Course Listing - Undergraduate
Official Yale College course information can be found at the Yale Online Course Information website.
Undergraduate Courses - Fall 2011
(G indicates that an undergraduate course is available to graduate students as well)
AFAM 040a/FILM 040a, SPIKE LEE
Terri Francis
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
Introduction to the study of film and issues in contemporary black culture through study of Spike Lee’s films and writings. Close analysis of Lee’s style, sources, creative dilemmas, and collaborations, as well as the conversations he and his films generate. Topics include concepts of black leadership, cinematic reflexivity, early film history, race and racism, stereotypes, auterism, cinema of attractions, defining black cinema, and questions of audience and authenticity
Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required.
AFAM 112aG/HSAR 379aG, NEW YORK MAMBO: MICROCOSM OF BLACK CREATIVITY
Robert Farris Thompson
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:35 a.m. - 12:50 p.m.
The rise, development, and philosophic achievement of the world of New York mambo and salsa. Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon. Examination of parallel
traditions, e.g., New York Haitian art, Dominican meringue, reggae and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira.
AFAM 160a/AMST 160a/HIST 184a, SLAVERY AND ABOLITION IN ATLANTIC HISTORY
Edward Rugemer
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:30 p.m. - 2:20 p.m., w/ 1 HTBA
The history of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas, from the first African American societies of the sixteenth century through the century-long process of
emancipation.
AFAM 167a/AMST 317a/WGSS 167a, AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY
Crystal Feimster
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:30 p.m. - 2:20 p.m., w/ 1 HTBA
The history of African American women from the eighteenth century to the present. Themes include work, family, community, sexuality, politics, religion, and culture.
AFAM 172a/HIST 119a, THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION ERA, 1845-1877
David Blight
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 a.m., w/ 1 HTBA
The causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. A search for the multiple meanings of a transformative event, including national, sectional, racial, constitutional,
social, gender, intellectual, and individual dimensions.
AFAM 187a/ANTH 261a, SEXUALITY IN THE CARIBBEAN AND LATIN AMERICA
Jafari Allen
Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m. - 11:20 a.m., w/ 1 HTBA
This course will introduce students to the study of sexuality in the Caribbean and American regions.
AFAM 189a/HSAR 373a, AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: COLONIAL PERIOD THROUGH 1941
Erica James
Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m., w/ 1 HTBA
This course engages the history of African American representation and artistic production in the United States. It provides a comprehensive overview of this art in relation to mainline discourses of American art, and in the context of American economic, cultural, social and political histories. Semester one begins in the colonial period with an examination of black creative expression in the context of slavery and culminates with a study of the ideological connections between representation and politics as seen in art coming out of the Harlem Renaissance and during the
pre-war years.
AFAM 191a/AFST 330a/FREN 230/LITR 266a, TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY MUSICS OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
Christopher L. Miller
Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
A comprehensive survey of literature written in French from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. The context of French colonialism and its institutions; local and global culture; independence and the postcolonial era. Authors include Senghor, Cesaire, Sembene (including film), Kourouma, Ba, Belaya, Conde, and Lopes.
AFAM 241a/AFST 262a/MUSI 262a, TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY MUSICS OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
Michael Veal
Mondays & Wednesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
A survey of the traditional and popular musics of black Africa, organized both by nation, such as Ghana, and by region, such as Senegambia, with an introduction to the fundamental
musical principles, materials, and performance contexts of African music.
AFAM 242a/FILM 370a, SPECTACLES, STEREOTYPES, AND BLACK FILM
Terri Francis
Mondays & Wednesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. Screenings: Mon., 7 p.m.
A survey of African American cinema from Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919) to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and beyond. Topics include the concept of a black aesthetic, the relationship between commercial and independent filmmaking practices, and the question of genre.
AFAM 245a/ENGL 229a, REPRESENTING U.S. SLAVERY
Anthony Reed
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
The strategies, limitations, and ethics of representing slavery in a range of texts from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Shifting meanings of race, gender, freedom, and emancipation in these texts.
AFAM 279a/AMST 273a/WGSS 342a, BLACK WOMEN’S LITERATURE
Naomi Pabst
Tuesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Examination of black women’s literary texts from the post-civil rights era. Exploration of the ways writers construct and contest the cultural, ideological, and political parameters of black womanhood. Topics include narrative strategy, modes of representation, and textual depictions of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, color, ethnicity, nationality, class, and generation. Texts placed within the context of black women’s literary legacies.
