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 597A. Afro-Caribbean Studies (Undergraduate/Graduate)
Afro-Caribbean Studies is an advanced introduction to the history, culture, and politics of people of African descent in the Caribbean basin suitable for both graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. After a broad synopsis of the region’s history, the course has a focus on the politics of select Caribbean states, from 1900 to the present; viz., Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. It will discuss major issues that affect the Caribbean region, namely, migration, poverty, regional economic cooperation and political integration, democratic institutions, and U. S. foreign policy towards the region. Also, the course will examine the history and role of the diverse religious components of the Caribbean basin from Indigenous practices to Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and the emergence and development of African belief systems and practices such as Santeria, Espiritismo, Vodou and Rastafarianism from the 18th century to the present. Music and other expressive arts is an additional focal area of the class.

AFROAM 630. 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 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 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 women¹s 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 Women¹s 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 692B. The Black Power Movement
The purpose of this course is to offer an appraisal of the Black Power movement which has not been generally available to students of 1960s upheavals in American life.  In far too many academic and popular accounts today, Black Power is portrayed as the “evil twin” of the modern Civil Rights movement, as an intransigent force that brought the black freedom movement of the 1960s era to wrack and ruin.   Our aim is neither to defend no pillory the excesses of Black Power, but rather to demonstrate how this movement arose from the massive resistance of white Americans to extending those basic rights (which they themselves enjoyed) to the black population of this country; and to the inability of established Civil Rights organizations to overcome the obstacles stemming from this massive resistance.  In the end, it is our contention that the collapse and failure of the Black Power phase of the Afro-American freedom struggle represented the collapse and failure of the Civil Rights movement itself. 

AFROAM 692Q. African Diaspora Studies: Introduction to Concepts and Historiography
*Required foundations course for Graduate Certificate in African Diaspora Studies.
This course will offer an introduction to 1) key concepts and definitions e.g. diaspora, Pan-Africanism, Afro-centrism, etc. 2) the classic works in the field. 3) major trends in contemporary scholarship. We will be reading a selection of works discussing the contours and history of the field as well as examples of recent scholarship. Two papers on major themes will be required.  This course is open both to students pursuing the certificate and to graduate students with a general interest in the subject.

AFROAM 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.

AFROAM 753. Special Topics in Afro-American Literature & Culture
For graduate students only. An intensive study of the history of the blues. The nature of blues music and lyrics in an African and African American social, political, and musical context, and the use of the blues tradition in literature. No reading knowledge of music required or expected.