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GRE
Spring 2018
The Resource Curse and Development in Africa (SA)
Subject associations
ANT 421 / AFS 320

This course examines the relationship between natural resource wealth and development in Africa. The dominant discourse on resource wealth on the continent has largely been associated with the resource curse. The construction and reproduction of the resource curse thesis is explored, particularly against the backdrop of the recent resource boom and scramble on the continent, and the changes that have occurred in Africa's resource-rich economies. It seeks to address the following questions. Is resource endowment inimical to development in Africa? What causes the resource curse in Africa? How can the resource curse be overcome in Africa?

Instructors
Godwin N. Onuoha
Fall 2023
Gaming Blackness: The Anthropology of Video Games and Race (CD or SA)
Subject associations
ANT 437 / AAS 437

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games. As we consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies, we scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize and interact with race and, in doing so, we advance an intersectional approach that also accounts for class, gender, and sexuality. The course's core set of theoretical and methodological tools helps students to engage with gaming critically and to create alternative games in the future.

RPP
Spring 2020
Disability, Difference, and Race (EM)
Subject associations
ANT 461 / AAS 364 / GHP 461 / GSS 461

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

Instructors
Laurence Ralph
Fall 2023
Disability, Difference, and Race (EM)
Subject associations
ANT 461 / AAS 461 / GHP 461 / GSS 461

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

Instructors
Laurence Ralph
AACL
GRE
Spring 2020
Comparing the Urban in the Americas and South Asia (SA)
Subject associations
ARC 396 / SAS 396 / URB 396

This course bridges the gap between pedagogy on Western cities, and that on cities of the so-called Global South, to compare urbanization and social movements across the Americas and South Asia. Specific course units will examine the development of informal settlements, urban segregation, enclave urbanism, privatization of public spaces, evictions, gentrification, homelessness, and the criminalization of the urban poor. Attention will also be paid to social movements focused on the right to the city. It asks how these processes and phenomena are similar, different, and / or interconnected across contexts.

Instructors
Priti Narayan
Spring 2023
Space and Subjectivity: Labor's Histories
Subject associations
ARC 550

This seminar explores concepts and themes concerning the interplay of labor, identity, and the built environment. We proceed from an intersectional analysis that roots questions of labor within physical bodies and from there aim to understand how these bodies labor to construct the built environment as well as how the built environment shapes laboring bodies, questions of identity, and our understandings of work and labor.

Instructors
Jay Cephas
Spring 2022
Space and Subjectivity
Subject associations
ARC 550 / AAS 550

This seminar focuses on identifying and articulating key concepts and themes concerning the interplay of race and the built environment. Proceeding initially from theories of subjectivity articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, the course analyzes culturations of the self via a theory of reflexive spatial practices that can help explain encounters between racialized forms of identity and the material conditions of architecture and cities.

Instructors
Jay Cephas
Spring 2022
Of Monkeys, Men and Great Edifices
Subject associations
ARC 553 / AAS 553

The seminar explores philosophical intersections of race and architecture, revealing Blackness as a negative aesthetic formation in historical and theoretical discourses. The transfiguration of Blackness from "inferior" historical racial sign to compelling architectonic language parallels John Dewey's formulations on rhetoric and "becoming." The result is a new spatial rhetoric founded on Blackness. Blackness is discussed as an aesthetic principle rather than a strictly socio-political condition. The distinction allows us to understand how race and architecture coexist.

Instructors
Darell W. Fields
Spring 2023
Of Monkeys, Men and Great Edifices
Subject associations
ARC 553 / AAS 553

The seminar explores philosophical intersections of race and architecture, revealing Blackness as a negative aesthetic formation in historical and theoretical discourses. The transfiguration of Blackness from "inferior" historical racial sign to compelling architectonic language parallels John Dewey's formulations on rhetoric and "becoming." The result is a new spatial rhetoric founded on Blackness. Blackness is discussed as an aesthetic principle rather than a strictly socio-political condition. The distinction allows us to understand how race and architecture coexist.

Instructors
Darell W. Fields
Spring 2018
Microhistory: Toward an Architecture of Slavery
Subject associations
ARC 556 / AAS 557 / MOD 503

Microhistory is a specific methodological approach to the study and writing of history. It applies an extremely detailed scale of investigation to any object of inquiry, including a particular person, community, infrastructure, building, map, plan, law, protocol, record, and event. The seminar scrutinizes this methodology, challenges teleological narratives, and examines microhistories throughout the spatial history of slavery in the United States of America and in Princeton. The aim is to anchor untapped spaces in order to unravel macro historical tendencies.