AFAM 282a/ECON 280a, POVERTY UNDER POSTINDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
Gerald Jaynes
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
Political economy of contemporary social welfare policy as it has been affected by economic restructuring, the development of the underclass, and the effects of immigration on the economy and its social structure.
Prerequisite: introductory microeconomics.
AFAM 291a/HSAR 470a, POP ART AND AFRICAN AMERICN CULTURE
Kobena Mercer
Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Examines Pop Art strategies among African American artists who contributed a critique of
the modernist canon from 1950s to the present. Critical uses of vernacular materials are studied
in view of theories of postmodernism as a dialectic of art and popular culture.
AFAM 294a/ENGL 294a, AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE I: 1740-1900
Robert Stepto
Mondays, 1:30 p.m – 3:20 p.m.
The literary reaction to slavery; the evolution in form from slave narratives to autobiographies and fictions; the incorporation of folk and popular materials into formal literature. Authors include Phyllis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Frederick Douglass, Harriett Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson.
AFAM 311a, RACE, HEALTH AND CAPITIVITY
Nicole Ivy
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 p.m – 3:45 p.m.
A study of the intersections of race, health and disease in the creation of captive black bodies in the U.S. and the Caribbean from the nineteenth century to the present. Topics include slavery and medicine; public health and citizenship at the turn of the 20th century; the management of
HIV/AIDS; the expansion of the prison-industrial complex; the maintenance of supra-national zones of detainment; and the national management of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake.
AFAM 327a/AMST 373a/ER&M 399a/WGSS 336a, AMERICAN LITERARY NATIONALISMS
GerShun Avilez
Tuesdays, 9:25 a.m – 11:15 a.m.
The influence of nationalist frameworks on American artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s. The treatment of gender expression in nationalist sentiments. Focus on writings by and about the Black Arts Movement, the Chicano Movement, the Young Lords Party, Asian American nationalism, and feminist and queer organizing. Works by Arturo Islas, Alice Walker, Frank Chin, Gloria Anzaldua, Amiri Baraka, and Maxine Kingston.
AFAM 344a/ENGL 304a/WGSS 331a, BLACK WOMEN WRITERS OF THE 1940s AND 1950s
Jacqueline Goldsby
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
An examination of short fiction, autobiographies, poetry, plays, and novels by African American women writers; post-WWII to 1965 that explores the politics of African American
canon formation: how to explain this cohort’s period popularity and its subsequent critical neglect? Writers to be studied include: Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Era BellThompson, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall, and Adrienne Kennedy.
AFAM 349a/ENGL 326a/WGSS 388a, CIVIL RIGHTS AND WOMEN'S LIBERATION
Crystal Feimster
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:20 p.m.
The dynamic relationship between the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement from 1940 to the present. When and how the two movements overlapped, inter-sected, and diverged. The variety of ways in which African Americans and women campaigned
for equal rights in the twentieth century. Topics include World War II, freedom summer, black power, the Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights.
AFAM 349a/AMST 326a/WGSS 388a, INTERRACIALITY AND HYBRIDITY
Naomi Pabst
Tuesdays, 3:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
Examination of mixed-race matters in both literary and critical writings, primarily within the black/white schema. Historical and current questions of black and interracial identity; the contemporary “mixed race movement” and the emerging rubric of “critical mixed race studies”; historical genealogy and interraciality and hybridity. Analysis of longstanding debates on race mixing in the realms of legal classification, transracial adoption, census taking, grassroots movements, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular.
AFAM 408aG/AMST 460aG/ENGL 443aG, AFRICAN AMERICAN POETS OF THE MODERN ERA
Robert Stepto
Wednesdays, 1:30 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic, and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. Includes sessions at the Beinecke Library for inspection and discussion of original editions, manuscripts, letters, and other archival material.
AFAM 410a/WGSS 410a, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Deborah Thomas
Wednesdays, 9:25 a.m.– 11:15 a.m.
An interdisciplinary, thematic approach to the study of race, nation, and ethnicity in the African diaspora. Topics include class, gender, color, and sexuality; the dynamics of reform, Pan-Africanism, neocolonialism, and contemporary black nationalism. Use of a broad range of methodologies.
AFAM 434a/ENGL 442a, MUSIC AND POETICS IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Anthony Reed
Tuesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Reading of canonical and recent poetry and criticism to discern the connections between music and poetics in the Anglophone literature of the African diaspora. Techniques and uses of music, sound, and sound engineering in black literary culture. Emphasis on jazz, blues, and poetry.
