The Courses

(All courses carry 3 credits unless otherwise noted.)

AFROAM 101. Introduction to Black Studies
Interdisciplinary introduction to the basic concepts and literature in the disciplines covered by Black Studies. Includes history, the social sciences, and humanities as well as conceptual frameworks for investigation and analysis of Black history and culture.

AFROAM 117. Survey of Afro-American Literature (4 credits)
The major figures and themes in Afro-American literature, analyzing specific works in detail and surveying the early history of Afro-American literature. What the slave narratives, poetry, short stories, novels, drama, and folklore of the period reveal about the social, economic, psychological, and artistic lives of the writers and their characters, both male and female. Explores the conventions of each of these genres in the period under discussion to better understand the relation of the material to the dominant traditions of the time and the writers' particular contributions to their own art.  (Gen.Ed. AL, U) 

AFROAM 118. Survey of Afro-American Literature II   (4 credits)
Introductory level survey of Afro-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, including DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Walker, Morrison, Baraka and Lorde. (Gen. Ed. AL, U) 

AFROAM 132. African-American History 1619-1860   (4 credits)
The main aim of this course is to make you familiar with some of the most important developments and issues in African American history until the Civil War. We will focus on the black experience under slavery and the struggle for emancipation. Topics include the Atlantic slave trade, evolution of African American communities and culture, the free black community, the distinct experience of black women, and the black protest tradition. The format of the course is lecture supplemented by class discussions.  (Gen.Ed. HS, U) 

AFROAM 133. African-American History Civil War-1954
Major issues and actions from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Focus on political and social history: transition from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction; the Age of Booker T. Washington; urban migrations, rise of the ghettoes; the ideologies and movements from integrationism to black nationalism. (Gen. Ed. HS, U) 

AFROAM 151. Literature & Culture   (4 credits)
This course focuses on African American cultural expressions contributing to the shape and character of contemporary African American (and U.S.) culture and how these forms have influenced and been represented by African American writers. The course uses African American literature and culture of the 1960s and 1970s in their many manifestations, especially poetry, criticism, theater, music, and the visual arts as an entry into the concerns listed above. A particular focus of the course will be the ways in which domestic and international political movements, such as Civil Rights, Black Power, anti-colonial, and non-aligned intersected with black cultural efforts, deeply influencing the formal and thematic choices of African American artists. (Gen.Ed AL,U)

AFROAM 191A. African American Short Stories
Students in this course will receive an introduction to the African American short story and to the major themes, issues, concepts, as well as the literary techniques and forms prevalent in African American literature.

AFROAM 197A. Taste of Honey: Black Film, Part I (1 credit) *Fall offering

AFROAM 197B. Taste of Honey: Black Film, Part II (1 credit)  *Spring offering

AFROAM 234. The Harlem Renaissance   (4 credits)
Exploration of the cultural explosion also termed the New Negro movement, from W.E.B. Du Bois through the early work of Richard Wright. Essays, poetry, and fiction, and the blues, jazz, and folklore of the time examined in terms of how Harlem Renaissance artists explored their spiritual and cultural roots, dealt with gender issues, sought artistic aesthetic and style adequate to reflect such concerns. Readings supplemented by contemporary recordings, visual art, and videos. 
(Gen.Ed. AL, U)

AFROAM 236.  History of the Civil Rights Movement  (4 credits)
Examination of the Civil Rights Movement from the Brown v. Topeka decision to the rise of Black power. All the major organizations of the period, e.g., SCLC, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and the Urban League. The impact on white students and the anti-war movement.  (Gen.Ed. HS, U)

AFROAM 243. Afro-American Folklore
A close look at the origins, variety, nature, and functions of Afro-American folklore, including contexts for collecting and understanding it and its manifestations in literature and popular music.

AFROAM 244. Afro-Am Poetry: Beginning to 1900
An intensive look at African American poetry before the Harlem Renaissance. It will encompass orature and literature, including folk and popular music as well as the literary output of such African American writers as Phillis Wheatley, George Moses Horton, James Whitfield, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Fenton Johnson. It will also take up the relation of African American poetry to broad political and cultural movements, such as U.S. republicanism, abolitionism, romanticism, transcendentalism, local color, and modernism. (Gen.Ed. AL, U)

AFROAM 253. Pre-Civil War Black Writers
A survey of African American and Black Atlantic writings in the Age of Revolution, from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the Civil War, with particular emphasis on how writers negotiated the promises and ideals of the revolutionary period. Course considers a variety of genres (autobiography, speeches, fiction, drama, poetry, etc.) and explores how different forms of writing were mobilized in the struggle for emancipation.  Other topics may include the beginnings of the African American novel; the drama of slavery; relationship between written and expressive culture; speeches and Abolitionism; the rise of black periodical and pamphlet culture; black narratives in the Atlantic World, including slave narratives, travelogues, natural histories, and other fictional and non-fictional accounts.

AFROAM 264.  Foundations of Black Education in the U.S.
The education of blacks from Reconstruction to 1954.   Includes public schools, colleges, and non-school education.  The involvement of religious associations, philanthropic organizations, the Freedman’s Bureau, the Black church, and the Federal Government will also be discussed. 
(Gen. Ed. HS, U)

AFROAM 291C. Race at Work: African Americans in the Labor Movement 
This course explores African American labor, reaching from slave emancipation through the late twentieth century.  Engaging historical and filmic texts, this course examines various themes in African American Labor history and class formation. Beginning with an interrogation of African American labor history as a field of historical study, this course moves along chronological and thematic axes to investigate changes in wage and labor structure, agricultural and industrial production, domestic work, and service work. It will consider African American migration, community building and organizing, labor unions, policy, and legal culture.  The Civil Rights Movement and the Fair Employment Movement will be critical to this course as they best highlight the strategies and patterns of black labor organizations, protests, and negotiation since emancipation. This course also will explore affirmative action and the reconsolidation of racial discrimination in the workplace in the late twentieth century.