Instructors
Samia Henni
GRE
Spring 2022
Introduction to African Art (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ART 260 / AAS 260 / AFS 260

An introduction to African art and architecture from prehistory to the 20th century. Beginning with Paleolithic rock art of northern and southern Africa, we will cover ancient Nubia and Meroe; Neolithic cultures such as Nok, Djenne and Ife; African kingdoms, including Benin, Asante, Bamun, Kongo, Kuba, Great Zimbabwe, and the Zulu; Christian Ethiopia and the Islamic Swahili coast; and other societies, such as the Sherbro, Igbo, and the Maasai. By combining Africa's cultural history and developments in artistic forms we establish a long historical view of the stunning diversity of the continent's indigenous arts and architecture.

Instructors
Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
AACL
GRE
Fall 2019
What is Black Art: Art History and the Black Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
ART 373 / AAS 373

This course introduces students to the art and visual culture of the Black diaspora from the colonial period to the present. Artists and works of art will be considered in terms of their social, intellectual, and historical contexts and students will be encouraged to consider artistic practices as they intersect with other cultural spheres. Topics and readings will draw from the field of art history as well as from other areas of inquiry such as cultural studies, critical race theory, and the history of the Atlantic world, and the course will incorporate regular museum visits and dialogue with artists and curators in the field.

Instructors
Anna Arabindan Kesson
GRE
Fall 2021
Post-1945 African Photography (LA)
Subject associations
ART 378 / AFS 378 / AAS 377

This course examines the role and status of photography in different phases of Africa's political, cultural and art historical experience since 1945. We explore how African photographers used the photographic medium in the service of the state, society and their own artistic visions during the colonial and post-independence eras. Photography's relationship with art and its social function in Africa will underlie our discussion.

Instructors
Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
GRE
Fall 2018
Kongo Art (LA)
Subject associations
ART 473 / AAS 473 / AFS 473

Easily recognized as among the most important examples of canonical African art, Kongo sculpture, textiles, and ritual design are famous for their conceptual density, stylistic variety and rigorous abstraction. The course examines the role of art in the life of the Kongo Kingdom and related peoples, from the arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 15th century, through the era of Belgian colonization from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, to the period since political independence in 1960. The seminar coincides with and will explore the Kongo Across the Waters exhibition at the Princeton University Museum.

Instructors
Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
GRE
Fall 2019
Art and Politics in Postcolonial Africa (LA)
Subject associations
ART 474 / AAS 474 / AFS 474

This seminar examines the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program, military dictatorships, and political crises on artistic production in the 1980s, and the dramatic movement of African artists from the margins of the international art world to its very center since the 1990s. How familiar or different are the works and concerns of African artists? What are the consequences, in Africa and the West, of the international success of a few African artists? And what does the work of these Africans at home and in the West tell us about the sociopolitical conditions of our world today?

Instructors
Chika O. Okeke-Agulu
GRE
Spring 2022
Pathologies of Difference: Art, Medicine and Race in the British Empire (CD or EC)
Subject associations
ART 483 / AAS 483 / HUM 483

This course examines the relationship of art and medicine in the construction and production of race in the British Empire from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. We will analyze how image-making has been used in the development of medical knowledge and how scientific concepts of vision and natural history have been incorporated into art making. We will then examine how these intersections were deployed to visualize and, sometimes, challenge continually changing meanings about human and geographical difference across Britain and its colonies.

Instructors
Anna Arabindan Kesson
Fall 2019
Ancient Egyptian Kingship in Image, Architecture & Performance
Subject associations
ART 529 / CLA 528 / AAS 529

The institution of kingship was central to the ancient Egyptian worldview. Kings and their administrations sought to express the complex nature of a strong leader with access to the gods and secret knowledge, exceptional skill as a warrior and diplomat, and unrivaled power over and sacrifice to his people by using both mystery and overwhelming display. In this seminar we consider the nature of Egyptian kingship and how a vast body of material and visual culture shaped and expressed this essential concept from its origins in the beginning of the 4th millennium to the era of Roman rulers.

Instructors
Deborah A. Vischak
Fall 2021
Art and the British Empire
Subject associations
ART 560 / AAS 560

This seminar proceeds through a series of thematic and case studies ranging from Britain's early colonial expansion to the legacies of empire in contemporary art and museum practice. Topics include science and ethnography; the colonial picturesque; curiosity and collecting; slavery and visual representation; art and nationalism and readings are drawn from a range of disciplines.

Instructors
Anna Arabindan Kesson
Spring 2023
Frequencies of Black Life
Subject associations
ART 571 / ENG 590 / AAS 571

The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life's frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?

