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/afro-am/.

AFROAM 590B. Black Body Studies in Africa and its Diasporas, 4 credits (Undergrad/Grad)
Black Body Studies uses a multidisciplinary approach bringing literature, ethnography, sociological, and historical texts into conversation, in order to explore how the Black body is related to: the question of humanity, violence and anti-Black racism, religion and spirituality, reproductive rights and justice, biopolitics, disabled/abled bodies, and fat phobia.

AFROAM 630. Critical Race Theories, 4 credits
Participants in this seminar, Critical Race Theories, will examine the general foundational ideas and concepts shaping today’s now proliferating scholarly enquiries that operate under the term critical race theories. While the basis for today’s critical race theories developed from Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory in legal scholarship, many scholars from a variety of disciplines have transformed for their own contexts the insights that have informed legal scholarship in this area.  An understanding of the entrenched racial structures in the United States and their basis in the social contract informing much of Western culture is especially useful for reading and analyzing a substantial portion of African American literature. Seminar participants will read early documents (The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America The Constitution of the United States of America, The Bill of Rights, Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments) together with texts by historical figures, philosophers, and others who have shaped or have responded to systems of race in the United States (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others) texts on theories of race (Smedley, Frederickson, Eze and others), and legal as well as literary, political, and philosophical critical race theorists (Bell, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Austin, Mills, Baldwin, Neal, Fuller, Du Bois, among others).

AFROAM 691C. Historiographical Methods in Afro-American Studies, 4 credits
This course will introduce you to some of the basics of what it means to read, think, and write as an historian. We will explore what historians do and why as well as the "objectivity question," the development of African American history as an academic discipline, and one or two current controversies.  We also will learn how to locate and use the resources of the Du Bois Library such as microforms, government documents, the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, on-line indices and collections, as well as those of such important national repositories such as the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Collection at Howard University and the Schomburg Center of the N.Y. Public Library.

AFROAM 691L. Black Arts Movement, 4 credits
This course will examine the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in its many manifestations, including literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. A particular focus of the course will be the ways in which domestic and international political movements (e.g., Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-colonial) intersected with Black Arts, deeply influencing the formal and thematic choices of African American artists. Much attention will be paid to the distinctive regional variations of the movement as well as to the ways in which Black Arts fundamentally changed how art is produced and received in the United States.

AFROAM 692J. African American Literary Movements, 4 credits
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 692Q. African Diaspora Studies: Introduction to Concepts and Historiography, 4 credits
*Required foundations course for Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies.
This course will offer an introduction to 1) key concepts and definitions e.g. diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Afro-centrism, etc. 2) the classic works in the field. 3) major trends in contemporary scholarship. We will be reading a selection of works discussing the contours and history of the field as well as examples of recent scholarship. Two papers on major themes will be required.This course is required for the Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies and is open both to students pursuing the certificate and to graduate students with a general interest in the subject.

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.