Course Listing - Graduate
Graduate Courses - Fall 2011
AFAM 505a/AMST 643a, THEORIZING RACIAL FORMATIONS
Hazel Carby
Thursdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
A required course for all first-year students in the joint Ph.D. in African American Studies; also open to students in American Studies. This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field.
AFAM 573a/ANTH 595a TRANSNATIONALISM, MODERNITY, AND RETHINKING DIASPORA
Kamari Clarke
Tuesdays, 7:00 p.m. - 8:50 p.m.
As anthropologists continue to grapple with changing notions of "the field" from local to global, this course covers recent and emerging scholarship that explores theoretical problems of modernity, transnationalism, and diaspora in specific historical and ethnographic contexts. Drawing on a range of ideas from world systems theories of globalization to notions of the invention of diasporas, to postmodern ideas of social constructions, the emphasis is on the interrelations between local and global cultural processes. These processes disrupt the once homogenizing tendencies of ethnography and instead push us to examine different criteria for analyzing and constructing communities.manuscripts, letters, and other archival materials.
AFAM 697a/HIST 713a RESEARCH IN SLAVERY AND ABOLITION
Edward Rugemer
Wednesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
A research seminar in the history of slavery and its abolition in the Atlantic world from the emergence of African slavery in the late sixteenth century through the final emancipations of the 1880s. Potential topics include slavery, slave resistance, rebellions, abolitionism, and emancipation.
AFAM 723a/AMST 645a, CARIBBEAN DIASPORIC INTELLECTUALS
Hazel Carby
Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
The course examines work by writers of Caribbean descent from different regions of the transatlantic world. In response to contemporary interest in issues of globalization, the premise of the course is that in the world maps of these black intellectuals we can see the intertwined and interdependent histories and relations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Thinking globally is not a new experience for black peoples, and we need to understand the ways in which what we have come to understand and represent as "Caribbeanness" is a condition of movement. Literature is most frequently taught within the boundaries of a particular nation, but this course focuses on the work of writers who shape the Caribbean identities of their characters as traveling black subjects and refuse to restrain their fiction within the limits of any one national identity. We practice a new and global type of cognitive mapping as we read and explore the meanings of terms like black transnationalism, migrancy, globalization, and empire. Diasporic writing embraces and represents the geopolitical realities of the modern, modernizing, and postmodern worlds in which multiple racialized histories are inscribed on modern bodies.
AFAM 727a/HSAR 780a, RUNNING BACKS AND WIDE RECEIVERS: THE INFLUENCE OF AFRICAN DANCE ON AMERICAN SPORT
Robert Farris Thompson
Thursdays, 3:20 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
Starting with an intensive study of the main organizing principles in African dance and their variations among four key civilizations, Mandé, Yorùbá, Igbo, and Kongo, the seminar systematically compares these traits and gestures first with key black American dancing and then with action styles in black American sport. Emphasis is given to the transformation of soccer by the black superstar Pelé, and black influence in the reshaping of NFL football.
AFAM 729a/HSAR 779a, NEW YORK MAMBO: MICROCOSM OF BLACK CREATIVITY
Robert Farris Thompson
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:35 a.m. - 12:50 p.m.
Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations of the world of New York mambo and salsa. Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colón. Examination of panel traditions such as New York Haitian art, Dominican merengue and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira.
AFAM 769a/HSAR 696a, VIOLENCE, RACE AND MODERNITY
Erica James
Mondays, 3:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
The course engages the art and material culture of transatlantic slavery, slave societies, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and contemporary times in the United States and the Caribbean through the indices of violence, trauma, and memory. It posits that violence (cultural, epistemic, ideological, systemic, physical, etc.) is a fundamental part of modernity within the African diaspora, but has thus far been under examined within art history and visual culture.
AFAM 773a/SOCY 630a, WORKSHOP IN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
Elijah Anderson
Mondays, 11:30 a.m. - 1:20 p.m.
The ethnographic interpretation of urban life and culture. Conceptual and methodological issues are discussed. Ongoing projects of participants are presented in a “workshop” format, thus providing participants with critical feedback as well as the opportunity to learn from and contribute to ethnographic work in progress. Selected ethnographic works are read and assessed.
AFAM 826a/HSAR 783a, THEORIZING DIASPORA
Kobena Mercer
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
This seminar reviews different methods in the study of diasporas and demonstrates their application in research on visual culture and art history. Models addressed to African American, Caribbean, and black British contexts by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford, Brent Hayes Edwards, inter alia, are examined in relation to art, film, and photography that articulates cross-cultural aesthetics. Debates on hybridization that led to such cognate concepts as syncretism, creolization, and translation are tested in comparative case studies. Texts include Homi Bhabha, Sarat Maharaj, Jean Fisher, Eduoard Glissant, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, and book-length introductions by Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas (1997), and Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora Criticism (2007).
