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 597B. Black Springfield  (Undergraduate/Graduate)
We will start with a broad survey of the city's history that began when William Pynchon and a company of Puritan men from Roxbury, founded Springfield in 1636 at the confluence of three rivers. Pynchon established a trading and fur-collecting post and enslaved Africans became a vital part of its labor force. Springfield officially became a city in May of 1852, but by then slavery had ended and the city had developed a reputation as a Underground Railroad depot thanks to antislavery freedom fighters like Thomas Thomas, Eli Baptist, and John Brown. Springfield's location at the crossroads of New England is the most significant reason for its economic progress as an industrial city. In 2010, Springfield was a city of 156,060 that was 22.3% Black or African American, and 4.7% from Two or More Races (1.5% White and Black or African American). Latin@s of any race made up 38.8% of the population (33.2% Puerto Rican).

AFROAM 597D. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois  (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This course will focus on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois to the study of the sociology of African Americans and race relations in the U.S. We will be examining such works as The Philadelphia Negro, the Atlanta University Studies, reports for various government agencies and selected essays. The course also will address Du Bois' influence on the work of other sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, Oliver Cox and William Julius Wilson.  The course is open to both graduate and upper-level undergraduate students.

AFROAM 597M. Third World Marxism    (Undergraduate/Graduate)
This seminar has two goals first, to introduce students to the views of Karl Marx on non-European societies, and second to explore how Marx's general theories have been adopted and modified to address the circumstances of non-white peoples. The primary focus will be on writings produced in the western hemisphere by African Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis and Harold Cruse; West Indians such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Rodney. We also will include writings by influential Latin American marxists such as Jose Carlos Mariategui. For the sake of comparison, some attention will be given to the development of marxist traditions in China and in Africa. This will be a reading seminar with heavy emphasis on class participation, including the leading of at least one class discussion.

AFROAM 652. Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
An intensive study of the literature and orature associated with the Harlem Renaissance, from the philosophical underpinnings supplied by Du Bois, Johnson, Locke, Garvey, and Randolph to the varied poetic visions of Hughes, Spencer, Brown, Cullen, and McKay to the fictional explorations of Toomer, Hurston, Fisher, Larsen, Fauset, and Thurman to the inspiration supplied by blues, jazz, and folklore of the African American tradition. Journals connected with the movement and the contributions of interested patrons such as Van Vechten, Cunard, and the Spingarns, and the relations of the Harlem Renaissance to other contemporary American literary currents (realism, naturalism, and modernism.)

AFROAM 667. Afro-American Presence in American Literature
An intensive survey of the portrayals of Afro-Americans in American literature, examining how characters, themes, and ideas are portrayed when filtered through the race, gender, class, politics, historical time frame, and individual artistic aesthetic of a variety of writers.

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 692J. African American Literary Movements
The New Negro Harlem Renaissance writers (1920s), the Chicago Writers (1930s and 1940s), the Black Arts and Aesthetics Movement writers (1960s and 1970s), and Black Womanist/Gender issues writers (1980s) mark four distinct periods of heightened literary production among African American writers. Participants in this course will investigate formative themes and concepts (protest/social literature, Pan-Africanism, uplift, Black aesthetic, among others.) that have shaped these movements and will examine the cross-talk—shared concepts, ideas, and ideals—that gives these movements as well as twentieth-century African American literature certain recognizable features that have been shaped and reshaped over time.

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 692V. Topics in Black Women’s History
This graduate seminar will explore African American women’s lives from slavery to the present.  It will pay special attention to the convergence of race, gender, class, and sexuality in shaping black female experiences.  Topics we will consider include, but are not limited to, motherhood, work (and lack of work), leisure, activism, sex, and violence.  We will be reading canonical texts and some of the latest scholarship on the lives and labors of African American women.

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.