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, 3 credits   (Undergrad/Grad)
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.  

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 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 692L. Black Studies: History, Theory & Practice
This seminar begins with a discussion of antecedents to institutionalized Black Studies departments and programs that emerged on college campuses starting in 1968; explores the historical development of the field up to and including today; and concludes with informed speculation concerning challenges to its future. Readings and reflections on the origins of Black Studies on the UMass Amherst campus will specifically be covered. Topics for exploration include the interrelationship of Black Studies to traditional fields and disciplines, the transition of Black Studies from political movement to professionalized institutionalization, the changing audience involved in that transition, and interpretations of American history and culture within the Black Studies matrix that challenge standard narratives regarding these issues.

AFROAM 692T. Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
This course examines the history of the Atlantic World through a gendered lens, exploring the ways in which European conquest and colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions of Africans and indigenous Americans gave rise to modern gender categories and hierarchies. In this course, students will engage with both foundational and more recent scholarly works on the subject, encountering a broad temporal and geographical range. Over the course of the semester, they will come to understand the ways in which the formation and reformation of gendered ideologies and identities lay at the center of Atlantic colonial and imperial projects, racial slavery, and nascent Western capitalism.

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. Credit, 9 per course.