AFAM 830a/AMST 656a/ENGL 944a, CANONIZING AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY
Elizabeth Alexander
Tuesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
African American poetry is under-studied, under-theorized, and under-archived. In this seminar we turn to the African American verse canon with a hand to edifying its scholarly apparatus. We ask questions about the politics of canon formation and anthologizing, as well as read relevant theory in the field. The first half of the course is devoted to the study and discussion of versions of this canon by examining critical editions that are variously exemplary: Gene Andrew Jarrett's Paul Laurence Dunbar, Arnold Rampersad's Langston Hughes, Verner Mitchell's Helene Johnson, Rita Dove's Melvin Tolson, various editions of Gwendolyn Brooks, and Kimberly Benston's Amiri Baraka. We consider the myriad approaches to writing and publishing on Phillis Wheatley and interrogate the idea of "foremother." We also consider the specific work of anthologizing such as Maureen Honey's work on African American women poets and Aldon Neilsen's work on black experimentalism. For the latter half of the class students work archivally, at the Beinecke and elsewhere, on poets of their choosing in consultation with the instructor; possibilities include Fenton Johnson, Jean Toomer, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright, and Lucille Clifton. The final project is a complete critical edition of the work of a chosen poet—"lost" or "canonical"—or a blueprint for an anthology on some subset of African American poetry.
AFAM 837a/REL 631a/RLST 848a, AFRICAN AMERICAN MORAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT
Emilie Townes
Tuesdays, 8:30 a.m. - 10:20 a.m.
The course concentrates on the theo-ethical perspectives of selected African American Christian and humanist thinkers. This term, the course focuses on the writings of Maria Stewart, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Jordan, Peter Paris, Katie Cannon, and Traci West. Attention is given to implications for the contemporary church.
AFAM 880a, DIRECTED READING. By arrangement with faculty.
AFAM 895a, DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP.
Glenda Gilmore
A noncredit, year-long course required of all third-year students. Fall term consists of biweekly work-in-progress talks by Yale faculty, advanced graduate students, and outside speakers. Spring term consists of biweekly workshops that focus on the dissertation prospectus.
Graduate Courses - Spring 2012
AFAM 588b/AMST 710b/ENGL 948b, AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN AMERICA
Robert Stepto
Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the “American Renaissance” to the present. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation.
AFAM 621b/ANTH 603b, THEORIZING EROTIC INTERIORS
Jafari Allen
TBA
While a number of foundational thinkers have theorized "the erotic," its intellectual (political and aesthetic) genealogies vary. Following Audre Lorde, the erotic is hermeneutical, and at once personal/individual and intersubjective—what she called "self-connection shared." In this research seminar, we pursue deeply contextual theorizations of affect and sociality (e.g., sexuality and sensuality, mourning, humor, longing, hope, resilience) in primary ethnographic and archival data and cultural texts—inside, overlapping, "haunting," or lurking just outside of the page, note, frame, or experience. The course begins with close readings of important critical works by, for example, Elizabeth Alexander, M. Jacqui Alexander, Lauren Berlant, Hazel Carby, Samuel Delany, Melvin Dixon, Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, Judith Halberstam, Michael Hanchard, Saidiya Hartman, Robin Kelley, Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Ann Stoler, and Sylvia Wynter. Later, students research and "workshop" focused research papers on the meanings, historicity, and/or uses of the erotic.
AFAM 827b, INTERDISCIPLINARY ANALYSIS IN RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
Gerald Jaynes
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Examination of some of the most influential social science texts treating theories of race, class, and gender. The seminar covers various theoretical and methodological paradigms common to social science disciplines. Authors discussed included classical (Marx, Weber) and more contemporary scholars (Giddens, Bourdieu, Butler, Moi, Hll-Collins, Wilson). Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary analysis and critique of past and contemporary scholarship in African American studies and related fields.
AFAM 895b, RESEARCH IN U.S. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY
Glenda Gilmore
Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m
Projects chosen from the post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined. Research seminar.
AFAM 728b/AFST 778b/HSAR 778b, FROM WEST AFRICA TO THE BLACK AMERICAS: THE BLACK ATLANTIC VISUAL TRADITION
Robert Farris Thompson
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:35 a.m. to 12:50 p.m.
Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations south of the Sahara—Mali, Asante, Dahomey, Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongo—and their impact on New World art and music, especially rock, blues, North American black painting of the past ten years, and black artists of Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil.
AFAM 737b/HSAR 697b, CARIBBEAN ART HISTORY
Erica James
Mondays, 3:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
This seminar engages art and art histories from the English, French, Dutch and Spanish speaking Caribbean.
AFAM 741b/777b, MAMBO IN THE MEDIA, 1949-2011
Robert Farris Thompson
Thursdays, 3:30 p.m. to 5:20 p.m.
