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.

Students in this course will work with Princeton Arts Fellow Michael J. Love and his collaborators, film-based artist Ariel René Jackson and rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown, Jr., to develop a new multi-channel video and live performance installation - to feature video by Jackson, live performance by the students (choreographed and directed by Love), and an electronic music-based composition by Brown. Students will engage with curated readings and media, lectures by Love, Jackson, and Brown, and weekly technique classes and choreography rehearsals. The course will culminate in a live performance and exhibition

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.