Instructors
Tina M. Campt
RPP
Spring 2023
Asian Americans and Identity Politics (CD or SA)
Subject associations
ASA 332 / GSS 427 / AAS 371

"Identity politics" has become a derogatory term across the political left and right to name divergent ills shaping contemporary US political culture. Yet present usages stem far from those of the Black queer feminists/socialists who coined the term in 1977. Why have "identity politics" become such a malleable anti-hero? How do Asian Americans figure in these debates? Through the work of Black feminists, postcolonial theorists, and activists, we will explore the liberatory and fraught nature of identity-based movement, tracing how negotiations of difference across gender, racialization, immigration status, and ability shape political culture.

Instructors
Elizabeth H. Rubio
AACL
Spring 2020
Black and Asian in America (SA)
Subject associations
ASA 360 / AAS 360 / ENG 285

Debates over policing, immigration, and affirmative action routinely position Black and Asian communities on opposing sides, while the model minority myth has been redeployed in the twenty-first century in the form of the Tiger Mom. How did we get here, and what do these trends mean for our daily lives? We respond to these questions by looking at fiction, film, and foodways from the last 30 years of Black-Asian relations in America. Using a comparative race and ethnic studies approach, we identify ways of thinking and talking about interracial difference that forge new paths for social, cultural, and political engagement.

Instructors
Kinohi Nishikawa
AACL
Spring 2023
Princeton Atelier: How to Find a Missing Black Woman (LA)
Subject associations
ATL 498 / AAS 498 / GSS 498

Poet Patricia Smith, Poet and Executive Director of JustMedia Mahogany Browne, and choreographer Davalois Fearon will collaborate through the course to craft a multimedia theatrical production that shines an unflinching light on the problem of missing black women and girls. In 2020, 268,884 women were reported missing, and nearly 100,000 were Black women and girls but there is a huge disparity in how the cases of Black missing girls and women are treated by media and law enforcement. The artists will work with students interested in music, theater, and dance to assemble the production, which will then be performed for the Princeton community.

Instructors
Mahogany L. Browne
Davalois V. Fearon
Patricia Smith
AACL
Spring 2023
Princeton Atelier: Sites of Memory: Gender, Performance, and the Law (LA)
Subject associations
ATL 499 / AAS 499 / ENG 499

Students will collaborate with legal scholar Patricia Williams, literary historian Autumn Womack, and guest artists and performers to creatively explore the theatrical and performative archives that animate what we'll understand as black (gendered) legal performances. We will investigate a range of sites - from the Margaret Garner trial to Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing - and the embodied, visual and sonic histories that score them. Alongside filmmakers, visual artists, and performers, students will construct a multi-modal creative record that fills in the silences and supplements the noise that accompanies these trials.

Instructors
Patricia Williams
Autumn M. Womack
AACL
Spring 2022
Rhetoric, A User's Guide (From Ancient Greece to the American Present) (CD or LA)
Subject associations
CHV 247 / CLA 257 / AAS 246 / HLS 247

This course will explore the theory and practice of rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome and the ways in which classical rhetoric has been adapted in modern American verbal art. From Gorgias and Demosthenes to Lincoln and Douglass, to Ida B. Wells and Fannie Lou Hamer, we will consider what makes individual speeches noteworthy in their local, historical contexts, as well as placing them in a larger rhetorical tradition. Throughout, we will analyze the role of ideologies of gender, class, race, nationality, religion, and sexuality in the construction of the rhetorical subject.

Instructors
Emily Greenwood
Fall 2023
The Hidden History of Hollywood - Research Film Studio (CD or LA)
Subject associations
CHV 385 / AAS 385 / VIS 385 / COM 308

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

Instructors
Erika A. Kiss
AACL
Fall 2022
The Hidden History of Hollywood - Research Film Studio (CD or LA)
Subject associations
CHV 385 / AAS 385 / VIS 385

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

Instructors
Erika A. Kiss
AACL
Spring 2021
The Hidden History of Hollywood - Research Film Studio (CD or LA)
Subject associations
CHV 385 / AAS 385

This course uncovers the roots of racial injustice in Hollywood; the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation that led directly to the rebirth of the KKK and increased violence against Afro-Americans; and William Monroe Trotter's fight against the propaganda film. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

Instructors
Erika A. Kiss
GRE
Spring 2018
Bondage and Slaving in Global History (HA)
Subject associations
CLA 225 / MED 225 / AAS 263 / HLS 225

Ranging from the Neolithic to the 21st century, this course will survey the history of human bondage. Topics to be explored include the role of slavery in the rise of the first Neolithic states; the institutionalization of slavery in ancient Mesopotamia, the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, and ancient China; the proliferation of slave systems elsewhere in Eurasia and on the African continent; the economic and political transformation of the Old and New Worlds through the commodification of African and Native American bodies; and the feedback loops linking ancient slave systems to modern ones.

