AFRAMER 11 Introduction to African Studies
Agbiboa, Daniel - This course introduces students to the rich diversity and complexity of Africa, including its historical dynamics, economic developments, social and political practices, and popular cultures. Throughout, we assume that Africa is not a unique isolate but a continent bubbling with internal diversity, historical change, entrepreneurial spirit, and cultural links beyond its shores. Our goal is to train students to think rigorously about Africa from interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives. We also aim to equip students with the analytical tools necessary for recognizing and deconstructing reductionist and stereotyped narratives of Africa. The course is open to all students who are interested in exploring various dimensions of African life, politics, peoples and cultures from the past to the postcolony.
AFRAMER 20 Introduction to African Languages and Cultures
Mugane, John - This course is an introduction to Africans through African languages and cultures. The course explores how sub-Saharan Africans use language and cultural production to understand, organize, and transmit indigenous knowledge about the world to each other and to successive generations. Language serves as a road map to comprehending how social, political, and economic processes like kinship structures, the evolution of political offices, trade relations, and environmental knowledge develop. Oral histories and cultural and intellectual products like novels, music, poems, essays, films, and photographs offer opportunities to open eyes to, interact with, listen and speak to, and think alongside Africans they entrepreneurs, artists, authors, teachers, thinkers as they uncover, communicate, and debate the major topics and issues facing African societies and people today. As a Social Engagement course, AAAS 20 will wed scholarly inquiry and academic study to practical experience and personal involvement in the community. Students will be given the opportunity to study Africans, their languages, and their cultures from the ground up, not only through textbooks and data sets but through personal relationships, cultural participation, and inquisitive explorations of local African heritage communities with Harvard's African Language Program instructors as guides. Throughout the semester you will be asked to employ video production, ethnographic research, creative writing, “social-portraiture,” GIS mapping, and linguistic study as you engage with Africans, their languages, and their cultures. By examining individual lives of select Africans, linguistic debates, cultural traditions and interrogating their import in the daily lives of Boston-area Africans, we hope to bridge the divide between grand theories and everyday practices, between intellectual debates and the lived experiences of individuals, between the American academy and the African world. Ultimately, this course aims to see and present Africans themselves as visible, audible and coherent articulators at the center of professional work and disciplinary study of Africa.
AFRAMER 98 Junior Tutorial – African American Studies
McCarthy, Jesse - Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.
AFRAMER 98A Junior Tutorial - African Studies
McCarthy, Jesse - Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.
AFRAMER 99A Senior Thesis Workshop
McCarthy, Jesse - Thesis supervision under the direction of a member of the Department. Part one of a two part series.
AAAS 108 Black Religion and Sexuality
Greene-Hayes, Ahmad - his course examines the co-constructed histories of religion, sexuality, and race in the Americas from the vantage of the African diaspora. Drawing upon foundational and newer works in the field, we will explore how the construction of these categories, largely rooted in biological essentialism, has had immense consequences for the enslaved and their descendants, indigenous peoples, other people of color, and women, queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individuals. This course also homes in on how those marginalized by these categories have challenged and subverted them using a hermeneutics of suspicion, political organizing, and other methods of resistance and feminist and queer theologizing.
AAAS 109 Religion, Theory, and the Archive
Greene-Hayes, Ahmad - Black and indigenous scholars have long argued that archives are often violent and dismembering, especially as the universities which house them preserve the physical and immaterial remnants of slavery and colonialism. Religious studies scholars, especially historians of religion, have attended to this quandary while sifting through archives of slavery, colonialism, conquest, and sexual violence. At Harvard, this conversation has re-emerged in unique ways through Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery: Reckoning with the Past to Understand the Present, and the question of what lies in university archives has taken center stage. This course examines these archival dilemmas and the violent hauntings of the past with an eye towards the historical study of religion in the Americas. We will read work by such scholars as Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Robert Orsi, Solimar Otero, Toni Morrison, and more.
