| AFRICAAM101Q | Black & White Race Relations in American Fiction & Film | Movies and the fiction that inspires them; power dynamics behind production including historical events, artistic vision, politics, and racial stereotypes. What images of black and white does Hollywood produce to forge a national identity? How do fil... |
| AFRICAAM105 | Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies | This course situates the study of Black lives, known interchangeably as African American Studies, Black Studies, Africana Studies, or African Diaspora Studies, within the context of ongoing struggles against anti-Black racism. We will explore the fou... |
| AFRICAAM106 | Race, Ethnicity, and Linguistic Diversity in Classrooms: Sociocultural Theory and Practices | Focus is on classrooms with students from diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. Studies, writing, and media representation of urban and diverse school settings; implications for transforming teaching and learning. Issues related to devel... |
| AFRICAAM108 | Islam in West Africa Beyond Decolonization | This course will survey the history of Islam and Muslim societies in West Africa through the beliefs, practices, writings, stories and poems of Sufi scholarly sages. The course will focus on the Islamic intellectual and spiritual tradition of West Af... |
| AFRICAAM10A | Introduction to Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics: Arts, Culture, and Pedagogy | This weekly lecture series introduces students to the study of identity, diversity, and aesthetics through the work of leading artists and scholars affiliated with the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA). This year's course highlights the educ... |
| AFRICAAM111 | AIDS, Literacy, and Land: Foreign Aid and Development in Africa | Foreign aid can help Africa, say the advocates. Certainly not, say the critics. Is foreign aid a solution? or a problem? Should there be more aid, less aid, or none at all? Africa has developed imaginative and innovative approaches in many sectors. A... |
| AFRICAAM112 | Urban Education | (Graduate students register for EDUC 212 or SOC 229X). Combination of social science and historical perspectives trace the major developments, contexts, tensions, challenges, and policy issues of urban education. |
| AFRICAAM113A | African American Energies and Ecologies | African American perspectives on the environment have long been suppressed in mainstream discourse, despite the importance of questions of land, labor, and resource to the historical and ongoing experiences of Black people in the United States. Again... |
| AFRICAAM113V | Freedom in Chains: Black Slavery in the Atlantic, 1400s-1800s | This course will focus on the history of slavery in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch Atlantic world(s), from the late 1400s to the 1800s. Its main focus will be on the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Between... |
| AFRICAAM114C | America Never was America to me: Race and Equity in US Public Schools | This cross-disciplinary course will use the 10-part docu-series "America to Me" to discuss the complexities of race and equity in US schools. The series follows a year in the life of a racially diverse, well-resourced high school outside Chicago, pro... |
| AFRICAAM118X | Critical Family History: Narratives of Identity and Difference | This course examines family history as a site for understanding identity, power, and social difference in American society. Focusing in particular on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, we approach the family as an archive through which... |
| AFRICAAM119 | Novel Perspectives on South Africa | 21st-century South Africa continues its literary effervescence. In this class we'll sample some recent novels and related writings to tease out the issues shaping the country (and to some degree the continent) at present. Is `South African literature... |
| AFRICAAM121B | "The Will to Adorn": An Anthropology of Dress | This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this cours... |
| AFRICAAM121N | How to Make a Racist | How does a child, born without beliefs or expectations about race, grow up to be racist? To address this complicated question, this seminar will introduce you to some of the psychological theories on the development of racial stereotyping, prejudice,... |
| AFRICAAM122F | Histories of Race in Science and Medicine at Home and Abroad | This course has as its primary objective, the historical study of the intersection of race, science and medicine in the US and abroad with an emphasis on Africa and its Diasporas in the US. By drawing on literature from history, science and technolog... |
| AFRICAAM124 | Caribbean Questions: Exploring the Caribbean | When asked to conjure up an image of the Caribbean, what comes to mind? The geographies? The political climate? Its people? Its histories? In this course we will complicate and investigate the notion of 'the Caribbean' by addressing various question... |
| AFRICAAM124F | The Mothership Connection: Black Science Fiction Across Media | As science fiction becomes the lingua franca of American popular culture and race takes center stage in our contemporary social and political discourses, the works of black SF creators offer a number of powerful conceptual tools for thinking about ra... |
| AFRICAAM127 | Health Impact of Sexual Assault and Relationship Abuse across the Lifecourse | (Human Biology students must enroll in HUMBIO 124 or AFRICAAM 127. Med/Grad students should enroll in SOMGEN 237 for 1-3 units.) An overview of the acute and chronic physical and psychological health impact of sexual abuse through the perspective of... |