Instructors
Dan-El Padilla Peralta
AACL
GRE
Fall 2020
Citizenships Ancient and Modern (SA)
Subject associations
CLA 310 / CHV 314 / AAS 311 / POL 310

Recent developments in the United States and throughout the world have exposed fault lines in how communities design and regulate forms of citizenship. But current debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? (How) are exclusion and marginalization wired into the historical legacies and present-day practices of citizenship?

Instructors
Dan-El Padilla Peralta
RPP
Spring 2021
Race and the Inhumanities (CD or HA)
Subject associations
CLA 342 / HUM 348 / AAS 356

Few technologies of domination have been wielded with more sweeping and devastating global consequence than race. The research and teaching taxonomies of predominantly White institutions such as Princeton bear witness both to this history and to the intricacy of those mechanisms that work to conceal it. Taking our cue from Achille Mbembe - "racial thinking... has been the ever-present shadow hovering over Western political thought and practice" - we'll examine the role of race and racialization in the formation of the intellectual disciplines around which universities like ours are organized, with a particular emphasis on the humanities.

Instructors
Tom Davies
Dan-El Padilla Peralta
GRE
Fall 2020
Introduction to African Literature and Film (CD or LA)
Subject associations
COM 239 / AFS 239 / AAS 239 / HUM 239

African literature and films have been a vital (but often unacknowledged) stream in and stimulant to the global traffic in invention. Nigerian literature is one of the great literatures of the twentieth century. Ethiopian literature is one of the oldest literatures in the world. Senegalese films include some of the finest films ever made. In this course, we will study the richness and diversity of foundational African texts (some in translation), while foregrounding questions of aesthetics, style, humor, epistemology.

Instructors
Wendy Laura Belcher
GRE
Spring 2020
The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (LA)
Subject associations
COM 241 / AAS 241 / AFS 241

Many assume that pre-twentieth-century Africa has no history. Rather, it has so much history that communicating all its richness can be a challenge. In this class, therefore, we focus on particular instances that speak to the tremendous diversity of the period from 300 to 1500 in Africa - its political systems, religious communities, and dynamics of cultural and economic conversation. We also address Africa's interconnectedness within and to the rest of the world as a vital part of the global middle ages. Primary sources include letters, treatises, and chronicles but also maps, archeological layouts, frescos, inscriptions, and rock art.

Instructors
Wendy Laura Belcher
Francois-Xavier Fauvelle
AACL
Spring 2021
Cinema in Times of Pandemic: Research Film Studio (EM)
Subject associations
COM 373 / AAS 383 / AMS 388

In cooperation with the Sundance and the Berlin Film Festivals, our workshop will investigate the crisis of film production, distribution and canonization made acute by the Pandemic as well as divisive culture wars. We will uncover how the formation of film canons is informed by the ebb and flow of the civil rights movement. Our focus will be on stories of injustice filmed by women and Afro-American artists. The seminar work will consist of making short digital presentations and scholarly film-montage essays. The class will record Zoom interviews with critically acclaimed filmmakers, film festival directors and leaders of the film industry.

Instructors
Erika A. Kiss
GRE
Fall 2021
Crafting Freedom: Women and Liberation in the Americas (1960s to the present) (CD or LA)
Subject associations
COM 376 / AAS 371 / GSS 439 / LAS 376

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

Instructors
Susana Draper
GRE
Spring 2020
Gender and Sexuality in African History (LA)
Subject associations
COM 434 / AAS 434 / AFS 435 / GSS 434

This course explores the history of gender and sexuality in Africa. By reading an eclectic range of historical sources (including films, novels, and anthropological works) alongside recent secondary literature, students will explore several important questions. How have African cultures, religions, experiences of colonialism, political formations, medicines, and youth, shaped, and been shaped by, understandings of gender and sexuality? What link is there between contemporary LGBTQ activism and African history? Why do debates about Africa often center on issues of gender and sexuality? Is "queer" a meaningful method for African studies?

Instructors
Wendy Laura Belcher
Ray Thornton
GRE
Spring 2022
Crafting Freedom: Women and Liberation in the Americas (1960s to the present) (CD or LA)
Subject associations
COM 476 / AAS 476 / GSS 476 / LAS 476

This course explores questions and practices of liberation in writings by women philosophers and poets whose work helped to create cultural and political movements in the U.S. and Latin America. Starting in the 60s, we will study a poetics and politics of liberation, paying special attention to the role played by language and imagination when ideas translate onto social movements related to social justice, structural violence, education, care, and the commons. Readings include Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Diamela Eltit, Audre Lorde, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gayatri Spivak, Zapatistas, among others.