AFRAMER 111X Africa in the Twentieth Century: Culture, Representation, and New Diasporas
Ogene, Timothy - This course will explore how Africans on the continent and its new diasporas have represented their communities, cultures, and histories in the last century. Drawing on archival sources, works of literature, and documentaries, this course will trace and contextualize the network of individuals, communities, and organisations that have shaped and influenced the direction of African representation in the world. As a study of self-representation and response to colonialism and settler narratives, this course will also emphasize the importance of individual and collective agency in the fashioning of the continent's image at home and abroad. We will engage the archives of colonial and settler narratives and consider how these are re-thought in the present. The emergence and formation of new diasporic identities, in the contexts of global migration and colonial/postcolonial encounters, will be considered alongside the transnational circulation of African cultures and the enduring influence of global back identities in Europe and the Americas.
AAAS 112 Black Art and the Refounding of America: Art, Race, and U.S. Law
Lewis, Sarah - In 2023, it is hard to look anywhere and not see the force of black culture in media, entertainment, and the visual arts, now more heavily represented in the exhibitions and displays in museums around the country. It is hard to read the political landscape in American life and not engage with the work of black culture from film to sculptures, public installations to paintings. This course focuses on the visual work of racial politics as a critical technology for contestation, redress, and rights-based advocacy in the United States.
This course method represents a change in how we can study the arts and humanities today. It was once possible to produce scholarship on vision and visuality in the United States as if it was somehow sealed off from the discursive force of racial formation. It is not any longer. In the 1990s, a methodological shift occurred as scholars including but not limited to Martin Berger, Maurice Berger, Kirsten Pai Buick, Eddie Chambers, Hal Foster, Édouard Glissant, Kellie Jones, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W. J. T. Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Steven Nelson, Michele Wallace, and Deborah Willis began to focus on the polemics, process, and construction of vision, absence, and opacity in the history of racial formation and social power.
The dual aim of this course is to give students—undergraduate and graduate—of all backgrounds and concentrations an understanding of core topics in Black Art, and a critical understanding of the imbrication of visuality, race, and politics in the United States through a series of case studies.
The final project will be a presentation of an exhibition concept to the class that can be developed into larger research projects including theses and dissertations.
Enrollment is capped. This seminar will include trips to the King Embrace Memorial in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.
AFRAMER 115Y Introduction to African Popular Culture
Ogene, Timothy - This course will introduce students to defining trends, movements, and practices in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture in Africa. Focusing on the lives, interventions and innovative practices of key figures in music, television, fashion, dance, and publishing, we will examine the socio-political and the historical in relation to broader aesthetic and stylistic links to the rest of the world. This will be discussed in the larger context of colonial and postcolonial class formation, the afterlives of Cold War cultural diplomacy, access to education and accumulation of socio-political capital, the emergence of new conceptions of self and nationhood in relation to the global, new modes of cultural circulation, and the new lives of rediscovered archives. Figures such as Fela Kuti, Ousmane Sembene, Fela Sowande, J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, Miriam Makeba, Duro Olowu, Charley Boy, Dele Momodu, and William Onyeabor will be discussed alongside new figures, with a focus on lines of influence, self-fashioning, and the interface between the socio-political and the commercial. The ubiquitous power of diasporic/Afropolitan presence (and performance of access) will be considered alongside the local and vernacular/indigenous, and the cosmopolitan and secular will be discussed alongside the traditional and religious. The steady rise/use of social media platforms as generative, where new forms of culture-driven protests and negotiation of identities unfold, will be considered alongside the history of audio-visual communication and the emergence of modern African celebrity culture. This course is suitable for students with a general interest in the production, circulation, and consumption of culture in modern Africa.
AFRAMER 116 Autobiography and Memoir: Remembering the Self
Kincaid, Jamaica - Close readings of classic autobiographies: Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, Elizabeth Keckley; among contemporary works include 'Come Back in September' by Darryl Pinckney, 'Ordinary Light' by Tracy K. Smith, 'Negroland' by Margo Jefferson.
AFRAMER 120X African American Theatre and Performance
Bernstein, Robin & Carpio, Glenda - A study of African American practices of performance over 150 years. This seminar meets twice each week: first, in a classroom to discuss play scripts and secondary materials, and second, in a Harvard archive to work directly with primary materials. We will handle original manuscripts, photographs, playbills, and more. Topics include slavery and freedom, black Broadway, Josephine Baker, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Robert O'Hara.