AFAM 294a/ENGL 294a, AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE I: 1740-1900
Robert Stepto
Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
The literary reaction to slavery; the evolution in form from slave narratives to autobiographies and fictions; the incorporation of folk and popular materials into formal literature. Authors include Phyllis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, France Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chestnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson.
AFAM 471a, INDEPENDENT STUDY: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Edward Rugemer
Independent research under the direction of a member of the department on a special topic in African American Studies not covered in other courses. Permission of the director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor directing the research is required. A proposal signed by the instructor must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes. The instructor meets with the student regularly, typically for an hour a week, and the student writes a final paper or a series of short essays.
May be elected for one or two terms.
AFAM 480a, SENIOR COLLOQUIUM: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES.
Deborah Thomas
Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
A seminar on issues and approaches in African American studies. The colloquium offers students practical help in refining their senior essay topics and developing research strategies. Students discuss assigned readings and share their research experiences and findings. During the term, students are expected to make substantial progress on their senior essays; they are required to submit a prospectus, an annotated bibliography, and a draft of one-quarter of the essay.
AFAM 491a, THE SENIOR ESSAY.
Edward Rugemer
1 HTBA
Independent research on the senior essay. The senior essay form must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes. The senior essay should be completed according to the following schedule: (1) end of the sixth week of classes: a rough draft of the entire essay; (2) end of the last week of classes (fall term) or three weeks before the end of classes (spring term): two copies of the final version of the essay.
Undergraduate Courses - Spring 2012
(G indicates that an undergraduate course is available to graduate students as well)
AFAM 095b/AMST 001b/HIST 001b, AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM MOVEMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Crystal Feimster
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
Introduction to the study and writing of history, focusing on how African Americans fought for civil rights throughout the twentieth century. The civil rights movement placed in its historical context; African American freedom struggles placed in the larger narrative of U.S. history.
Enrollment limited to first-year students only. Preregistration required.
AFAM 178bG/AFST 188bG/HSAR 378bG, 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 183b/HSAR 375b, AFRO- MODERNISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Kobena Mercer
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Introduces African American, Caribbean and Black British artists in modernism and
postmodernism and examines cross-cultural dynamics in the aesthetics and politics of ‘race’
and representation.
AFAM 190b/HSAR 374b/WGSS 167b, AFRICAN AMERICAN ART 1941-PRESENT
Erica James
Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m. to 11:20 a.m., w/ 1 HTBA
This is the second part of a year-long comprehensive survey of African American art,representation and artistic production in the United States and by African American artists within the diaspora. This semester covers the post war period into the present day and in process maps several movements that challenged and expanded early parameters for and expectations of Black art and representation, which in process shaped a liberated future.
AFAM 194b/AMST 194b/DEVN 194b/ENGL 194b, AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTS TODAY
Elizabeth Alexander
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:00 p.m. - 5:15 p.m., w/ 1HTBA
This class will explore the renaissance in African-American culture from 1980 to the present. Students will examine exemplars of the very finest works of art by living African American artists in various forms and fields: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama, film, music, dance, painting, photography, and hip-hop. Students will learn and employ different critical vocabularies and approaches with which to think about questions of genre and to write knowledgeably and persuasively about multiple art forms in conversation and in historical context. All artists studied are living and working today; the class will feature public conversations with several of the artists we study. Artists studied include: Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Hilton Als, Rita Dove, Terrance Hayes, Bill T. Jones, Kerry James Marshall, Lorna Simpson, Jason Moran, and Jay-Z.
AFAM 250b, BLACKS AND THE LAW
Flemming Norcott
Mondays & Wednesdays, 4:30 p.m. - 5: 45 p.m.
An exploration of the ways in which legislative and judicial policy has affected the legal and socioeconomic status of African Americans from slavery to the present. Constitutional
concepts of equality and integration.
AFAM 277b/FILM 373b, BLAXPLOITATION REEXAMINED
Terri Francis
Mondays & Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. - 2:15 p.m. Screenings: 7:00 p.m.
Examination of African American visual culture of the “blaxploitation” era. Issues of authorship, performance, and audience relative to black creativity; the question of what is
included and excluded by genre; and how particular works engage the idea of a black aesthetic tradition.
AFAM 285b/AMST 357b, RACIAL VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
Crystal Feimster
Tuesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:20 p.m.
Examination of racial violence against African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans. Attention to major historical events and individual
experiences. Ways in which racist ideologies and violence have worked to keep different groups of people socially, politically, or economically oppressed in given historical
moments.
