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
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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 590D The Poetry and Prophecies of Phillis Wheatley
This course emerges from a recent renaissance of scholarship and creative work about the enslaved poet and freedom dreamer, Phillis Wheatley (Peters). Above all else, the course will take shape through deep and careful readings of the poet's body of work. We will also place Wheatley within a rich tradition of black feminist poetics and read a number of poems that have been dedicated to or otherwise inspired by her across the centuries. We will read the best of recent scholarship on Wheatley, with particular attention to work that: deepens our understanding of her relationship not to her enslavers, but to her kin, community, and to other black artists; reads her in the context of West African and diasporic traditions; attends to the politics of power and pleasure in her poems; examines the circulation of her poetry within local, regional, and transatlantic networks of both print and manuscript cultures in the late eighteenth century; and traces the history of her memorialization by writers, readers, and other communities and groups. The course will include some poetry writing in and outside class, but no prior creative writing experience is required or expected. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 590H Black Labor History
What is the relationship between work and freedom? This question lies at the heart of Black American liberation struggles, and at the heart of this course, which centers Black labor in the long arc of American history. Throughout the semester, we will explore the experiences of Black workers in a range of workplaces—from cotton fields to battlefields, from kitchens to factory floors, from schools to prisons. From slavery to the modern day, we will consider how the labor and labor struggles of Black men, women, and children have shaped individual Black lives and communities, as well as transformed the broader nation. Topics covered include slavery and capitalism; the Great Migration; the role of Black women in the workforce; the rise of the Black middle class; unions and racial labor politics; and carceral labor.
AFROAM 590STA Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean
This seminar will explore moments of possibility, belonging, and being in works of literature by Black and Indigenous Women from Latin America and the Caribbean. In this class, we answer the question: How do embodied practices become modes of organizing communities? How can we decipher the ancestral memories we carry and move through in our bodies? Existing in the both/and of Black and Indigenous feminisms that is rooted in a hemispheric understanding of race, gender, and sexuality. In the upper-level class Latin American women will expand our reading of various politics around identity, Indigeneity, and Blackness as they relate to the understanding of feminism.
AFROAM 591B Black Radical Thought
This seminar will focus on contributions to primarily Marxist African and African-descended thinkers.
AFROAM 591G Black Ecologies
This seminar roots ecological catastrophe in the history of the Atlantic slave trade. We will read a number of works that illuminate the specific relationship between environmental degradation and the world that slavery made. We will be also interested in tracing how race, gender, and poverty are being mobilized as weapons of dispossession and extraction on the frontiers of capitalist exploitation today. Other topics include: ecological thought in black critical theory; alternative models of sustainability and stewardship; black eco-poetics and climate fiction; environmental justice movements; new solidarities in climate activism. Readings will draw from a range of fields, including black critical theory; feminist, queer, and trans studies; disability studies; literary studies; and diaspora studies. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 597 Special Topics
AFROAM 630 Critical Race Theories
Participants in this seminar 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 together with texts by historical figures, philosophers, and others who have shaped or have responded to systems of race in the United States, texts on theories of race, and legal as well as literary, political, and philosophical critical race theorists. Credits, 4.
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.) Credits, 4.
AFROAM 691B Black Workers in the U.S. Since Emancipation
This seminar will attempt to accomplish two goals; to examine some of the significant issues in the history of African American workers since Emancipation and to introduce you to some of the most recent scholarship addressing those issues. We will begin with general studies of the history of capitalism in the U.S. and Black workers then proceed to a study of 1) The role of Black labor in several industries, 2) Black woman as workers, 3) Black labor and the Black power movement and 4) Herbert Hill’s critiques of organized labor and the labor history establishment. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 691C Historiographical Methods in Afro-American Studies
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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 691F Black Political Struggle and the American Political System
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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 691L The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960's and 1970's in its many manifestations, including literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. Focus on 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. The distinctive regional variations of the movements and the ways in which Black Arts fundamentally changed how art is produced and received in the United States. Credits, 4.
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. Credits, 4.
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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 692L Black Studies: History, Theory and 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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 692Q African Diaspora Studies: Introduction to Concepts and Historiography
*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. Credits, 4.
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. 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. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 693B The Rise of the Carceral State
This course will introduce students to carceral studies, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that takes the late twentieth century expansion of the U.S. prison system as its primary object of analysis. This course will provide a firm sense of the chronological, political, and institutional development of the U.S. carceral state. In doing so, this course will pay particular attention to the distinct relationship between domestic regimes of policing and incarceration and various black political struggles, from individuated acts of resistance to insurgent social movements. By placing this body of scholarship in conversation with the history of black politics, this graduate course seeks to both familiarize students with an emerging field of study and offer a unique perspective on the state of Black Studies. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 693G Gender in the Civil Rights Movement
In the 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists challenged Jim Crow, a system that was as much gendered as it was raced, they wrestled with historic assumptions about race and gender in American society. This course explores this and seeks to answer several major questions: What was the “gendered geography of Jim Crow”? How did race and gender shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement? What was the interplay between race, gender, and sexuality in this struggle? How did the mid-twentieth century Black Freedom Movement reinforce and challenge traditional notions of womanhood and manhood? While the Civil Rights Movement is the central focus of the course, we also will consider other mid-century liberatory movements that were influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and grappled intensely with race, gender, and sexuality in ways that have had major and lasting implications for Black gender relations and politics. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 693T TA Mentoring Seminar
Credit, 1.
AFROAM 696A Qualifying Exam
Credits, 1-6.
AFROAM 699 Master's Thesis
Credits, 1-10.
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 per course.
AFROAM 753 Special Topics in Afro-American Literature & Culture
An intensive study of the history of the blues. The nature of blues music and lyrics in an African and African American social, political, and musical context, and the use of the blues tradition in literature. No reading knowledge of music required or expected. Credits, 4.
AFROAM 796 Independent Study
Credits, 1-6.
AFROAM 899 PhD Dissertation
Credits, 10.