| AFRICAAM128 | Roots Modern Experience - Mixed Level | In this course students will be introduced to a series of Afro-contemporary dance warm ups and dance combinations that are drawn from a broad range of dance traditions of the African diaspora with a particular focus on Afro Brazilian, Afro Cuban and... |
| AFRICAAM130 | Community-based Research As Tool for Social Change:Discourses of Equity in Communities & Classrooms | Issues and strategies for studying oral and written discourse as a means for understanding classrooms, students, and teachers, and teaching and learning in educational contexts. The forms and functions of oral and written language in the classroom, e... |
| AFRICAAM131 | Racial Equity in Energy | The built environment and the energy systems that meet its requirements is a product of decisions forged in a context of historical inequity produced by cultural, political, and economic forces expressed through decisions at individual and institutio... |
| AFRICAAM133 | Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean | This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connectio... |
| AFRICAAM134 | Black Music Revealed: Black composers, performers, and themes from the 18th century to the present | Online seminar on the achievements of Black composers and performers in ragtime, jazz, and classical music, from Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose music influenced Mozart, and George Bridgetower, for whom Beethoven composed his "Kreutzer" Sonata, to... |
| AFRICAAM135A | Contemporary Islam & Muslims in the United States | In this course, we will explore contemporary Islam and Muslims in a post-9/11, post-Trump United States. Following some brief grounding history in Week 1, we will use ethnographic studies and digital media content to understand the American Muslim ex... |
| AFRICAAM136B | White Identity Politics | Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-... |
| AFRICAAM138 | Intersectional Feminisms | This course is focused on the feminist concept of intersectionality. As a mode of Black feminist thought, lived activist practice, and interdisciplinary research methodology, intersectionality allows us to think about overlapping forms of identity an... |
| AFRICAAM139 | Black Geographies: An Orientation | This introductory course examines racialization and antiblackness as spatial practices as well as the placemaking practices and sensibilities across and within Black communities throughout the Americas. Rather than focusing merely on where Black peop... |
| AFRICAAM141X | Activism and Intersectionality | How are contemporary U.S. social movements shaped by the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality? This course explores the emergence, dynamics, tactics, and targets of social movements. Readings include empirical and theoretical social mo... |
| AFRICAAM143 | Black Divinities: Race, God, and Nation in the Photography of Deana Lawson | In recent years the Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson (born 1979) has become rightly famous for her rapturous yet grounded large-sized photographs of everyday black people--those she meets in her neighborhood, as well as on her travels to Braz... |
| AFRICAAM145B | Africa in the 20th Century | (Same as HISTORY 45B. Students taking 5 units, register for 145B.) CREATIVITY. AGENCY. RESILIENCE. This is the African history with which this course will engage. African scholars and knowledge production of Africa that explicitly engages with theor... |
| AFRICAAM146A | African Politics | Africa has lagged the rest of the developing world in terms of economic development, the establishment of social order, and the consolidation of democracy. This course seeks to identify the historical and political sources accounting for this lag, an... |
| AFRICAAM147 | History of South Africa | (Same as HISTORY 47. HISTORY 147 is for 5 units; HISTORY 47 is for 3 units) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evol... |
| AFRICAAM149 | African Voices: Literature and Arts in 20th Century South Africa | How did South African Black intellectuals and artists utilize literature and other artistic forms to articulate their increasingly precarious position in the country's political landscape in the 20th century? What hopes and visions were capt... |
| AFRICAAM150B | Nineteenth Century America | (Same as HISTORY 50B. 150B is 5 units; 50B is 3 units.) This course is a survey of nineteenth-century American history. Topics include: the legacy of the American Revolution; the invention of political parties; capitalist transformation and urbanizat... |
| AFRICAAM150C | The United States in the Twentieth Century | (Same as HISTORY 50C. 50C is for 3 units; 150C is for 5 units.) 100 years ago, women and most African-Americans couldn't vote; automobiles were rare and computers didn't exist; and the U.S. was a minor power in a world dominated by European empires.... |
| AFRICAAM151 | Ethical STEM: Race, Justice, and Embodied Practice | What role do science and technology play in the creation of a just society? How do we confront and redress the impact of racism and bias within the history, theory, and practice of these disciplines? This course invites students to grapple with the c... |
| AFRICAAM153P | Black Artistry: Strategies of Performance in the Black Diaspora | Charting a course from colonial America to contemporary London, this course explores the long history of Black performance throughout an Atlantic diaspora. Defining performance as "forms of cultural staging," from Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez'... |