AAAS 124 Tabaco y Azucar
Sommer, Doris - Cuban Counterpoint Between Tobacco and Sugar (Fernando Ortiz 1940) will guide explorations of aesthetic and historical tensions throughout the Spanish Caribbean. Particular crops cultivated divergent political - cultural responses. Along with musical forms, plastic arts, and politics, we concentrate on literary works including abolitionist Cecilia Valdes, El reino de este mundo, the Dominican Over, Puerto Rico's La charca, Jamaica's Wide Sargasso Sea, writings by Hostos, Bono, Mintz, Klein, among others.
AFRAMER 135Y Black Feminist Theory Seminar
Perry, Imani - This course traces the development of Black feminist theory and thought, from 19th century thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper, Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells through 20th century movements including identity politics, standpoint theory, matrices of domination, intersectionality, as well as Marxian and liberation feminism. Students will be expected to develop critical fluency with the movements and concepts covered and apply them to social, cultural, and political issues.
AFRAMER 146X A Black History of Electronic Dance Music
Aumoithe, George - Electronic dance music. Mentioning the genre elicits questions over origins and boundaries. While oft forgotten, Black queer, femme, and non-binary people invented the modern-day genre’s arrangement, composition, production, and distribution, undergirding distressed communities’ sonic landscapes, enlivening social movements, and seeding multibillion-dollar markets. From disco to house to techno, each seminar will crisscross wide-ranging geographies including Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Manchester, United Kingdom. We will pair essential LPs, EPs, singles, and bootleg recordings with thematically linked texts in history, musicology, and theory to ask how Black electronic musicians responded to history’s unfolding.
AFRAMER 184X Jim Crow: Histories and Revivals
Eatmon, Myisha - Some historians believe that people should understand the historical and political context of the world and communities in which they live and engage with facts and reality that makes them better-informed citizens. Being of that mindset, this course will be offered to students who want to engage critically with history and the present. The purpose of this course is three-fold. First, it is meant to allow students to begin to parse out the continuities and discontinuities between the Jim Crow era (broadly defined) and our current historical moment. Second, the course is meant to push students to engage with the historiographical debates surrounding the history of black lived experiences, race (not just black and white), and immigration (from South America, Central America, and Asia) as they relate to Jim Crow, structural racism, and white nationalism. Third, the course is meant to teach students how to write and support coherent historical arguments.
AAAS 186 Religion, Culture, and Society in Africa
Olupona, Jacob - Exploring the meaning of religion and its impact of on African culture and society broadly, this course will highlight both religious traditions and innovations. Instead of treating each of the religions of Africa, the triple heritage in the words of Ali Mazrui of indigenous African religions, Islam, and Christianity, as distinct and bounded entities, we will explore the hybridity, interaction, and integration between categories throughout Africa. Using case studies, a unique perspective on religious diversity on the African continent and diaspora will emerge.
AAAS 192 The History of African Art
Blier, Suzanne - This course explores key art historical and architectural traditions in Africa from earliest man to the eighteenth century.
AFRAMER 192Y The Paradox of the Garden: Good and Evil in Paradise
Kincaid, Jamaica - Selected readings from The Book of Genesis, Frederic Douglass, Thomas Jefferson, Jane Austen, William Bartram, Anne Spencer among others.
AFRAMER 197 Poverty, Race, and Health
Williams, David - This course critically examines the health status of the poor, and of African Americans and other socially disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups in the US. Attention will be focused on the patterned ways in which the health of these groups is embedded in the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, and arrangements of US society. Topics covered include the meaning and measurement of race, the ways in which racism affects health, the historic uses of minorities in medical research, how acculturation and migration affects health, and an examination of the specific health problems that disproportionately affect nondominant racial groups.