Instructors
Susana Draper
AACL
Fall 2020
Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity and Innovation (LA)
Subject associations
CWR 316 / AAS 336 / LAO 316 / ASA 316

This workshop explores the link between racial identity and poetic innovation in work by contemporary poets of color. Experimental or avant-garde poetry in the American literary tradition has often defined itself as "impersonal," "against expression" or "post-identity." Unfortunately, this mindset has tended to exclude or downplay poems that engage issues of racial identity. This course explores works where poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the text while at the same time engaging in poetic practices that subvert conceptions of identity or authenticity.

Instructors
Monica Y. Youn
Fall 2023
The American Experience and Dance Practices of the African Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 211 / AAS 211

A studio course introducing students to African dance practices and aesthetics, with a focus on how its evolution has influenced American and African American culture, choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies.

Instructors
Dyane Harvey Salaam
AACL
GRE
Spring 2022
The American Experience and Dance Practices of the African Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 211 / AAS 211

A studio course introducing students to American dance aesthetics and practices, with a focus on how its evolution has been influenced by African American choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies.

Instructors
Dyane Harvey Salaam
AACL
GRE
Spring 2023
The American Experience and Dance Practices of the African Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 211 / AAS 211

A studio course introducing students to African dance practices and aesthetics, with a focus on how its evolution has influenced American and African American culture, choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies.

Instructors
Dyane Harvey Salaam
AACL
GRE
Fall 2022
The American Experience and Dance Practices of the African Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 211 / AAS 211

A studio course introducing students to African dance practices and aesthetics, with a focus on how its evolution has influenced American and African American culture, choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies.

Instructors
Dyane Harvey Salaam
AACL
GRE
Fall 2020
Introduction to Dance Across Cultures (CD or SA)
Subject associations
DAN 215 / ANT 355 / GSS 215 / AMS 215

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

Instructors
Judith Hamera
Fall 2022
Introduction to Dance Across Cultures (CD or SA)
Subject associations
DAN 215 / ANT 355 / GSS 215 / AMS 215

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

Instructors
Judith Hamera
AACL
Spring 2023
Introduction to Hip-Hop Dance (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 222 / AAS 222

This introductory survey course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore a range of hip-hop dance techniques, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which these dances emerged. Special attention will be given to breaking - the most prominent hip-hop form - as a foundation for exploring other forms of movement. By critically exploring these physical and historical connections, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to develop a personalized style.

Instructors
Joseph Schloss
AACL
Spring 2021
Introduction to Hip-Hop Dance (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 222 / AAS 222

This introductory survey course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore a range of hip-hop dance techniques, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which these dances emerged. Special attention will be given to breaking - the most prominent hip-hop form - as a foundation for exploring other forms of movement. By critically exploring these physical and historical connections, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to develop a personalized style.

Instructors
Joseph Schloss
AACL
Fall 2018
An Introduction to the Radical Imagination (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 223 / AAS 223 / VIS 224

Using an interdisciplinary visual and performance studies approach to explore various sites of contemporary art practices, this course will provide an introduction to radical performance practices through which artists consider the gendered and racialized body that circulates in the public domain, both onstage and off. We will query the kinds of political questions that performers raise with their work. Our texts will include live and recorded performances, as well as historical and theoretical secondary sources. Every other week the class hosts a public performance/speaking series featuring radical artists and curators.

Instructors
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
AACL
Fall 2021
Introduction to Rhythm Tap Dance: Past Legacies, Future Rhythms (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 229 / MTD 229 / THR 229

In this studio course, dancers will study the past, present, and future of rhythm tap dance by learning the techniques and Black American histories, traditions, and legacies that have established and continue to sustain the form. While learning fundamental steps and foundational routines, we will interact with various media curated to introduce some of rhythm tap's important people, happenings, and places. Additionally, we will engage with related theory and closely examine the work of contemporary tap artists to identify how the form is being preserved and how Black traditions are being used to shape innovations and new approaches.

Instructors
Michael J. Love
RPP
Spring 2022
#Dancing Black: Black American Dance from 1970 to Today (CD or LA)
Subject associations
DAN 302 / AAS 316

This course explores the politics, aesthetics, and histories of Black American dance from the early 1970s to today. Paying special attention to the politics of circulation and new technologies, we will explore questions around innovation, virality, citation, ownership, and appropriation. Radio, television, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok will be studied as connected yet discreet technologies of creative dispersal in direct relationship to their capacity for/constraints around creative, economic, and political output.

Instructors
Jasmine E. Johnson
AACL
Spring 2022
Rhythm Tap Dance Lab: Explorations in Black Embodied and Electronic Music (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 303 / AAS 329 / MTD 303 / MUS 268

Enrolled students will engage with this course as workshop cast members of a new interdisciplinary piece by Princeton Arts Fellow Michael J. Love and explore methods of rhythm tap dance performance, live electronic music composition, and practice-based research on Black American music (genres such as jazz, funk, soul, hip hop, techno, and house). In-studio class meetings, structured as rehearsals, will be augmented with weekly listening, viewing, and reading assignments. There may also be opportunities for guest artists and respondents. The course will culminate in a work-in-progress showing during the final weeks of the semester.