| AFRICAAM154G | Black Magic: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Performance Cultures | In 2013, CaShawn Thompson devised a Twitter hashtag, #blackgirlmagic, to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of black women. Twitter users quickly adopted the slogan, using the hashtag to celebrate everyday moments of beauty, accomplishment, and ma... |
| AFRICAAM156 | Performing History: Race, Politics, and Staging the Plays of August Wilson | This course purposefully and explicitly mixes theory and practice. Students will read and discuss the plays of August Wilson, the most celebrated and most produced contemporary American playwright, that comprise his 20th Century History Cycle. Class... |
| AFRICAAM157P | Solidarity and Racial Justice | Is multiracial solidarity necessary to overcome oppression that disproportionately affects certain communities of color? What is frontline leadership and what role should people play if they are not part of frontline communities? In this course we wi... |
| AFRICAAM158 | Rebelión: Black Resistance in the Caribbean | In 1978, Afro-Columbian artist Joe Arroyo recorded his hit song `Rebelión,' including lines such as "esclavitud perpetua," a reference to the 1452 Dum Diversas Papal Bull, and lines like "No le pegue a la negra," which evince a slave resistance based... |
| AFRICAAM159 | James Baldwin & Twentieth Century Literature | Black, gay and gifted, Baldwin was hailed as a "spokesman for the race", although he personally, and controversially, eschewed titles and classifications of all kinds. This course examines his classic novels and essays as well his exciting work acros... |
| AFRICAAM164A | Race and Performance | How does race function in performance and dare we say live and in living color? How does one deconstruct discrimination at its roots? From a perspective of global solidarity and recognition of shared plight among BIPOC communities, we will read and p... |
| AFRICAAM165 | Identity and Academic Achievement | How do social identities affect how people experience academic interactions? How can learning environments be better structured to support the success of all students? In this class, we will explore how a variety of identities such as race, gender, s... |
| AFRICAAM167 | Animated By Origins: Africa and The Americas | When working with experimental animation, what can we learn from the Shangaan about compositing, layering and collaging, from the Dogon about counter-rhythms and remixing, or from the Lakota about observation and improvisation? In this class, we will... |
| AFRICAAM169A | Race and Ethnicity in Urban California | The course is part of an ongoing research project that examines the consequences of longterm social, economic, and political changes in ethnic and race relations in in urban California. The required readings, discussions, and service learning compone... |
| AFRICAAM169B | Introduction to Intersectionality | "Intersectionality" is so popular, it's almost impossible to avoid: it was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2017, it was painted on signs at the Women's Marches, and it guides modern day social movement organizers. But what does intersectio... |
| AFRICAAM170A | Unlearning Racism, Redefining Identity: Culture workers and the frontlines of Change | The fabric of racism is inextricably woven and constructed into the founding principles of the United States. Racism was done and it can be undone through effective anti-racist organizing with, and in accountability to the communities most impacted b... |
| AFRICAAM171 | Peering into darkness: critical research practices in contemporary art & astrophysics | We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing --Italo Calvino `Peering into darkness is an interdisciplinary... |
| AFRICAAM172 | Transformative Art-Practices for Engaging Community | This course is presented by IDA, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. In this course, we will explore how artists are addressing and transforming issues central to communities of color such as housing, healthy food access, abolition, human traffi... |
| AFRICAAM173 | Still Waters Run Deep, Troubling The Archive with filmmaking and photography | Using lens-based filmmaking and photography as a form of storytelling, students will create individual projects that explore their own family, community, environmental histories, and narratives. How has your identities or historical context been flat... |
| AFRICAAM175 | Philosophy of Law: Protest, Punishment, and Racial Justice | In this course, we will examine some of the central questions in philosophy of law, including: What is law? How do we determine the content of laws? Do laws have moral content? What is authority? What gives law its authority? Must we obey the law? If... |
| AFRICAAM178S | The Haitian Revolution: Slavery, Freedom, and the Atlantic World | How did the French colony of Saint-Domingue become Haiti, the world's first Black-led republic? What did Haiti symbolize for the African diaspora and the Americas at large? What sources and methods do scholars use to understand this history? To answe... |
| AFRICAAM179A | Crime and Punishment in America | This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the way crime has been defined and punished in the United States. Recent social movements such as the Movement for Black Lives have drawn attention to the problem of mass incarceration and officer-... |
| AFRICAAM180D | Designing Black Experiences | This discussion-rich course is for students to learn design thinking to more confidently navigate life and careers as members and allies of the Black community. This course will allow students to navigate identity while building community to uplift B... |