AFRAMER 201 Theory and Race in Africa
Agbiboa, Daniel - This course focuses on theoretical debates and frameworks in African studies from the past to the postcolony. The course strives to open up a critical, open-ended discussion that treats Africa as People, and reclaims the epistemic freedom and virtue of African people through a double-consciousness of deprovincializing Africa and provincializing Europe. The course will examine the lines of knowledge production in Africa, beyond hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge-production, with the aim of achieving what the writer Chinua Achebe calls a “balance of stories.” What, for instance, does a decolonized, African-centered approach to knowledge production look like? Ultimately, the course belies entrenched and racialized notions of Africa as a residual category, the study of which adds nothing (theoretically) meaningful to world knowledge or the human condition.
AAAS 205 Questions of Theory
Sommer, Doris - To explore key literary, cultural and critical theories, we pose questions through readings of classic and contemporary theorists, from Aristotle to Kant, Schiller, Arendt, Barthes, Foucault, Glissant, Ortiz, Kittler, and Butler, among others. Their approaches include aesthetics, (post)structuralism, (post)colonialism, media theory, gender theory, ecocriticism. Each seminar addresses a core reading and a cluster of variations. Weekly writing assignments will formulate a question that addresses the core texts to prepare for in-class discussions and interpretive activities. Crossed with ROM201
AAAS 212A New Directions in Black Power Studies
Terry, Brandon - The 2023-2024 Warren Center for American History workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of historians, social scientists, humanists, and scholars of black political thought to explore what might be at stake — philosophically, theoretically, culturally, and politically — in revisiting the Black Power Movement in the present. Building on the successes of Black Power Studies scholars, this seminar seeks to resist unduly defensive and siloed forms of scholarly engagement, to openly and critically interrogate Black Power’s political and cultural dynamics, social formations, and conceptual contributions to political and social thought across such key concerns as political violence, education, the philosophy of race, cultural politics, gender, political economy, and more. Engaging the work-in-progress of visiting scholars, faculty, and other guests, the seminar will provide an extended opportunity to reflect upon the political and intellectual legacy of Black Power, the place of black radical traditions in academic scholarship, and how historians, theorists, and social scientists might work more collaboratively to pursue the hard questions the movement continues to raise.
AAAS 222A Afrodescendant Mobilization in Latin America (Mellon Sawyer Seminar)
De la Fuente, Alejandro - This yearlong (two consecutive courses) seminar studies contemporary struggles over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. Afrodescendants have been at the forefront of struggles typically associated with liberal values—equality, democracy, voting rights—since the colonial period. But Afrodescendant activists, thinkers, and artists have also articulated alternative visions of freedom and belonging that are frequently sidelined in the dominant narratives about rights and citizenship in Latin America. The seminar is conducted in conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar “Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America” funded by the Mellon Foundation. This will allow us to bring scholars, activists, artists and other practitioners involved in struggles for racial justice in Latin America to our class and our campus. Undergraduate students who wish to take this class should get in touch with the instructors in advance. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year in order to receive credit. Students need to register under History or AAAS but not both for credit.
AFRAMER 232 The Ethnic Avant-Garde
McCarthy, Jesse - We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between minority writers and the Soviet Union. How can this model apply to other minority vanguardist literatures? What is or what was the avant-garde? How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the ones we inherit from Renato Poggioli (1968) and Peter Bürger (1984) in their accounts of the historical formation of European vanguards. By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This is a graduate seminar and will typically only admit graduate students; undergraduate students may apply for special permission in writing but admittance will be strictly limited.
AFRAMER 310 Individual Reading Tutorial
Allows students to work with an individual member of the faculty in a weekly tutorial.
AFRAMER 390 Individual Research
Requires students to identify and carry out a research project under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin work on the research paper required for admission to candidacy.
AFRAMER 391 Directed Writing
Requires students to identify a major essay and carry it out under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin to work on the research paper that is a requirement of admission to candidacy.
AFRAMER 392 Teaching, Writing, and Research
To be used to enroll in credits for teaching, writing, and research
AFRAMER 398 Reading and Research
Permission of the instructor and the Director of Graduate Studies is required for enrollment.
AFRAMER 399 Direction of Doctoral Dissertations