Africana Studies

What You Will Learn

1. An understanding and appreciation of the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of Africana Studies. 
2. How to demonstrate your understanding of the major issues, questions, and debates surrounding theory and research through writing and discussion.
3. Race’s central role and its intersectional relationship to other socially constructed ideas, such as gender, class, and sexual orientation, in the histories and lived experience of people of African descent.
4. How to employ acceptable methods of conducting research.
5. How to evaluate and analyze existing scholarship on the subject.   

B(L)ack to Nature: Poetry and Theory
AFRI 120 PZ

This course centers Blackness, nature, and gender in 20thC African American poetry. Through the study of poets Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Claudia Rankine, students explore aesthetic strategies of and practice writing free verse, vignette, haiku, choreopoem, and blues. Coupled with readings in Black feminist geographies, earth histories, and ecologies studies, students engage with critical questions of representation, space, and embodiment in 20th century African American poetry.   

Octavia E. Butler: Wild Seed to Earth Seed
AFRI 110 AF

Octavia E. Butler invites readers to consider critical questions about ecologies, communities, hierarchies, love, sexuality, race, gender, colonization, slavery, home, displacement, immigration, imprisonment, self-reliance, trans-species cooperation, and hybridity, to name a few. Butler raises questions about the power of narrative and the parameters of Black feminist and African diaspora literatures as she innovates sci-fi genres, often blending the African diaspora historical with the Afrofuturistic. 

Wokeness: African American Social Theory
SOC 109 PZ

How have African Americans contributed to sociology? This course seeks to provide an overview of early 20th century and more contemporary African American contributors to the discipline such as St. Clair Drake, Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, and Robert Staples. Moreover, students will become familiar with how race, sex, and class shaped these theoretical writings and expanded socio-cultural understanding of African Americans in the U.S.