of gender and sexuality throughout the seminar, drawing on examples and critical work from authors working in the Caribbean, South Asia, North America, South Africa, East Africa, and the UK.

AFROAM 701-702 Major Works Seminar in Afro-American Studies I and II
An intensive study of fifty major works of Afro-American Studies. Required of all first-year doctoral and masters candidates, and open only to them.