AFROAM 291F. Black Caribbean Literature
A variety of literary genres as well as critical essays authored by Afri-Caribbean writers from the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbean will be analyzed during the course of the semester. While attention will be given to historical and cultural context, emphasis will be placed on literary analysis of texts. The readings selected will cover slavery, colonialism, anti-colonialism, race/colorism, gender, creolization, language, orality, and diaspora.

AFROAM 293N/293P. Voices of New Africa House, Part I / Part II   (1 credit)     
A mixed-voice choral music class celebrating two methods of teaching: by ear to perform a cappella and by sheet music containing arrangements for 4-part harmony with piano accompaniment. Learn to sing material from the African-American song-style canon. We will study and perform music created in the 17, 18 and 19th centuries beginning with creations by slaves in the United States through the 20 and 21st century’s contemporary sounds. Other genres we will explore come under the umbrella of blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, soul, funk and folk music. 

AFROAM 297A. Black Springfield: Revisited 
African American urban studies is a vibrant area of intellectual inquiry. This course will acquaint you with a variety of disciplinary tools for studying African American life in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts. Community engaged research will be emphasized.

AFROAM 326. Black Women in U.S. History
The history of African American women from the experience of slavery to the present. Emphasis on the effect of racist institutions and practices on women. The ways in which women organized themselves to address the needs of African Americans in general and their own in particular. The achievements of such leaders as Mary Church Terrell, Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, and Mary McLeod Bethune as well as lesser known women.  (Gen.Ed. HS, U)

AFROAM 331. Life of W.E.B. Du Bois
Examination of the life and thought of perhaps America's greatest intellectual activist and one of Massachusetts' native sons. Microfilm research in the Du Bois archives in the Tower Library.(Gen. Ed. U)

AFROAM 344. Black Speculative Fiction
Examination of the development of black speculative fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth century, including science fiction, fantasy, gothic literature, magical realism, the detective novel, and/or related genres. Topics of discussion may include slavery and colonialism; diaspora; science, technology, and the environment; race and the paraliterary; utopianism and dystopianism; blackness and metaphysics; Afrofuturism.

AFROAM 365. Composition: Style & Organization
Expository writing focusing primarily on argumentative and narrative essays. Discussion and practice of logic—inductive and deductive reasoning—as it relates to the argumentative essay form. Topics as thesis on main idea, organization, style, unity, supporting evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, and basic writing mechanics, including constructing sentences, paragraphing, transitions, and correct grammar.

AFROAM 390D. Langston Hughes
An intensive look at the life and work of Langston Hughes, encompassing his poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama.  We will examine the development of Hughes’ work from the 1920s to the 1960s, paying attention to historical and cultural developments that contributed to his vision, with particular emphasis on Hughes’ use of African American music in his works.  This honors course will require additional participation and a group presentation beyond normal course requirements.   (Gen.Ed. AL, U)

AFROAM 390G. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Novel
The course will focus on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, locating its roots in earlier publications such as slave narratives; discussing the novel in the context of the literary aesthetics of its era and its social and political impact in its times; and exploring how other writers, and Stowe herself, responded to the issues it raised and the criticism it provoked.

AFROAM 391F. Afro-American Literature of the 1950s
This course will examine African American literature and culture from beginning of the Cold War until the black student movement of the early 1960s. It will take up a range of cultural forms, including the visual arts, music, theater, and film as well as literature. It will look at the political and social context out of which these cultural forms grew. It will also consider such generic questions as the relation of black cultural production to such artistic movements as modernism, the new American poetry (e.g., the Beats), social realism, and naturalism and to popular and high culture representations of African Americans and African American culture. 

AFROAM 392C. Songbirds, Blueswomen and Soulwomen
The focus for this course is the cultural, political, and social issues found in the music and history of African American women performers. The primary emphasis in the course will be on African American women in Jazz, Blues, and Soul/R&B, but students also will study African American women composers as well as Spiritual-Gospel and Opera performers.

AFROAM 391B. Modern Afro-American Women Novelists
Examine novels written by African American women from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. The course will engage a simple, but fundamental issue: is there such thing as modern African American women's literature? if so, how might we define it? Some of the ways that we come at this issue will be from the point of genre (e.g., the novel of manners, the slave narrative, the sentimental novel, the gothic romance, the historical novel, etc), audience reception, and the relation of the novels to popular culture. 

AFROAM 397C. Black Globalization and Imperialism
This introductory seminar explores the changing content, practice, and value of "imperialism" and "globalization" as world historical forces. By focusing attention to their impact on Africans and African-descended peoples in the U.S., Latin American, and the Caribbean, the course emphasizes notions of race in the development and critical evaluation of these forces. Issues of historical agency, identity, and human rights will also be considered, as we reassess black experiences of victimization, collaboration, and resistance to European and American globalizing practices.        

AFROAM 494DI. Du Bois Senior Seminar
This course is an upper-division course that provides a structured context for students to reflect on their own learning in their General Education courses and the courses they have taken in the AFROAM major. In the course we will attempt to connect skills and knowledge from multiple sources and experiences and apply theory to practice in various real world settings; engaging diverse and even contradictory points of view; and, understanding issues and positions contextually as students prepare to write their senior thesis.  This course satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for students in the AfroAm major.