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 591B. Black Radical Thought  (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This course will focus on contributions to Marxist intellectual and political traditions by African and African-descended thinkers. We will read and discuss works by major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Amilcar Cabral, Angela Davis, Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon.  We also hope to introduce you to a selection of perhaps lesser known figures such as Babu, Achille Mbembe, George Padmore, Claudia Jones, Harry Haywood, James Boggs, Muhammad Ahmad.  The course will require extensive reading, informed participation in class discussion, and a final paper. 

AFROAM 691C.  Historiographical Methods in Afro-American Studies
This course will introduce you to some of the basics of what it means to read, think, and write as an historian.  We will explore what historians do and why as well as the "objectivity question," the development of African American history as an academic discipline, and one or two current controversies.  We also will learn how to locate and use the resources of the Du Bois Library such as microforms, government documents, the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, on-line indices and collections, as well as those of such important national repositories such as the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Collection at Howard University and the Schomburg Center of the N.Y. Public Library.

AFROAM 691F.  Black Political Struggle & the American Political System: the Rise of the Carceral State
This graduate seminar will introduce students to carceral studies, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that takes the late twentieth century expansion of the U.S. prison system as its primary object of analysis. Drawing on a variety of sources – influential older articles and books, a growing literature on the prison system's historical development, and recent examinations of mass incarceration’s “collateral consequences” – this course will provide a firm sense of the chronological, political, and institutional development of the U.S. carceral state. In doing so, this course will pay particular attention to the distinct relationship between domestic regimes of policing and incarceration and various black political struggles, from individuated acts of resistance to insurgent social movements. By placing this body of scholarship in conversation with the history of black politics, this graduate course seeks to both familiarize students with an emerging field of study and offer a unique perspective on the state of Black Studies.

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 691N. Critical Race Theories
Participants in this seminar, Critical Race Theories, will examine the general foundational ideas and concepts shaping today’s now proliferating scholarly enquiries that operate under the term critical race theories. While the basis for today’s critical race theories developed from Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory in legal scholarship, many scholars from a variety of disciplines have transformed for their own contexts the insights that have informed legal scholarship in this area.  An understanding of the entrenched racial structures in the United States and their basis in the social contract informing much of Western culture is especially useful for reading and analyzing a substantial portion of African American literature. Seminar participants will read early documents (The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America The Constitution of the United States of America, The Bill of Rights,  Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments) together with texts by historical figures, philosophers, and others who have shaped or have responded to systems of race in the United States (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Banneker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others) texts on theories of race (Smedley, Frederickson, Eze and others), and legal as well as literary, political, and philosophical critical race theorists (Bell, Crenshaw, Gotanda, Austin, Mills, Baldwin, Neal, Fuller, Du Bois, among others).

AFROAM 692G. African American Women’s Narrative
Gender, race, class, slavery, the woman as artist, domesticity, and the territory of love, all are concepts that are located in the narratives of the African American women writers that have been selected for this course.  Participants in this course will interrogate these issues, among others, in the narratives of nineteenth and twentieth century African American women and will be encouraged to examine critically the challenges and the victories that these writers present in their texts.  Course participants also will be encouraged to find connections as well as any disjunctures among these writers and to develop their facility for discussing these narratives as specific instances of a writer’s literary style and as an historically, as well as politically,  marked literary texts in African American literature.

AFROAM 692L. Black Studies: History, Theory & Practice
This seminar begins with a discussion of antecedents to institutionalized Black Studies departments and programs that emerged on college campuses starting in 1968; explores the historical development of the field up to and including today; and concludes with informed speculation concerning challenges to its future. Readings and reflections on the origins of Black Studies on the UMass Amherst campus will specifically be covered. Topics for exploration include the interrelationship of Black Studies to traditional fields and disciplines, the transition of Black Studies from political movement to professionalized institutionalization, the changing audience involved in that transition, and interpretations of American history and culture within the Black Studies matrix that challenge standard narratives regarding these issues.

AFROAM 692U. Dynamics of Race and the Law
An intensive examination of the intersection of race with American law. The focus will be on the critique of established legal theories by a number of scholars in what has come to be known as the Critical Race Theory movement. Supreme Court cases and other legal materials will combine with theoretical, historical and critical works on the law and American society. Among the topics to be covered are the law of slavery, affirmative action, voting rights, and the nature of legal education. Weekly papers, class presentations, and final research paper will round out course grades.

AFROAM 697J. Cross-Disciplinary Contemporary Issues: The Education of Africans from Roberts v. Boston to the AfroFuture
Education at its highest level and most majestic quality is "the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life…the secret of civilization.” In this course we study African Civilization in and of the world from the 1840s to the future. Our approach is grounded at the intersection of class (political economy, law, and property), gender, sexuality, body politics, science, and culture. From a materialist conception of history to recent work in brain and cognitive science the two centuries under focus in this course will emphasize an innovative and creative approach that simultaneously embraces disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary knowledge work. 

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.