The Courses
(All courses carry 3 credits unless otherwise noted.)
AFROAM 101. Introduction to Black Studies (4 credits)
Interdisciplinary introduction to the basic concepts and literature in the disciplines covered by Black Studies. Includes history, the social sciences, and humanities as well as conceptual frameworks for investigation and analysis of Black history and culture. (Gen. Ed. I,DU)
AFROAM 117. Survey of Afro-American Literature (4 credits)
The major figures and themes in Afro-American literature, analyzing specific works in detail and surveying the early history of Afro-American literature. What the slave narratives, poetry, short stories, novels, drama, and folklore of the period reveal about the social, economic, psychological, and artistic lives of the writers and their characters, both male and female. Explores the conventions of each of these genres in the period under discussion to better understand the relation of the material to the dominant traditions of the time and the writers' particular contributions to their own art. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 118. Survey of Afro-American Literature II (4 credits)
Introductory level survey of Afro-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, including DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Walker, Morrison, Baraka and Lorde. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 132. African-American History 1619-1860 (4 credits)
The main aim of this course is to make you familiar with some of the most important developments and issues in African American history until the Civil War. We will focus on the black experience under slavery and the struggle for emancipation. Topics include the Atlantic slave trade, evolution of African American communities and culture, the free black community, the distinct experience of black women, and the black protest tradition. The format of the course is lecture supplemented by class discussions. (Gen.Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 133. African-American History Civil War-1954 (4 credits)
Major issues and actions from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Focus on political and social history: transition from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction; the Age of Booker T. Washington; urban migrations, rise of the ghettoes; the ideologies and movements from integrationism to black nationalism. (Gen. Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 151. Literature & Culture (4 credits)
This course focuses on African American cultural expressions contributing to the shape and character of contemporary African American (and U.S.) culture and how these forms have influenced and been represented by African American writers. The course uses African American literature and culture of the 1960s and 1970s in their many manifestations, especially poetry, criticism, theater, music, and the visual arts as an entry into the concerns listed above. A particular focus of the course will be the ways in which domestic and international political movements, such as Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-colonial, and non-aligned intersected with black cultural efforts, deeply influencing the formal and thematic choices of African American artists. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 156. Revolutionary Concepts in African American Music II (4 credits)
This course will examine the development of African American music during the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Literature and history will be examined alongside documentaries and footage of famous performers in conjunction to their historical period and the cultural and political events of the time. The Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, post-Civil Rights era, and the Black Lives Matter Movement will encompass the scope of this course. In addition, the course will consider the diasporic reaches of “Afro-Latinidad” (bachata, salsa, etc.) and Caribbean influences such as reggae and dub. (Gen. Ed. AT,DU)
AFROAM 161. Introduction to Afro-American Political Science (4 credits)
Survey of the politics of the Black community in the U.S. The history of Black political development, major theories which explain Black political life, social, economic, psychological and institutional environment from which Black politics flows. Attention paid to 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and its relevance to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. (Gen. Ed. SB,DU)
AFROAM 170. The Grassroots Experience in American Life and Culture I (4 credits)
This course combines instruction in research techniques in a variety of Humanistic and Social Science disciplines, and hands-on experience with those techniques, with substantive materials focusing on the long struggle of minority populations for full participation in American cultural and public life. (Gen. Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 232. History of Black Nationalism
Black nationalism in the United States, beginning with voluntary associations developed by free blacks in the late 19th century up to the Afrocentric "hip-hop" expressions of the 1990s. The interrelationships between the economic, political, and cultural forms of African American nationalism analyzed along with its secular and religious expressions. The intimate connections between nationalist and assimilationist tendencies in African American life.
AFROAM 234. The Harlem Renaissance (4 credits)
Exploration of the cultural explosion also termed the New Negro movement, from W.E.B. Du Bois through the early work of Richard Wright. Essays, poetry, and fiction, and the blues, jazz, and folklore of the time examined in terms of how Harlem Renaissance artists explored their spiritual and cultural roots, dealt with gender issues, sought artistic aesthetic and style adequate to reflect such concerns. Readings supplemented by contemporary recordings, visual art, and videos. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 236. History of the Civil Rights Movement (4 credits)
Examination of the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Topeka decision to the rise of Black power. All the major organizations of the period, e.g., SCLC, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and the Urban League. The impact on white students and the anti-war movement. (Gen. Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 250. African American Short Stories (4 credits)
Students in this course will receive an introduction to the African American short story and to the major themes, issues, concepts, as well as the literary techniques and forms prevalent in African American literature. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 257. Contemporary African-American Novel
Survey of the Black novel from 1940 to the present; major Black novelists of the contemporary period. Emphasis on what these novelists have to say about the black experience in the latter half of the 20th-century. Themes include alienation and identity, revolution, and existentialism. Attention to the styles of various writers and their use of the language.
AFROAM 264. Foundations of Black Education in the U.S. (4 credits)
The education of blacks from Reconstruction to 1954. Includes public schools, colleges, and non-school education. The involvement of religious associations, philanthropic organizations, the Freedman’s Bureau, the Black church, and the Federal Government will also be discussed. (Gen. Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 272. Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
What is race? What is sexuality? And how did early American history shape the legal structures that would come to define racial and sexual identities and possibilities? In this course, students will examine how African, European, and Native American ideas about race and sexuality influenced the development of colonial, early Republican, and antebellum America, with a special focus on the evolution of American legal frameworks undergirding racial and sexual hierarchies. Topics covered include initial encounters between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; the birth and evolution of racial slavery; interracial sex and marriage; citizenship and belonging; and legal and extra-legal violence.