The impact of a midcentury dance on novels, films, aesthetic criticism, photography, and painting from 1949 to 2011. Discussion includes the novels of Jack Kerouac, Carlos Fuentes, and Gonzalo Martré; the films of Almodóvar and Fellini; and the history of mambo dance in Havana, Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and London.
AFAM 743b/AMST 654b/ENGL 845b, AMERICAN ARTISTS AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN BOOK
Robert Stepto
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
The visual art in African American books since 1900. Artists include Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, E. S. Campbell, Tom Feelings, and the FSA photographers of the 1940s. Topics
include Harlem Renaissance book art, photography and literature, and children’s books. Research in collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Art Gallery is encouraged.
AFAM 588b/AMST 710b/ENGL 948b, JAMES BALDWIN AND THE POLITICS OF FORM
Jacqueline Goldsby
Wednesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
In-depth examination of James Baldwin's fictional canon, interrogating the reception of his late novels' supposed "decline" against those works' experiments in form(lessness).
AFAM 763b/AMST 731b/ENGL 780b, METHODS AND PRACTICES IN U.S. CULTURAL HISTORY
Matthew Jacobson
Fridays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
This sampling of U.S. cultural history from the early national period to the present is designed to unfold on two distinct planes. The first is a rendering of U.S. culture itself—a survey, however imperfect, of the major currents, themes, and textures of U.S. culture over time, including its contested ideologies of race and gender, its organization of productivity and pleasure, its media and culture industries, its modes of creating and disseminating "information" and "knowledge," its resilient subcultures, and its reigning nationalist iconographies and narratives. The second is a sampling of scholarly methods and approaches, a meta-history of "the culture concept" as it has informed historical scholarship in the past few decades. The cultural turn in historiography since the 1980s has resulted in a dramatic reordering of "legitimate" scholarly topics, and hence a markedly different scholarly landscape, including some works that seek to narrate the history of the culture in its own right (Kasson's history of the amusement park, for instance), and others that resort to cultural forms and artifacts to answer questions regarding politics, nationalism, and power relations (Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters). In addition to providing a background in U.S. culture, then, this seminar seeks to trace these developments within the discipline, to understand their basis, to sample the means and methods of "the cultural turn," and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of culture-based historiography as it is now constituted.
AFAM 764b/AMST 715b/HIST 715b, READINGS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
David Blight
Thursdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:20 p.m.
The course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century: sectionalism; expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas.
AFAM 773b/SOCY 630, WORKSHOP IN URBAN ETHNOGRAPHY
Elijah Anderson
Mondays, 11:30 a.m. - 1:20 p.m.
AFAM 776b/RLST 704b, BEHIND THE VEIL: APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF BLACK RELIGION IN THE UNITED STATES
Clarence Hardy III
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
This course will explore how scholars have constructed and pursued the modern study of black
religion in the United States from its inception in the early decades of the twentieth century,
through its institutionalization in the academy after the civil rights movement, and its continued
evolution in contemporary times. The course will focus especially on pioneers in the field
(e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neal Hurston, and Carter Woodson) and consider the rise of
competing methodologies for the study of black religious cultures, ranging from the historical
to the sociological while including at various moments, the theological, anthropological and
literary. Special attention will be given to the ways in which racial and religious identities have
shaped and confounded scholarly efforts to interpret black religious subjects and practices even as these identities have also provided a platform for interrogating the meaning of race, nation, and political commitment in America.
AFAM 823b/RLST 926b, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MISERY
Emilie Townes
Tuesdays, 8:30 a.m. - 10:20 a.m.
An examination of the ways in which the intersection of various forms of oppression—such as racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, and classism—coalesce to form lifestyles of misery that produce social patterns of domination and subordination. Consideration of how conversations between Christian ethics and other disciplines help frame possible trajectories of justice and justice making.
AFAM 827b, INTERDISCIPINARY ANALYSIS
Gerald Jaynes
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Examination of some of the most influential social science texts treating theories of race, class, and gender. The seminar covers various theoretical and methodological paradigms common to social science disciplines. Authors discussed include classical (Marx, Weber) and more contemporary scholars (Giddens, Bourdieu, Butler, Moi, Hill-Collins, Wilson). Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary analysis and critique of past and contemporary scholarship in African American studies and related fields.
AFAM 880b, DIRECTED READING. By arrangement with faculty.
AFAM 895b, DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS WORKSHOP.
Glenda Gilmore.
HTBA. 81 Wall Street, Room 201
A noncredit, year-long course required of all third-year students. Fall term consists of biweekly work-in-progress talks by Yale faculty, advanced graduate students, and outside speakers. Spring term consists of biweekly workshops that focus on the dissertation prospectus.
