Faculty of Arts & Sciences

An exploration of some of the key texts and issues in African American Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Members of the faculty deliver guest lectures in their own areas of specialization.

This course introduces students to the general outlines of African archeology, history and geography, as well as key concepts in the study of African health, social life , economic situation, arts, and politics. Our aim is to give students a fundamental vocabulary and interdisciplinary methodology for the study of Africa. Throughout, we assume that Africa is not a unique isolate but a continent bubbling with internal diversity, historical change, and cultural connections beyond its shores. The course is open to all students who are interested in exploring various dimensions of African life and cultures in ancient and modern periods.

This course examines issues of race, class, gender, and identity in the Afro-American community. Topics of special emphasis include the contemporary situation of the black family, class stratification and the conditions and prospects of the modern black middle class, black feminist thought, black educational performance, and the dynamics of race. Our objective is to arrive at a deeper sociological analysis and appreciation of the changing life experiences awaiting African Americans.

This introduction to African languages and cultures explores how sub-Saharan Africans use language to understand, organize, and transmit (culture, history, etc.) indigenous knowledge to successive generations. Language serves as a road map to comprehending how social, political, and economic institutions and processes develop: from kinship structures and the evolution of political offices to trade relations and the transfer of environmental knowledge. As a Social Engagement course, AAAS 20 will wed scholarly inquiry and academic study to practical experience and personal involvement in the community. Students will be given the opportunity to study Africans, their languages, and their cultures from the ground up, not only through textbooks and data sets but through personal relationships, cultural participation, and inquisitive explorations of local African heritage communities. Throughout the semester you will be asked to employ video production, ethnographic research, creative writing, "social-portraiture," GIS mapping, and linguistic study as you engage with Africans, their languages, and their cultures. By examining linguistic debates and cultural traditions and interrogating their import in the daily lives of Boston-area Africans, we hope to bridge the divide between grand theories and everyday practices, between intellectual debates and the lived experiences of individuals, between the American academy and the African world. Ultimately, this course aims to place Africans themselves in the center of the academic study of Africa.

Individualized study of an African language at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy. Any language not listed as a course is taught under this number.

Individualized study of Amharic at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Afrikaans at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Hassaniyah at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Tshiluba at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Malagasy at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Jamaican Patois at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Bemba at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Bamanakan at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Cape Verdean Creole at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Chichewa at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Dinka at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Haitian Creole at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Hausa at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Igbo at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Kinyarwanda at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Luganda at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Oromo at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Somali at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Tigrinya at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Wolof at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Xhosa at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Zulu at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Krio at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Shona at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Sudanese Arabic at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Pulaar at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Ibibio at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Setswana at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Kikongo at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Individualized study of Lingala at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Contact hours with language coach. Emphasis on literacy.

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

This course will examine the complexity of contemporary racial and ethnic experience in the United States, focusing on self-identified "mixed-race" groups and voluntary immigrant groups from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean (e.g. from Brazil, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Nigeria). Interdisciplinary course readings will introduce key theoretical issues in the social sciences and humanities, such as cultural relativism, the social construction of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the negotiation of identity in diaspora and minority settings. Assignments will include both written work and social engagement with local communities resulting in multimedia projects.

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

Thesis supervision under the direction of a member of the Department.

This course will equip students with qualitative research experience that focuses on the ways in which urban residents deal with the consequences of violence, crime, and injury. The class will meet once a week for a three-hour period. Each week students will either be on Harvard's campus or at their chosen field site. Field sites will be chosen early in the semester. Possible sites include: 1) a violence prevention program in Dorchester; 2) a homeless shelter in Boston; 3) a housing and tenants rights advocacy group in Roxbury; and 4) a physical rehabilitation center for war veterans in Jamaica Plain. While learning how to engineer a research project (that may eventually blossom into a senior thesis), students will be encouraged to examine how injury is both embodied and perpetuated through "structural violence," or the social forces that predetermine a population's susceptibility for injury and illness.

This course functions, first and foremost, as a map of the major landmarks in twentieth-century black intellectual history. Using primary sources (that is, work written by black intellectuals rather than about them), the course engages the idea of a "black radical tradition". The black radical tradition is bound together as a set of ideas that constructs and reconstructs philosophical and political connections across the rupturing history of black dispossesssion, displacement, and disenfranchisement. The black radical tradition, then, exists in dialectical tension with many of the key idioms of Enlightenment and liberal philosophy (freedom, progress, history, justice, civilization). We pay particular attention to how the black radical tradition has framed the relationship of black history to modernity and global historical developments; how it has posited black selfhood and black liberation over and against attempts to conscript the end of slavery into a seamless narrative about the triumph of liberal values; and finally, whether black desires and black life itself can ever be validated in the midst of ongoing anti-black racism.

