ASRC 6903 - Africana Studies Graduate Seminar

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Intended for: first-year ASRC graduate students.

C. Boyce Davies.

The seminar is coordinated and supervised by one professor but team taught by three or four faculty members per semester. Each participating faculty member is responsible for a topical segment of the course related to her or his areas of specialization or an area of interest pertaining to theory and methodology of Africana Studies.

Spring Topic: Cultural, Literary, Visual Analysis

The second in a two-part course sequence offered in the fall and spring semesters annually and it surveys the black intellectual traditions of the field through an exploration of the “great books” and classic texts that develop, define, shape and contest the contours of black cultural, literary and visual analysis in the diaspora.
There are certain seminal essays and books in Africana Studies with which you should be familiar and which pose central questions for the study of people of African ancestry in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Moreover, these classic texts provide a way of interrogating or examining the black experience in the arts, history, literature, and politics. They help us to understand the lineaments and trajectory of black thought, the similarities and differences in the condition and response of black peoples throughout the African diaspora, and the ways in which we probe and analyze the meaning of black ideas and action. Additionally, we will grapple with more recent debates about post-blackness and the post-racial.

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