| AFRICAAM183 | Black Feminism and the SciFi of Octavia Butler | Octavia Butler's novels often begin with the question, 'how am I going to survive?' In short order, they usually ask next: what is trying to kill me?' In Butler's hands, these two questions produce theories of power and resistance, anarchy and tyrann... |
| AFRICAAM185 | Racial Inequality across the Lifespan | Imagine two children, one Black and one White, born on the same day and in the same country. By adulthood, these two will likely have had two remarkably different social experiences (e.g., the Black child will have received less education, income, he... |
| AFRICAAM186 | Black Experimental Narrative | How do Black video artists and filmmakers use materials, space, and language to construct the subjective space of storytelling? Black Experimental Narrative surveys the aesthetics, history, and theories that characterize experimental Black cinema and... |
| AFRICAAM187 | African Archive Beyond Colonization | From street names to monuments, the material sediments of colonial time can be seen, heard, and felt in the diverse cultural archives of ancient and contemporary Africa. This seminar aims to examine the role of ethnographic practice in the political... |
| AFRICAAM189 | Zora Neale Hurston | An exploration of the life, times, and works of Zora Neale Hurston, who died in obscurity in 1960 despite having published more books than any other African American woman. We will encounter the diversity of Hurston's interests across a range of medi... |
| AFRICAAM18A | Jazz History: Ragtime to Bebop, 1900-1940 | From the beginning of jazz to the war years. |
| AFRICAAM18B | Jazz History: Bebop to Present, 1940-Present | Modern jazz styles from Bebop to the current scene. Emphasis is on the significant artists of each style. |
| AFRICAAM191B | African American Art | This course explores major art and political movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and #BlackLivesMatter, that have informed and were inspired by African American artists. Students will read pivotal texts written by Blac... |
| AFRICAAM193 | Black and Brown: American Artists of Color | This course explores the art history of African American and Latina/o/x artists in the United States, Latin America & the Caribbean. Focused on particular exhibition and collection histories, students will consider the artistic, social and political... |
| AFRICAAM194 | Topics in Writing & Rhetoric: Contemporary Black Rhetorics: Black Twitter and Black Digital Cultures | Does not fulfill NSC requirement. This course will examine Black engagements with digital culture as sites for community building, social action and individual and collective identity formation. By studying phenomena like #BlackTwitter, memes, Vine,... |
| AFRICAAM194A | Topics in Writing & Rhetoric: Freedom's Mixtape: DJing Contemporary African American Rhetorics | Black music in all its genres, styles and eras has always been about freedom and transformation. About both Black people and the whole society. About the US Black experience, the African continent and the diaspora. These musical forms and the socia... |
| AFRICAAM195 | Independent Study | No Description Set |
| AFRICAAM198B | Digital Traces | What stories do data tell? In this course, we will follow digital traces by excavating, interrogating, and pursuing the digital evidence in data. What is the relationship between narratives and digital evidence? How do we address the tension between... |
| AFRICAAM199 | Honors Project | May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. |
| AFRICAAM200N | Funkentelechy: Technologies, Social Justice and Black Vernacular Cultures | From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We w... |
| AFRICAAM200P | Doing Religious History | What is religion, and how do we write its history? This undergraduate colloquium uses case studies from a variety of regions and periods - but with a specific focus on the African continent - to consider how historians have dealt with the challenge o... |
| AFRICAAM200X | Honors Thesis and Senior Thesis Seminar | Required for seniors. Weekly colloquia with AAAS Director and Associate Director to assist with refinement of research topic, advisor support, literature review, research, and thesis writing. Readings include foundational and cutting-edge scholarship... |
| AFRICAAM200Y | Honors Thesis and Senior Thesis Research | Winter. Required for students writing an Honors Thesis. Optional for Students writing a Senior Thesis. |
| AFRICAAM200Z | Honors Thesis and Senior Thesis Research | Spring. Required for students writing an Honors Thesis. Optional for Students writing a Senior Thesis. |
| AFRICAAM201 | Moving the Message: Reading and embodying the works of bell hooks | In this course, we will spend time reading, discussing and embodying the work of Black feminist theorist and teacher bell hooks. hook's work focuses on practices rooted in Black feminism, the role of love in revolutionary politics, rescuing ourselves... |
| AFRICAAM204 | Race, Colonialism, and Climate Justice in the Caribbean | Caribbean nations and territories remain on the frontlines of climate change despite being minor contributors to global warming. How has the history of environmental racism, colonialism, and environmental justice movements shaped our understanding of... |
| AFRICAAM205 | Art as Activism | Art is a form of revolution and reflection. From literary and performing arts to murals and large scale conceptual sculptures- artists have often created a pathway for society to engage in a dialogue on the complicated nuances of social justice issue... |
