| Introduction to Africana Studies (Spring 2006)
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Overview
of the Pilot Curriculum General Education Requirement
Current Pilot Curriculum
General Requirement Course Descriptions
This course
fulfills Category I of the General Education Requirement.
Faculty:
Meeting
Times:
| LEC |
COLL
001 411 |
T & R |
10:30 - 12:00 |
Course Description:
Though the field of African American Studies has achieved greater visibility in the last decade, most of the attention has fallen upon individual scholars in the field, while often distorting or ignoring altogether the issues that make the field both complex and necessary, the product of a large variety of contributions and discussions. In adopting the term Africana Studies, scholars and teachers in the field have sought to extend critical attention to sites outside of the U.S. to include the Caribbean, Africa, and other locations in the global community. What we have come to understand is that as a result of the flows of population, capital, and cultural practices, the African Diaspora is a setting where we come to understand terms like “Blackness” and “community” as signifiers of the vibrant exchanges across geographical and conceptual borders. With these exchanges have come new methodologies and critical approaches which have worked to challenge many of the scholarly assumptions about race, gender, and class that characterized the field’s beginnings in the late 19th Century.
The aim of this course is to help students develop an understanding of the complex array of African American and African Diaspora social practices and experiences. Using both classic and contemporary texts to introduce students to the dynamics of African American and African Diaspora thought and practices, the course will work to dramatize the dialogues (and debates) both within and across disciplines that includes scholars, writers, artists, and social activists. Topics covered will include: What is Afro-American Studies; Representing Blackness; Imagining the Past; Black Atlantic Culture(s); From Black Studies to Africana Studies; Race and Class in the 20th Century; Changing Conceptions of Racial Identity and Racial Classification; Gendering Africana Studies. Requirements for the course will include short papers, group projects, and a final examination.
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