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 591B. Black Radical Thought (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This course will focus on contributions to Marxist intellectual and political traditions by African and African-descended thinkers. We will read and discuss works by major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Angela Davis, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon. We also hope to introduce you to a selection of perhaps lesser known figures such as Babu, Achille Mbembe, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, James Boggs, Muhammad Ahmad. The course will require extensive reading, informed participation in class discussion, and a final paper. Credits, 3.
AFROAM 597M. Third World Marxism (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This seminar has two goals first, to introduce students to the views of Karl Marx on non-European societies, and second to explore how Marx's general theories have been adopted and modified to address the circumstances of non-white peoples. The primary focus will be on writings produced in the western hemisphere by African Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis and Harold Cruse; West Indians such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Rodney. We also will include writings by influential Latin American marxists such as Jose Carlos Mariategui. For the sake of comparison, some attention will be given to the development of marxist traditions in China and in Africa. This will be a reading seminar with heavy emphasis on class participation, including the leading of at least one class discussion. Credits, 3.
AFROAM 597P. Black Presence at UMass Amherst (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This course will provide an opportunity for students to assist in researching and selecting materials for a Black Presence at UMass website and for a short history, with photos, of the presence of Black folk at UMass since its founding in 1867. The goal for the website is to be as comprehensive as possible in identifying students, staff, administrators, faculty that made up the UMass Afro-descended community. We also will be preparing lists of key individuals and events to be included in the short history. Where feasible we will be doing short (5-10 minute) videos for the website throughout the semester and during Homecoming weekend. The large portion of the work will take place using the resources of the Du Bois Library. There will be visits to community sites in Amherst, Springfield, and other relevant towns and cities. The efforts of all students involved will receive appropriate acknowledgement on the website and in the book. The class also will serve as informal advisors on academic and artistic programming for the Malcolm X Center for the 2020-21 school year. These are projects of great and lasting significance. Student input is vital. Credits, 3.
AFROAM 610. The Life and Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois
A critical examination of the life and thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, paramount black scholar and activist whose massive body of scholarly work spans the period from late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. Course covers the major works of Du Bois: The Philadelphia Negro; The Souls of Black Folk; Black Reconstruction; and, Dusk of Dawn. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa, and The Education of Black People, as well as selected essays by Du Bois, are also addressed. Topics include Du Bois as a sociologist, historian, propagandist, and creative writer, taking into account his often shifting views on art and culture, politics, leadership, civil rights and the color line, trade unionism, Pan-Africanism, socialism, internationalism, and, of course, double consciousness, among other issues.
AFROAM 667. Afro-American Presence in American Literature
An intensive survey of the portrayals of Afro-Americans in American literature, examining how characters, themes, and ideas are portrayed when filtered through the race, gender, class, politics, historical time frame, and individual artistic aesthetic of a variety of writers.
AFROAM 690K. Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance
This course will treat major writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s-1950s, setting them in the context of the White Chicago Renaissance, the New Negro Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and other arts in Chicago in the era, and treating various aesthetics, goals, themes, symbols and images that express the zeitgeist of the movement.
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 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 693D. Black Visual Culture
This course examines genealogies of black visual culture from the age of slavery to the present day. It also offers an introduction to black visual theory. We will consider multiple genealogies, including the visual rhetoric of the abolitionist movement; the role of visuality in regimes of enslavement and its afterlives; black women’s friendship albums and other visual ephemera; the data visualizations created by W. E. B. Du Bois and his students at Atlanta University; the use of ekphrastic techniques in black avant-garde prose and poetry; intermedia and radical black aesthetics; black portraiture and other trends and conversations in contemporary art. We will be particularly interested in black feminist, queer, and trans theorizations of the possibilities and pitfalls of visual representation.
AFROAM 701/AFROAM 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. Credits, 9.