| AFRICAAM205K | The Age of Revolution: America, France, and Haiti | (History 205K is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 305K is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course examines the "Age of Revolution," spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. Primarily, this course will focus on the Ameri... |
| AFRICAAM207 | Emergent Thinking: Abolition and Climate Change | Gesturing toward adrienne marie brown's notion of 'emergent strategy,' this course asks us to think in the most radical and imaginative ways possible about two systemic failures that animate what Achille Mbembe has called 'necropolitics' decisions on... |
| AFRICAAM20A | Jazz Theory | Introduces the language and sounds of jazz through listening, analysis, and compositional exercises. Students apply the fundamentals of music theory to the study of jazz. Prerequisite: Music 19, consent of instructor, or satisfactory demonstration of... |
| AFRICAAM21 | African American Vernacular English | Vocabulary, pronunciation and grammatical features of the systematic and vibrant vernacular English [AAVE] spoken by African Americans in the US, its historical relation to British dialects, and to English creoles spoken on the S. Carolina Sea Island... |
| AFRICAAM211 | Education for All? The Global and Local in Public Policy Making in Africa | Policy making in Africa and the intersection of policy processes and their political and economic dimensions. The failure to implement agreements by international institutions, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations to promote educat... |
| AFRICAAM218 | Musics and Appropriation Throughout the World | This course critically examines musical practices and appropriation through the amplification of intersectionality. We consider musics globally through recourse to ethnomusicological literature and critical race theories. Our approach begins from an... |
| AFRICAAM219 | Novel Perspectives on South Africa | 21st-century South Africa continues its literary effervescence. In this class we'll sample some recent novels and related writings to tease out the issues shaping the country (and to some degree the continent) at present. Is `South African literature... |
| AFRICAAM221 | Between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, JR.: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Freedom | Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz) and Martin Luther King, Jr. are both icons of the twentieth-century civil rights and black freedom movements. Often characterized as polar opposites - one advocating armed self-defense and the other non-violence a... |
| AFRICAAM222 | DESIGNING FOR COMMUNAL SAFETY | How might we design for communal safety beyond the prison industrial complex? Through recognizing the prison industrial complex as a design problem, we will explore both how established institutions (like prisons and policing) are impermanent and the... |
| AFRICAAM224 | Caribbean Questions: Exploring the Caribbean | When asked to conjure up an image of the Caribbean, what comes to mind? The geographies? The political climate? Its people? Its histories? In this course we will complicate and investigate the notion of 'the Caribbean' by addressing various question... |
| AFRICAAM225 | Designing Towards an Antiracist Stanford | In this class, we will explore complex concepts of systemic and interpersonal oppression and racism, understand how these concepts manifest on our campus and in our communities, then design and prototype meaningful interventions for impact. We will s... |
| AFRICAAM226 | Mixed-Race Politics and Culture | Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches i... |
| AFRICAAM230 | Community College: Designing for Policy, Ethics, AI/ML tech, Culture, the Environment | Let's design the world we want for ourselves and the next generation. Let's make space for a variety of Black & Brown voices with diverse expertise to imagine this future. Let's design, build, and test solutions to our world's most pressing problems... |
| AFRICAAM235 | Print on Purpose | Operating at an intersection of visual expression and freedom of speech, Print on Purpose investigates how social justice is imprinted in our local, national, and global consciousness. From lawn signs to newspapers to zines to posters to pamphlets to... |
| AFRICAAM238J | The European Scramble for Africa: Origins and Debates | Why and how did Europeans claim control of 70% of African in the late nineteenth century? Students will engage with historiographical debates ranging from the national (e.g. British) to the topical (e.g. international law). Students will interrogate... |
| AFRICAAM242 | Black Religion in America | Since Africans arrived on North American shores, their religious cultures have anchored them to the traditions of their originating homelands; offered outlets for communal innovation; and structured their responses to the everyday realities of life i... |
| AFRICAAM244 | Re(positioning) Disability: Historical, Cultural, and Social Lenses | This course is designed to introduce undergraduate students of any major to important theoretical and practical concepts regarding special education, disability, and diversity. This course primarily addresses the social construction of disability and... |
| AFRICAAM250J | Baldwin and Hansberry: The Myriad Meanings of Love | This course looks at major dramatic works by James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Both of these queer black writers had prophetic things to say about the world-historical significance of major dramas on the 20th Century including civil rights, revol... |
| AFRICAAM251J | American Slavery and Its Afterlives | How did the institution of American slavery come to an end? The story is more complex than most people know. This course examines the rival forces that fostered slavery's simultaneous contraction in the North and expansion in the South between 1776 a... |