AFAM 290bG/HSAR 473bG, 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 292b/AMST 292b, INTERRACIAL LITERATURE
Naomi Pabst
Tuesdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Examination of interracial and black subjectivity as represented within a selection of postemancipation literary texts. Focus on black/white color line crossing, the trope of the tragic mulatto, and theories of difference and hybridity.
AFAM 295b/AMST 295b/ENGL 295b, AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE II: 1900 - 1970
Jacqueline Goldsby
Thursdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:20 p.m.
An examination of modern African American literature, concentrating on the short story and novel. Topics include the shape of the narrative; major literary themes such as migration and urbanization, racial oppression, representation of women, and identity; the literary 'renaissances' of the twentieth century; and canon formation and genre practices. Authors include Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Chestnutt, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Jean Toomer, and August Wilson.
AFAM 304b/AMST 309b/WGSS 309b, TONI MORRISON.
Naomi Pabst
Tuesdays, 3:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
Analysis of Toni Morrison's speeches, interviews, essays, and eight novels. Examination of race, gender, class, sexuality, identity, and memory in Morrison's work.
AFAM 317b/ANTH 303b, FIELD METHODS IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Kamari Clarke
Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Exploration of the fundamentals of cultural anthropology methods. The foundations of fieldwork approaches, including methods, theories, and the problem of objectivity.
AFAM 328b, BLACK PROTEST AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
Jeffrey Gonda
Mondays, 7:00 p.m. - 8:50 p.m.
A broad view of the struggle for black equality and the fight against Jim Crow segregation in the twentieth century. Traditions of protest from African American labor rights in the 1930s to the black power movement of the 1970s. The civil rights movement as it was affected by law, violence, international politics, gender, and radicalism.
AFAM 334b/HIST 402b, SLAVERY AND THE LAW FROM ANCIENT TIMES
Edward Rugemer
Wednesdays, 2:30 p.m. - 4:20 p.m.
The relationship between slavery and the law beginning with ancient slave codes, through the laws that governed Atlantic slavery during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, to the prosecution of slavery and human trafficking in international courts.
AFAM 369b/LITR 271b/AMST 378b/ENGL 364b/THST 369b, AFRICAN AMERICAN THEATRE
Paige McGinley
Tuesdays, 3:30 p.m. - 5:20 p.m.
African American dramatic literature and theater history. Black musical comedy and vaudeville, antilynching dramas, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Black Arts Movement. Playwrights include Hughes, Hansberry, Baraka, Kennedy, Wilson, and Parks.
AFAM 389b/ENGL 371b/WGSS 389b, SEXUALITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND POPULAR CULTURE
GerShun Avilez
Thursdays, 9:25 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Sexual imagery and content in African American literature and popular culture. Ways that artists and social critics understand the relationship between sexual identity and racial identity. Writers and artists include Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Spike Lee, Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill, Patricia H. Collins, Mark Anthony Neal, and Audre Lorde.
AFAM 406bG/AMST 405bG/ENGL 405bG, AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN AMERICA
Robert Stepto
Mondays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
A study of autobiographical writings from Mary Rowlandson's Indian captivity narrative (1682) to the present. Classic forms such as immigrant, education, and cause narratives; prevailing autobiographical strategies involving place, work, and photographs. Authors include Franklin, Douglass, Jacobs, Antin, Kingston, Uchida, Blakian, Als, and Karr.
AFAM 414b/WGSS 438b, WOMEN, LAW AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT
Kathleen Cleaver
Tuesdays, 1:30 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Writings and scholarship of women are used to examine struggles against slavery, racial segregation, economic exploitation, and gender discrimination in the United States. Focus on women who were abolitionists, civil rights leaders, and freedom fighters.
AFAM 423bG/AMST 384bG/ENGL 306bG, 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 472b, INDEPENDENT STUDY: AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Edward Rugemer
Independent research under the direction of a member of the department on a special topic in African American Studies not covered in other courses. Permission of the director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor directing the research is required. A proposal signed by the instructor must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes. The instructor meets with the student regularly, typically for an hour a week, and the student writes a final paper or a series of short essays.
May be elected for one or two terms.
AFAM 491b, THE SENIOR ESSAY
Edward Rugemer
1 HTBA
Independent research on the senior essay. The senior essay form must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes. The senior essay should be completed according to the following schedule: (1) end of the sixth week of classes: a rough draft of the entire essay; (2) end of the last week of classes (fall term) or three weeks before the end of classes (spring term): two copies of the final version of the essay.