Instructors
Michael J. Love
AACL
Fall 2021
Black Dance: History, Theory, Practice (CD or HA)
Subject associations
DAN 305 / AAS 307 / AMS 310

This course traces histories, traditions and innovations in Black American dance through archival and embodied practice. Moving from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the 1970s, we will explore how dance - when executed by those who identify as Black and when circulated outside/beyond/without Black people themselves - speaks to the body's relationship to the political, social, and cultural contexts of American life. Through a hybrid seminar/studio seminar format, students will be introduced to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in Black Dance. We'll wrestle with the complexities around researching, doing, and reading Black Dance.

Instructors
Jasmine E. Johnson
AACL
Spring 2018
Special Topics In Urban Dance: Improvisational Approaches to Hip-Hop Practices (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 322 / AAS 312

This course is designed to provide a broad understanding of hip-hop dance, history and culture. We will explore the various dance styles and folk art traditions that preceded and influenced hip-hop dance and its essential elements. With a focus on Breaking and its deconstruction of body movements and choreographic forms, the course will emphasize the creative tools inherent in Breaking techniques and improvisational structures to support students to develop and find their own individual style. Viewings and readings videos will contextualize students' investigations.

Instructors
Raphael Xavier
AACL
Spring 2020
The Politics of Hip-Hop Dance (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 323 / AAS 308 / LAO 323

Hip-Hop is one of the most important cultural movements of the last half-century. But although hip-hop culture comprises a wide range of artistic practices - including music, dance, theater and graphic arts - its cultural politics are almost always analyzed through the lens of rap music. This seminar, by contrast, will explore the social and historical implications of hip-hop culture through its dance forms.

Instructors
Joseph Schloss
AACL
Spring 2019
Creating Your Biomythography Workshop (LA)
Subject associations
DAN 350 / AAS 329 / CWR 350

Coined by the poet and essayist Audre Lorde, the term "biomythography" combines history, biography, and myth-making. Using an interdisciplinary workshop approach to explore the concept of the biomyth, this course will provide an introduction to various sites of contemporary art practices situating literature, design, and dance within a social and historical context. Zami will serve as a point of departure into the creation of our memoir narratives. Additional texts will include live and recorded performances, historical, theoretical secondary sources, as well as guest writers, poets and artists.

Instructors
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
RPP
Spring 2020
Economics of Development (SA)
Subject associations
ECO 351

This course is divided in two parts. The first examines why some countries are so much richer than others, and critically evaluates different explanations for this phenomenon on theoretical and empirical grounds. The second part deals with selected microeconomic issues related to life in the developing world, examining theories and data on education, health, credit and other topics.

Instructors
Matteo Bobba
Spring 2023
Reading the French Caribbean: The Postcolonial Literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ECS 393 / AAS 394 / FRE 394 / LAS 317

The course will focus on postcolonial writing from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which have come increasingly to be viewed as sites where issues of global import are conspicuously articulated. Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, questions to be discussed will feature some that loom especially large: the genesis of a distinct multiethnic and multilingual community; the phenomena of migration and diaspora; ongoing tensions between former colonies now incorporated, as peripheral departments, by the "center," that is, France and the European Union; and not least, the matter of geography and the environment.

Instructors
Thomas A. Trezise
Fall 2023
The Reclamation Studio: Humanistic Design applied to Systemic Bias (SA)
Subject associations
EGR 361 / ENT 361 / URB 361 / AAS 348

Assumptions and practices by the nonprofit industrial complex, government agencies and affordable housing developers treat poor communities, especially poor communities of color as problems to be managed by those from outside these communities. The Reclamation Studio explores the humanistic design practices applied by social entrepreneurs from low-status communities near Princeton (our "clients") that counteract that history of systemic bias with innovative development projects designed to retain the talent from within their communities. Students will have the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to their efforts.

Instructors
Majora J. Carter
RPP
Spring 2023
Special Topics in Entrepreneurship: Black Entrepreneurial History in the United States
Subject associations
EGR 495 / ENT 495 / AAS 495

This class is designed so that students can discover, recognize and debate two key objectives on Black entrepreneurship and business history: 1) Celebrate the achievements and resilience of the Black entrepreneurial community over the history of the country, and 2) explore the social, cultural and legal obstacles Black entrepreneurs faced and the impact of those obstacles until present day.

