Offered as AMS 351np and ENG 384np. A creative nonfiction writing workshop where students improve their writing using photography as muse, guide, foil and inspiration. Students write long, creative nonfiction pieces about current issues in American life using photography as a method for inspiring, analyzing and improving the prose. Students take photos, report and write, applying principles of photography such as point of view, depth of field, focus, flatness and timing to help with the essentials of narrative prose.

A seventeenth-century engraving imagines an encounter between two men wearing feathers and holding onto the same string of shells: depending on your perspective, this image looks like a scene of trade or one of theft at knife-point. In understanding moments from the past, representation and perspective shape not just interpretation, but sources themselves. Seeing moments as both trade and theft opens them to tellings and analyses from multiple perspectives, exposing overlooked elements and revealing the ways in which histories are made.

This course introduces some of the exciting and innovative approaches to cultural analysis that have emerged over the last three decades. Students apply these methods to a variety of texts and practices (stories, movies, television shows, music, advertisements, clothes, buildings, laws, markets, bodies) in an effort to acquire the tools to become skillful readers of American culture, and to become more critical and aware as scholars and citizens. Prerequisite: AMS 201 is recommended but not required.

This one-credit, eight-week course will ask the question of what it means to study Africa. As the world’s second largest and most linguistically and culturally diverse continent, Africa is also one of the world’s least understood historically, politically, socially, and culturally. This course thus aims to challenge conventional representations of the continent. In doing so, it also aims to introduce students to the broader interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study of the continent. S/U only.

The course introduces students to the main theoretical interpretations of culture in the Caribbean, and gives an overview of Caribbean cultural history. Students will be expected to analyze the impact of colonialism, race, class, gender and sexuality in the formation of Caribbean cultural practices, and to interpret cultural expression in its broadest political sense. Key theoretical terms that are central to any understanding of Caribbean cultural thought – the plantation, diaspora, creolization – will be addressed in detail in the course.

Why has the construction of archives that center on the experiences of people of African descent been so critical to black political, cultural, and social life? What do black archives look like and what do they offer us? How do they expand the way we consider archives in general? This course seeks to address these questions by examining the conception and development of black archives, primarily, although not exclusively, as they arose in the United States across the twentieth century. Enrollment limited to 20.

This course examines historical, critical and theoretical perspectives on the development of Black feminist theory/praxis. The course draws from the 19th century to the present, but focuses on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on Western and global feminisms. Central to our exploration is the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and of race, to gender and class.

An introduction to some of the major perspectives, themes, and issues in the field of Afro-American studies. Our focus is on the economic, social and political aspects of cultural production, and how these inform what it means to read, write about, view and listen to Black culture.