This course will examine the process by which representations of Black spiritualities in film and media have constructed a genre of "voodoo" as well as "voodooizations" of different religious and spiritual beliefs. This class will not be about vodou or vodun the spiritual/religious belief system. Instead, we will address differing politics of representation, we will engage in theories of reception and commodification, cultural studies, performance theory, postcolonial theories, critical feminist and queer media studies.

Africa has occupied a central place in the making of anthropology as a discipline. If early ethnographic studies of African contexts generated leading theories of society and political organization, contemporary anthropologists made African livelihoods key contexts for understanding modernity, globalization, and the dynamics of late capitalism. Taking "Africa" as both an ideological category of knowledge and power and a geo-political context of life, this course traces the ways in which lives, subjectivities, and intimacies in Africa mediate and are shaped by global historical processes. We examine diverse themes and theories that deal with local and regional economies; kinship and socio-political organization; ritual, sexuality, and the life course; colonial and missionary reforms; labor migration and urbanization; development and witchcraft; law and criminality in the postcolonial state; the effects of market liberalization; and the commodification of African identities. We ask: What do ethnographies of Africa offer us by means of understanding the world at large?

Examines contemporary African music with emphasis on the relationship between traditional and popular genres. Of particular interest are themes of music and social commentary, music and public health, music and political conflict, and music and youth empowerment. Case studies from Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Africa will be featured.

This course explores how discourses and embodied encounters have produced Otherness through racial and ethnic categorizations and how such categories mediate political and economic interventions in the colonial and postcolonial world. How do discourses of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference shape the lived worlds of those they claim to represent? How does alterity emerge and how is it embodied by subjects of difference? And what is the role of globalization, commodification, and consumption in the regeneration, reconfiguration, or erasure of markers of difference? Students will revisit classic texts in postcolonial theory and critical race theory in order to explore how their conceptual insights can be translated into ethnographic practice and historical analysis. If anthropology has long been invested in various categories of difference, this course also sets out to rethink what the discipline can offer towards a critical investigation of the production of alterity in the (post)colonial world.

This class will consider the study of race, ethnicity, and diaspora in relation to the digital world. Complex societal issues of power, domination, and bias follow us into digital spaces. Simultaneously, the much discussed digital divide has shifted from differential access to inequity in ownership, control, and content. The imagined democratizing promise of the digital exists in stark contrast to "the other". Individuals and collectives use digital technologies to reproduce and address notions of social difference. Hate groups actively recruit members and propagandize online via chat rooms, websites, social media, and virtual world games. Anti-racism organizations and individuals expose hate groups, educate on race and gender, transform the digital humanities to be more inclusive, and critique and advocate against faulty policies and stereotypical representations of minority groups. Digital environments are crucial spaces for research, critique, and social engagement on intolerance and inequality and simultaneously, positive ways of commemorating, representing, and engaging with shared experiences of race, gender, and ethnicity. Weekly workshops will feature expert guest visitors from a variety of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural backgrounds, and will be organized around a series of themes that are key to studies of race and technology. These workshops, open to faculty and students, will meet Thursdays from 11:30-1 pm. 30 students will be permitted to take this as a course; they will also meet on Tuesdays, 11:30-1 pm. Innovative assignments will develop student skills in digital research, content creation, and design.

New technology and democratized access to digital media powerfully impact strategies aiming to heighten global awareness of local issues and are integral to efforts seeking to inspire empathy, political engagement, social activism, and charitable giving. With a focus on race, gender, and identity, this course will explore the portrayal of the human condition across cultures in feature films, documentaries, and photography. Students will have the opportunity to create their own multimedia projects.

Why have social orders like Apartheid South Africa and White Supremacy in segregated America that are based on extreme racial, gender and national oppression always generated often violent, hallucinatory fictions of the racial and gender identities of the oppressed? And why have the oppressed in turn often internalized these sorts of fictions and also produced counter-fictions that more or less conform to the same violent, phantasmic logic? In this course, we will explore how these fictions and counter-fictions are reproduced and challenged in some of the most powerful, canonical works of drama, fiction and cinema by South African and African American authors and filmmakers. As the Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe once famously remarked: "where one thing stands, another thing will stand beside it." To this end, we will pay special attention in the course to how, both in form and in content, race and gender always seem, constitutively, to intersect in these fictions and counter-fictions. The course is thus a study in the dark, violent but generative cultural unconscious of modern racialized and gendered identities.

This course explores the cultural richness of African American humor through analyses of stand-up, drama, the visual arts and literature from the 19th century onward. Artists include but are not limited to Richard Pryor (and many other important figures in black comedy), the painter Robert Colescott, the artists Kara Walker, writer William Wells Brown, Charles W. Chesnutt, George Schuyler, and Ishmael Reed.

Close readings of classic autobiographies: Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams, Elizabeth Keckley; and contemporary memoirs by Ta Nahesi Coates, Hilton Als among others. A weekly critical paper is required; the final paper is a creative one, a short memoir.