| AFRICAAM252C | The Old South: Culture, Society, and Slavery | This course explores the political, social, and cultural history of the antebellum American South, with an emphasis on the history of African-American slavery. Topics include race and race making, slave community and resistance, gender and reproducti... |
| AFRICAAM254G | Black Magic: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Performance Cultures | In 2013, CaShawn Thompson devised a Twitter hashtag, #blackgirlmagic, to celebrate the beauty and intelligence of black women. Twitter users quickly adopted the slogan, using the hashtag to celebrate everyday moments of beauty, accomplishment, and ma... |
| AFRICAAM255D | Racial Identity in the American Imagination | From Sally Hemings to Barack Obama, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major... |
| AFRICAAM256 | Black Contemporary Filmmakers | Despite the systemic inequalities of the Hollywood system, there is a robust, stylistically diverse cohort of African-American writer/directors at work, including Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Ryan Coogler. Jenkins' films (Moonlight, If Beale Stre... |
| AFRICAAM256E | The American Civil War: The Lived Experience | What was it like to live in the United States during the Civil War? This course uses the lenses of racial/ethnic identity, gender, class, and geography (among others) to explore the breadth of human experience during this singular moment in American... |
| AFRICAAM257 | Histories of Racial Capitalism | This colloquium takes as its starting point the insistence that the movement, settlement, and hierarchical arrangements of indigenous communities and people of African descent is inseparable from regimes of capital accumulation. It builds on the conc... |
| AFRICAAM258 | Black Feminist Theater and Theory | From the rave reviews garnered by Angelina Weld Grimke's lynching play, Rachel to recent work by Lynn Nottage on Rwanda, black women playwrights have addressed key issues in modern culture and politics. We will analyze and perform work written by bl... |
| AFRICAAM261 | Black Aliveness | Based on Kevin Quashie's 2021 book "Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being," this seminar will explore moments of possibility, love, and being in works of literature and art. With Quashie as our guide, we will look closely at poems, stories, photogra... |
| AFRICAAM261E | Black Mirror: Representations of Race & Gender in AI | TBA |
| AFRICAAM262 | Toni Morrison: Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature | This course will take a close look at Toni Morrison's oeuvre to explore question of Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature. Texts to be looked at will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, Beloved, Love, and Playing i... |
| AFRICAAM264 | Crossing the Atlantic: Race and Identity in the "Old" and "New" African Diasporas | In this course, we will think critically about what we have come to call the African diaspora. We will travel the world virtually while exploring a selection of classic and understudied texts, in order to interrogate the relationship between culture,... |
| AFRICAAM266 | Classical Reception in the Black Diaspora | From the ancient oral epics to contemporary literature from Africa, the Caribbean, and the USA, this seminar will examine the significance of Classics in the literatures and arts of Africa and the Black Diaspora. This course will also investigate the... |
| AFRICAAM268 | Black Temporality | Futurity, progress, futurism, and history have become contested ideas within the valence of Black life. This course examines both the speculative imagination and the aspirational and pessimistic stakes of temporality within the Black diaspora. While... |
| AFRICAAM272 | African American Child and Adolescent Mental Health: An Ecological Approach | African American children and adolescents face a number of challenges (e.g., racism, discrimination, lack of access to resources, community violence) that can impact their mental health. Yet, they possess and utilize many strengths in the face of cha... |
| AFRICAAM278 | Carceral Logics & Abolition in Education | Abolition is a complex concept, often moving against the grain in a society fixated on punishment. What happens when we begin with the concept that life is valuable and that concept should be the center of society when building institutions and respo... |
| AFRICAAM279 | Introduction to Black Popular Culture | This course will examine how Black Americans helped shape and have been shaped by American Popular Culture. To do this, we will draw from a broad range of scholarship, theory, and concepts in media studies, cultural studies, performance theory, visua... |
| AFRICAAM286 | The Psychology of Racial Inequality | Our topic is the psychology of racial inequality - thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that contribute to racial stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and how these processes in turn maintain and perpetuate inequality between racial groups... |
| AFRICAAM291 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| AFRICAAM294 | Black Brazil: Afro-Brazilian Music, Literature, and Art | More enslaved people from Africa were forced to Brazil than any other country and Brazil was the last country to abolish the practice of slavery in the Americas. How do these two facts impact the cultural history of Brazil? How and why was the countr... |
| AFRICAAM30 | The Egyptians | This course traces the emergence and development of the distinctive cultural world of the ancient Egyptians over nearly 4,000 years. Through archaeological and textual evidence, we will investigate the social structures, religious beliefs, and expre... |
