Courses

Further Information

Further information concerning planned graduate course offerings can be obtained by calling the Afro-American Studies Department office at (413) 545-2751, or by visiting the department's website at www.umass.edu/afroam/.

All courses carry 4 credits unless otherwise specified.

AFROAM 690B. The Civil War and Reconstruction
This course examines the revolutionary significance of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era in United States history. While not ignoring military history, it will focus on the demise of slavery during the war and contests over the meaning of freedom, citizenship, and the powers of the state. It will also look at African American political mobilization, constitutional issues, and vigilante violence during Reconstruction. Other topics include the role of Lincoln, the Confederate experiment, gender and Reconstruction, the transition from slavery to free labor, and the fall and aftermath of Reconstruction. Recent historical literature will constitute the bulk of the reading. Students will have the option of writing a historiographical paper on a topic of their choice or a more substantial research paper based on primary sources. 

AFROAM 690G/AFROAM 692T. Fugitive Science, Fugitive Literature
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century famously witnessed the rise of forms of scientific racism, linked to the rise of comparative anatomy, that were used to reinforce regimes of enslavement and perpetuate racist ideas about African Americans, both enslaved and free. But the popularization of natural science in the period simultaneously opened the door to the construction of a distinctively anti-racist science by an unlikely set of actors. This course examines the ways that African American writers, performers, and other cultural producers of the nineteenth century both crafted artful critiques of racist science and mobilized sciences with no particular connection to the science of race--from geology to astronomy--in the struggle for emancipation and in the development of more speculative imaginaries of freedom. Across the semester, students will track and chronicle the intimate and animating relationship between black scientific and literary production in the nineteenth century. Using this literary-historical context as a backdrop, the course will finally examine the reanimation of racial science in contemporary science, especially in genomics, and the ways in which "fugitive science" continues to provide a means of resistance and redress in the twenty-first century.

AFROAM 690J. Passing
This course will focus on different manifestations of passing from the 19^th to the 21^st centuries, examining motivations, methods, and outcomes in the context of race, class, gender, sexuality, and literary aesthetic.

AFROAM 691D.  Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement
Women initiated, organized, and sustained the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did women activists far outnumber men, but they also emerged as leaders in working-class and poor neighborhoods more often than men. This course will investigate women's diverse visions of and involvement in social justice using historical texts, film, television, and music. Taking the long civil rights movement approach, it will consider middle-class and working-class activism towards racial, gender, and economic justice in the early twentieth century, the labor-oriented civil rights movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and the modern Civil Rights and Women's Liberation Movements. Special attention will be paid to the relationships between black and white women and the impact of the movement on women¹s status and identity. Notable activists like Mary Church Terrell, Ella Baker, Florynce Kennedy, Lena Horne, and Nina Simone, as well as those who remain unnamed in the historical record, will be critical to this investigation.

AFROAM 691F.  Black Political Struggle and the American Political System
An historical examination of the black political struggle for equality and citizenship in America—the obstacles placed in the path of that struggle by the American political system in general and by the American state in particular—and the countless ways in which racial politics have shaped the system that is called American Democracy.

AFROAM 691L. The Black Arts Movement
This course will examine the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s in its many manifestations, including literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. A particular focus of the course will be the ways in which domestic and international political movements (e.g., Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-colonial) intersected with Black Arts, deeply influencing the formal and thematic choices of African American artists. Much attention will be paid to the distinctive regional variations of the movement as well as to the ways in which Black Arts fundamentally changed how art is produced and received in the United States.

AFROAM 691R. Topics in the Modern Civil Rights Movement
This seminar will explore the distinction between movements, organizations, and the activities of single individuals that has been obscured in recent discussions of the "long civil rights movement.” We will be examining the histories of organizations that were formed prior to the post-Brown Era and which have survived to this day. We will be exploring those groups and organizations that came into being post Brown and were defunct by the mid- 1970's. We will pay some brief attention to those groups and organizations that arose in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black liberation movements, i.e. since the mid- 1970's. The readings will include a selection from the latest scholarly monographs, as well as from memoirs and other primary sources available in print, microform and digital formats.  A lengthy (18-20 pages) reading paper analyzing the goals, activities, successes and failures of a group, organization or individual will be required. Regular class attendance and participation in discussions is assumed.

AFROAM 692A. Literary Theory
This course will take up literary theory since 1965 and how it has influenced the study of African American literature and culture.  The idea here is not to be comprehensive, but rather, to use the term popular a few years back, to stage a series of interventions into the sometimes troubled relationship between “high” theory and its successors and African American Studies. Our task will not simply be to examine different “schools” of critical theory, but to consider how theory has informed and challenged African American literary studies and vice versa.  We will also seek to historicize various critical moments or movements rather than simply view them as pieces of an intellectual toolbox.

AFROAM 692F.  From Reconstruction to Renaissance
This course examines African American literature and culture from the rise of Reconstruction through the onset of Jim Crow and the Great Migration to the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance.  We will be particularly interested in the relationship between African American literature and culture during this period and the notions of modernity, modernism, and the artistic and social avant-garde in the United States.

701-702 Major Works Seminar in Afro-American Studies I and II
An intensive study of fifty major works of Afro-American Studies. Required of all first-year doctoral and masters candidates, and open only to them.