AFROAM 326. Black Women in U.S. History (4 credits)
The history of African American women from the experience of slavery to the present. Emphasis on the effect of racist institutions and practices on women. The ways in which women organized themselves to address the needs of African Americans in general and their own in particular. The achievements of such leaders as Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, and Mary McLeod Bethune as well as lesser known women. (Gen. Ed. HS,DU)
AFROAM 345. Southern Literature (4 credits)
This course offers an introduction to Southern Black Literature through a sampling of classic texts and more recent prose and poetry. In addition to surveying a rich canon of literature that has its origins in the antebellum slave narrative tradition, we will also study: (1) networks, alliances, and patterns of migration connecting the U.S. South and the Global South (especially the Caribbean); (2) black queer and trans life in the South; (3) recent film and television set in the Deep South; (4) structures and experiences of dispossession and poverty. We will also look at media coverage and scholarship to explore struggles happening in the South right now, especially movements around armed self-defense/community policing; cooperative farming and economic self-determination; disaster capitalism and environmental dispossession in places like the Gulf Coast and in Puerto Rico; the toppling/removal of Confederate statues and fight against white supremacist organizations and activities. (Gen. Ed. AL,DU)
AFROAM 365. Composition: Style & Organization
Expository writing focusing primarily on argumentative and narrative essays. Discussion and practice of logic—inductive and deductive reasoning—as it relates to the argumentative essay form. Topics as thesis on main idea, organization, style, unity, supporting evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, and basic writing mechanics, including constructing sentences, paragraphing, transitions, and correct grammar. Junior year writing is required for all majors in AfroAm; secondary majors have the option to complete this requirement in their primary major.
AFROAM 390S. I Strike the Empire Back: Black Youth Culture in the Neoliberal Age
Using hip hop as a lens to explore the development of diasporic Black youth culture in the neoliberal age, this course considers the African American experience during the close of the 20th century and dawning of the 21st. Our investigation will be concerned with at least two things that we will examine in parallel throughout the semester. On one hand, we will dig deeply into the origins and evolution of hip-hop artistry––including visual art, dance, music, lyrics, and performance––as well as the impact of commercial forces on those forms. On the other hand, we will pay serious attention to the ascendence of conservative political leaders in the United States and England during the 1970s whose policies emphasizing deregulation and privatization reshaped the global economy according to the tenets of neoliberalism, in order to understand the impact of those global economic and political realignments on the generation of black people who gave birth to or, later, inherited hip hop. Of central importance here will be the Nixon administration’s adoption of a policy of “benign neglect” toward low-income black communities living in the nation’s crumbling cities; the replacement of the War on Poverty with the War on Drugs; the enactment of “free trade” policies that accelerated the deindustrialization of the American economy and deepened the structural unemployment of black people; the militarization of municipal police forces; and the explosive growth of the carceral state.
AFROAM 390STA. Introduction to Global Black Studies
This course uses the critical methodologies of the humanities and the social sciences to consider some of the questions provoked by the Global Black experience. Course Materials will allow students to survey the lasting contributions of Africans and their descendants to the development of various world civilizations and examine historical relationships between the individual actors and the larger social forces. The major themes that will be used to comprehend the experience of African-descended people are Loss, Identity, Gender, and Sexuality. A combination of student-led conversation and lecture will be used in the classroom.
AFROAM 494DI. Du Bois Senior Seminar (for Juniors and Seniors)
This course is the senior capstone course required for all majors in Afro-American Studies. It also fulfills the University's Integrative Learning Experience (IE) requirement. This course has two aims: (1) to reflect on your educational journey at UMass as well as to further explore your intellectual and professional goals; and (2) to prepare you to complete your senior project in Afro-American Studies. The course will provide ample space and time to brainstorm and plan your senior project in consultation with the instructor and your peers.
AFROAM 591E. Black Feminist and Queer Insurgencies (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This course traces black feminist and queer theories of militancy, insurgency, and revolutionary planning from Harriet Tubman to the present day. Untethering our perspective from the domain of normative masculinities, we will instead focus on forms of organization, revolt, and defensiveness (Nash) that are equally attuned to care, healing, and the transformative force of pleasure and desire (Hartman; Musser). We will study how people take care of each other in the face of state violence and the neoliberal state’s ongoing divestment from public infrastructure and services by exploring histories and experiments in mutual aid, community and armed defense, femme expertise and care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha), revolutionary mothering (Gumbs, Martens, Williams), radical separatism and communal living, critical solidarities, sex radicalism, and abolition as a form of both radical imagination and social transformation. We will seek to map an alternative genealogy of black revolutionary theory through the history of black feminist and queer militancy. Throughout, we will be invested in the long-term work of black study (Moten and Harney) and utopian planning at the same time as we investigate practical tactics and strategies that approach white supremacy as a racial and gendered act of war that requires immediate mobilization and response.