| AFRICAAM31 | RealTalk: Intimate Discussions about the African Diaspora | Students to engage in an intellectual discussion about the African Diaspora with leading faculty at Stanford across departments including Education, Linguistics, Sociology, History, Political Science, English, and Theater & Performance Studies. Sever... |
| AFRICAAM355 | Black Feminism and Anti-Carceral Resistance | Black feminists throughout the Western Hemisphere have long resisted carcerality, a system that emerged as a response to antebellum Black fugitivity. In this course, we will review Black feminist theory and abolitionist activism, focusing on how the... |
| AFRICAAM361 | Comparative Methodologies in Black Gender Studies | This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will rea... |
| AFRICAAM362E | Toni Morrison: Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature | This course will take a close look at Toni Morrison's oeuvre to explore question of Modernism, Postmodernism, and World Literature. Texts to be looked at will include The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, Beloved, Love, and Playing i... |
| AFRICAAM37 | Contemporary Choreography: Chocolate Heads 'Weather Simulator' Performance Project | An interdisciplinary project-based class to develop dance technique, collaborative choreography, and associated visual and musical arts. We invite dancers, movers, and emerging creators of all styles and backgrounds. The Autumn 22-23 project will foc... |
| AFRICAAM389C | Race, Ethnicity, and Language: Pedagogical Possibilities | This seminar explores the intersections of language and race/racism/racialization in the public schooling experiences of students of color. We will briefly trace the historical emergence of the related fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthro... |
| AFRICAAM39 | Long Live Our 4Bil. Year Old Mother: Black Feminist Praxis, Indigenous Resistance, Queer Possibility | How can art facilitate a culture that values women, mothers, transfolks, caregivers, girls? How can black, indigenous, and people of color frameworks help us reckon with oppressive systems that threaten safety and survival for marginalized people and... |
| AFRICAAM41 | Genes and Identity | In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intr... |
| AFRICAAM428 | Intersectional Justice in Education Policy and Practice | This 3-5-unit, graduate course is designed to explore intersectionality as a "method and a disposition, a heuristic and an analytic tool" (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013, p. 11). To do this we explore the intellectual lineage of intersect... |
| AFRICAAM43 | Introduction to English III: Introduction to African American Literature | In his bold study, What Was African American Literature?, Kenneth Warren defines African American literature as a late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century response to the nation's Jim Crow segregated order. But in the aftermath of the Jim Crow era a... |
| AFRICAAM442 | (Re)Framing Difference: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Disability, Race and Culture | This course uses social theories of difference to examine the intersections of disability, race and culture. The course will examine these concepts drawing from scholarship published in history, sociology of education, urban sociology, cultural studi... |
| AFRICAAM45 | Dance Improvisation from Freestyle to Hip Hop | In this dance improvisation class, we will develop techniques and practices to cultivate an improvisational practice in dance and domains beyond. This class is an arena for physical and artistic exploration to fire the imagination of dance improviser... |
| AFRICAAM46 | Cape to Cairo: Decolonization and African Urban Life 1940s-1960s | Decolonization across Africa was complicated, messy and sometimes violent. It was also an important moment for (re) imagining and (re)structuring society resulting in fascinating historical encounters among different groups. This course explores deco... |
| AFRICAAM46N | Show and Tell: Creating Provenance Histories of African Art | Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, d... |
| AFRICAAM47 | History of South Africa | (Same as HISTORY 147. HISTORY 47 is for 3 units; HISTORY 147 is for 5 units.) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evol... |
| AFRICAAM47S | Black Earth Rising: Law and Society in Postcolonial Africa | Is the International Criminal Court a neocolonial institution? Should African art in Western museums be returned? Why have anti-homosexuality laws emerged in many African countries? This course engages these questions, and more, to explore how Africa... |
| AFRICAAM488 | Stanford Black Academic Lab: Community-Based Participatory Methods | This lab-based course is an overview of research methods that are used in the development of Black educators, including survey research, individual and focus group interviews, ethnographic methods, and documentary activism. Lab participants will be g... |
| AFRICAAM48Q | South Africa: Contested Transitions | Preference to sophomores. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994 marked the end of an era and a way of life for South Africa. The changes have been dramatic, yet the legacies of racism and inequality persist. Focus: overlapping a... |
| AFRICAAM491 | Riot: Visualizing Civil Unrest in the 20th and 21st Centuries | This seminar explores the visual legacy of civil unrest in the United States. Focusing on the 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 2014 Ferguson Uprising, and 2020 George Floyd Uprisings students will closely examine photographs, television... |