Instructors
Keith B. Hollingsworth
Fall 2022
Special Topics in Entrepreneurship: Black Entrepreneurial History in the United States
Subject associations
EGR 495 / ENT 495 / AAS 495

The course focuses on the Black entrepreneurship and business history from pre-colonial days till the present. The course will discuss the trials, tribulations and successes of Black entrepreneurs throughout the history of the country. Emphasis will be placed on the social, legal and political contexts that both encouraged and discouraged Black business success as well as strategies employed to generate success.

Instructors
Keith B. Hollingsworth
Fall 2020
Melodrama: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Grey's Anatomy (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 353 / GSS 424

From 18th-century fallen woman tales to 20th-century soap operas, melodrama has always offered exaggerated plot swings and wallowing emotions. Modern aesthetics often demands that writing be understated, that it show instead of tell; melodrama refuses to do these things. This course will examine a variety of sensational and emotive texts. Along the way we will consider distinctions between "high" and "low" art, we will examine morality tales about "good" and "bad" women, and we will interrogate the racial politics of sympathy.

Instructors
Jocelyn A. Rodal
GRE
Spring 2022
Black Dramatists in the English-Speaking World (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 354 / AAS 354 / THR 351

The language of a play intermingles thought and dramatic action to epitomize an unreconciled social conflict, intended to manifest within and between human bodies in real time. What have English-language dramatists of African descent identified as the central conflicts of their plays? How have their relationships to race, power, and colonial structures influenced their works? In what ways have they shaped, subverted, and advanced theatrical forms? This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st C. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Instructors
Nathan A. Davis
AACL
GRE
Fall 2022
Black Dramatists in the English-Speaking World (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 354 / AAS 354 / THR 351

The language of a play intermingles thought and dramatic action to epitomize an unreconciled social conflict, intended to manifest within and between human bodies in real time. What have English-language dramatists of African descent identified as the central conflicts of their plays? How have their relationships to race, power, and colonial structures influenced their works? In what ways have they shaped, subverted, and advanced theatrical forms? This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st C. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Instructors
Nathan A. Davis
GRE
Spring 2021
Reading Islands: Caribbean Waters, the Archipelago, and its Narratives (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ENG 358 / LAS 385 / AMS 396

The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas - islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, we will explore questions of indigeneity, colonial contact, iterations of enslavement, and the plantation matrix in literary texts. How do island-writers evoke gender and a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction?

Instructors
Christina León
GRE
Spring 2023
Caribbean Literature and Culture: Island Imaginaries: Movement, Speculation and Precarity (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ENG 358 / LAS 385 / AMS 396 / AAS 343

Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean Literature: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt. These past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean in ways that necessitate attention to gender, race, and environment.

Instructors
Annabelle E. Haynes
Christina León
AACL
GRE
RPP
Fall 2017
Black Aesthetics: Art, Literature, and Politics in the African Diaspora (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 379 / AAS 379 / AMS 389 / ART 380

This course introduces students to black aesthetics as a historically grounded concept that stages questions of the social, cultural, political and philosophical meaning of blackness. We'll explore various 'flashpoints' during the 20th century where black art serves both as a site of contestation and a platform for interrogating topics of race, gender, sexuality, the body, objecthood, slavery and colonialism. We'll consider how various generations of black artists/intellectuals across the African diaspora turned to the aesthetic realm to imagine new political possibilities and generate different ways of seeing, feeling, sensing, and thinking.

Instructors
Nijah Cunningham
Fall 2023
Topics in Women's Writing: Archival Silence & Aesthetic Innovation (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 383 / GSS 395 / AMS 483 / AAS 340

In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.

Instructors
Lindsay T. Brown
Autumn M. Womack
AACL
Spring 2018
Experimenting in Dark Times: 19th C African American Literature and Culture (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 391A / AAS 391

This interdisciplinary course explores the intersecting worlds of late 19th century African American literature, technology, aesthetics, and politics. Although this period is commonly theorized as the "Nadir," or "dark point," of Black life, it was in fact a moment of artistic and social experimentation, as black artists and intellectuals traversed a range of media to imagine new futures. We will investigate this overlooked cultural moment and develop an understanding of black experimental writing's roots. In design studio, students will design historically experimental urban projects around the text's investigated in the weekly seminar.

Instructors
V. Mitch McEwen
Autumn M. Womack
GRE
Spring 2020
New Diasporas: Black British Literature (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 397 / COM 348 / AAS 397

This is a course on the dynamic body of works produced by migrants and descendants of migrants from Africa and the Caribbean in Britain since the 1950s. How has the migrant experience transformed the British cultural landscape after the end of an empire? What does it mean to be British and Black? How have migrant writers created new aesthetic forms to respond to the meaning of postcolonial Britishness? How does writing function as a mode of imagining alternative spaces of belonging? Readings will range from the novels of migrant arrival in the 1950s and the works of Zadie Smith to "post-racial" novels by Helen Oyeyemi and Aminatta Forna.

