Africana Studies

Introduction to African Experience
The African continent houses fifty-four countries, more than two thousand languages, and the most genetically diverse population in the world. This course introduces you to the major themes in the study of African history, culture, literature, politics, and economics. From the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the HIV/AIDS crisis, from precolonial oral traditions to contemporary cinema, we will explore both the challenges facing Africa and the continent’s rich cultural and political tradition.

Black Cinema
This course examines films by African, African American, and other African diaspora directors. It focuses on the attempt by different filmmakers to wrest an African/diasporic identity and aesthetic from a medium that has been defined predominantly by American and European models. Students analyze the implicit and explicit attempts to formulate a black aesthetic within film, as well as the general phenomenon of the representation of blacks in film.

Deconstructing the Police
This senior seminar examines the origins, evolution and ideas about policing. We consider theories, perspectives and critiques of policing including those that consider policing to be disciplinary power, as an apparatus of class rule, a white supremacist instrument, as democratic institution etc. We ask where do the police come from? What do they do? Whose interests do they serve? How are they or might they be legitimized? Why might they be necessary? Why night they be abolished? Are the police different from policing? What accounts for the apparent tension between policing, gender, race and class? Is policing an inherently anti-black institution?