| AFRICAAM49S | African Futures: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Beyond | This course examines decolonization and its aftermath in sub-Saharan Africa. With a "wind of change" sweeping the continent, how did Africans imagine their futures together? From W.E.B. Du Bois to Black Panther, this course will engage in historical... |
| AFRICAAM50B | Nineteenth Century America | (Same as HISTORY 150B. HISTORY 50B is 3 units; HISTORY 150B is 5 units.) Territorial expansion, social change, and economic transformation. The causes and consequences of the Civil War. Topics include: urbanization and the market revolution; slavery... |
| AFRICAAM50C | The United States in the Twentieth Century | (Same as HISTORY 150C. 50C is for 3 units; 150C is for 5 units.) 100 years ago, women and most African-Americans couldn't vote; automobiles were rare and computers didn't exist; and the U.S. was a minor power in a world dominated by European empires.... |
| AFRICAAM53S | Black San Francisco | For over a century African-Americans have shaped the contours of San Francisco, a globally recognized metropolis, but their histories remain hidden. While endangered, Black San Francisco is still very much alive, and its history is an inextricable pi... |
| AFRICAAM54S | From Stanford to Stone Mountain: U.S. History, Memory, and Monuments | The future of America's memorial landscape is a subject of intense debate. How do societies remember? Who built the nation's monuments and memorials, and to what ends? Can the meaning of a memorial change over time? In this course, we will survey the... |
| AFRICAAM55F | The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877 | (History 55F is 3 units; History 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically ch... |
| AFRICAAM58A | Egypt in the Age of Heresy | Perhaps the most controversial era in ancient Egyptian history, the Amarna period (c.1350-1334 BCE) was marked by great sociocultural transformation, notably the introduction of a new 'religion' (often considered the world's first form of monotheism)... |
| AFRICAAM60 | Spoken Word Poetry and Resistance: 1990's-Present | In the 1990's the Spoken Word movement exploded onto the public scene in multiple forms. The decade marked the birth of the Poetry Slam movement, the 'Golden Age' of rap, and the re-emergence of Poetry as Performance. In the contemporary moment Kendr... |
| AFRICAAM61 | Theater and Social Justice: Skills for Rethinking Everything | In this course we will employ theater foundations (writing, acting, staging and direction) to interrogate individual and collective belief systems prescribed through our lineage, geography, genetics, culture and class. We will ask big questions like:... |
| AFRICAAM62Q | A Comparative Exploration of Higher Education in Jamaica (Anglo-Caribbean) and South Africa | How do developing (former colonized) nations feature in global conversations on the purpose of higher education in the Twenty-first Century and beyond? In this project-based seminar students will examine higher education systems in South Africa, and... |
| AFRICAAM68D | American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. | Martin Luther King, Jr., was the 20th-century's best-known African-American leader, but the religious roots of his charismatic leadership are far less widely known. The documents assembled and published by Stanford's King Research and Education Inst... |
| AFRICAAM71 | Introduction to Capoeira: An African Brazilian Art Form | Capoeira is an African Brazilian art form that incorporates, dance, music, self-defense and acrobatics. Created by enslaved Africans in Brazil who used this form as a tool for liberation and survival, it has since become a popular art form practiced... |
| AFRICAAM76B | The Social Life of Neighborhoods | How do neighborhoods come to be? How and why do they change? What is the role of power, money, race, immigration, segregation, culture, government, and other forces? In this course, students will interrogate these questions using literatures from soc... |
| AFRICAAM78 | Art + Community: Division, Resilience & Reconciliation | Violence and trauma isolates and segregates us. Part of the healing process must be about coming back into community. Freedom is meaningful only insofar as it lifts all, especially those who have been done the most harm. In times of violence and pola... |
| AFRICAAM80Q | Race and Gender in Silicon Valley | Join us as we go behind the scenes of some of the big headlines about trouble in Silicon Valley. We'll start with the basic questions like who decides who gets to see themselves as "a computer person," and how do early childhood and educational exper... |
| AFRICAAM92BP | Contemporary Black Poetry and Poetics | In this poetry workshop, students will write and read closely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor and simile, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course reading will focus on the rich diversity of c... |
| AFRICAAM94 | Public Space in Iran: Murals, Graffiti, Performance | This course examines the history and traditions of artistic engagement in public space in Iran. It offers a unique glimpse into Iran's contemporary art and visual culture through the investigation of public art practices and cultural expression, as w... |
| AFRICAAM95 | Liberation Through Land: Organic Gardening and Racial Justice | Through field trips, practical work and readings, this course provides students with the tools to begin cultivating a relationship to land that focuses on direct engagement with sustainable gardening, from seed to harvest. The course will take place... |