Instructors
Simon E. Gikandi
AACL
Fall 2020
Queer Literatures: Theory, Narrative, and Aesthetics (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ENG 408 / GSS 415 / AMS 418

This course will read from various trajectories of queer literature and engage "reading queerly" across race, gender, ability, class, and geography. We will consider the etymology of queer and think through its affiliate terms: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans. How are such narratives encounters with power that are historically situated in relation to the national formations, carceral states, and racial capitalism?

Instructors
RL Goldberg
Christina León
AACL
Spring 2020
Major Author(s): August Wilson: African American Life in the 20th Century (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 411 / AAS 413 / AMS 411 / THR 412

August Wilson completed what many consider the most ambitious project of any American playwright. His cycle of ten plays, one for each decade, chronicles African American life in the 20th century. We will explore all ten plays as individual drama and depictions of history. We will read standard histories to gain background and context.

Instructors
R. N. Sandberg
AACL
Fall 2020
Major Author(s): Mourning America: Emerson and Douglass (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 411 / AMS 411 / AAS 413

This course focuses on the relations and differences between these two "representative men" of the 19th C. Demonstrating that Douglass' strategies of writing have relays with Emerson's points will enable us to bring out the radically political and historical character of Emerson's writings but also the profoundly literary elements of Douglass' political writings. Using the writings of these two key figures of the 19th C as a kind of measure, the course will seek to understand the governing cultural and political rhetorics through which America thought about such issues as race, slavery, manifest destiny, westward expansion, and identity.

Instructors
Eduardo L. Cadava
AACL
Spring 2023
Major Author(s): Mourning America: Emerson and Douglass (CD or LA)
Subject associations
ENG 411 / AMS 411 / AAS 413

This course will focus on two "representative men" of the nineteenth century. It will propose that Emerson and Douglass are two of America's greatest defenders, precisely because they are its greatest mourners. While they point to America's unfulfilled promise of universal representation, they seek to realize it in their own acts of writing. This course attends to these writers' relations to the period's broader discourses surrounding race, ecology, empire, and nation-building. Alongside Emerson and Douglass, we will read short texts by naturalists, politicians, and activists such as J.B. Lamarck, James Madison, and Ida B. Wells.

Instructors
Eduardo L. Cadava
Denise Xu
AACL
Spring 2019
Major Author(s): Toni Morrison and the Ethics of Reading (LA)
Subject associations
ENG 414 / AAS 455

This course traces the relationship between reading, politics, and aesthetics in the work of Toni Morrison. Working across her published oeuvre and personal archive -- from the "Bluest Eye" to "God Save the Child" -- we will approach Morrison as a critical reader, as a theorist of reading, and her novels as sites that interrogate reading practices. In tackling these goals, we will not only read works Morrison authored, but also works she edited (Gayle Jones' Corregidora), and collaborated on (The Black Book).

Instructors
Autumn M. Womack
AACL
GRE
Fall 2020
Topics in Literature and Ethics: Imagining Human Rights (EM)
Subject associations
ENG 415 / JRN 415 / COM 446

This course is an invitation for us to think about literature as an ethical and political project, one that raises enduring questions about the uniqueness of the human being, the relation of the self to the other, and the possibility of human understanding across cultural, ethnic, racial and national boundaries. Moving across different periods and traditions, the course will consider how literature, film, and photography have played a crucial role in establishing the meaning of human rights and of enriching our understanding of what it means to be a human being entitled to freedom, life, and liberty.

Instructors
Simon E. Gikandi
Spring 2020
African-American Literature: James/Baldwin
Subject associations
ENG 556 / AAS 556

James Baldwin made no secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life, paying debt in archly poetic sentences that friends as well as rivals snidely dismissed (Mailer: "even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume"). This course explores the erotic and political facets of style, its capacity to work as flamboyant closetedness and recipe or technique (Bronstein: "a way of training the reader into desire for and expectation of a particular kind of understanding"). J's theory of the novel's influence on B's essay style center our inquiry into how that stylistic cross-pollination might have informed black study.

Instructors
Stephen M. Best
Fall 2019
African-American Literature: Black Arts Criticism
Subject associations
ENG 556 / AAS 556

Black arts criticism addresses the contradictions of cultural production while expanding what it means to read a work of art. It's become an essential part of our contemporary discourse. From a longer view, this dissemination may be traced to the Black Arts movement, whose own body of criticism questioned just whom "black art" was being produced for. We survey the development of Black Arts criticism into Black arts criticism, touching on music, literature, and the visual arts. In the process, we explore criticism's role in the academy by learning how scholarly writing can inform online and magazine work.

Instructors
Kinohi Nishikawa