Against the background of radical theories of racial formation and identity politics in America, this course will comparatively explore controversial images of African Americans and Italian Americans in selected films of two of the most important contemporary American filmmakers, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. On their road to becoming iconic figures in America's contemporary cinematic and artistic avant-garde, Scorsese and Lee radically transformed received or conventional perceptions of Italian Americans and African Americans in mainstream American film. In this course, we will explore both similar and contrastive styles and approaches by the two filmmakers. Special attention will be paid to popular and scholarly discourses that the selected films of Scorsese and Lee have generated.

Through such films as "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", "Pulp Fiction" and "Django Unchained", the course will explore the avant-garde techniques of cinematic storytelling that Scorsese and Tarantino deploy to explore America's obsession with the figure of the black male as both a victim and purveyor of extreme violence.

This course surveys African American History from the first migrations of Africans to the Americas during the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the eve of the U.S. Civil War. Atlantic in scope, our studies will consider black US history in the context of broader regional variations, highlighting both the distinctive and the unexceptional features of black society, culture, and politics. Lectures, readings, discussions, and assignments will emphasize several key themes: the indispensability of slavery to the colonial development of the Americas, the entrenchment of race as a mode of categorical belonging and discrimination, the continuity of multivalent struggles for dignity, freedom, and equality, and the shaping force of gender, geography, and imperial warfare in the transformations of the period. Special attention will be paid to the interpretive possibilities of representing this history in the form of data, argumentative prose, storytelling, and works of visual art.

This course will examine the sociohistorical legacy of chocolate, with a delicious emphasis on the eating and appreciation of the so-called "food of the gods." Interdisciplinary course readings will introduce the history of cacao cultivation, the present day state of the global chocolate industry, the diverse cultural constructions surrounding chocolate, and the implications for chocolate's future of scientific study, international politics, alternative trade models, and the food movement. Assignments will address pressing real world questions related to chocolate consumption, social justice, responsible development, honesty and the politics of representation in production and marketing, hierarchies of quality, and myths of purity.

A study of African American practices of performance from the 19th century through the present. This seminar will meet twice each week: first, in a classroom to discuss scholarship on black performance, and second, in a Harvard archive to work directly with primary materials. Topics include abolitionism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and hiphop.

This course traces the social, political, and economic developments that shaped black history and culture from the Civil War to the present. Coming at a critical juncture in national and world history, the course surveys the diverse currents of African American experiences in the United States.

Today 1 in 3 African American boys will spend part of their lives behind bars, a profound reflection of the limitations of law and democracy in the United States. By examining the connections between race and the development of legal and penal systems over time, this course investigates the historical process that eventually gave rise to the mass incarceration of black and Latino Americans in the late twentieth century. The course is structured according to the major punitive changes that often emerged after the expansion of constitutional and civil rights for African Americans. Our historical consideration will provide us the necessary background to address the ongoing consequences of racial disparities in the criminal justice system and the momentous public policy implications of this dynamic.

Exploration of literary, historical, philosophical writings by Afro-Latin Americans including Latinos in the United States.

Why is the United States more segregated today than ever before? By examining the impact of social, political, and economic transformations in the decades after the civil rights movement, this course addresses historical developments that functioned to increase segregation and income stratification in African American communities in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

This course surveys that diverse yet thematically connected set of social philosophies generally classified under the broad rubric "black nationalism." We will take an interdisciplinary approach to reading the canonical primary documents in the tradition, focusing primarily on black nationalism as a social theory, a political philosophy, and an intellectual tradition. Though some attention will be given to black nationalist organizations and social movements, the main focus will be on black nationalist ideas. We will critically examine the ideas of a few key theorists and iconic spokespersons and take up the core themes of the tradition. Topics to be explored include the varieties of black nationalism; black self-determination; black capitalism; the ideas of "race" and "nation"; racial solidarity and group self-reliance; self-defense and political resistance; the construction of gender roles and configurations of class within black nationalist discourses; the relationship between black identity and black liberation goals; the role of black artistic and cultural expression in black freedom struggles; the significance of Africa for black nationalist ideals; and the relevance of black nationalism for contemporary African American politics. In addition to critics of black nationalism such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr, we will discuss some contemporary critical assessments of the tradition and its legacy. The figures to be considered include David Walker, Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, and Huey Newton.

This course examines the major fiction and nonfiction works of Richard Wright from a literary, philosophical, and political perspective. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to this wide-ranging and canonical American author, contextualizing him within the broader tradition of black letters. Readings include but are not limited to Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, American Hunger, 12 Million Black Voices, The Outsider, Black Power, The Color Curtain, White Man Listen!, and Eight Men. The course also explores major influences in Wright's development including the work of Marx, Sartre, and Freud.

Close readings of major writers in the context of cultural history. I) Literature and folk culture in the slavery period: Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Omar Ibn Said, Victor Sejour, Lydia Maria Child, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Frank Webb, Martin Robison Delany, and Harriet Jacobs. II) "Post-bellum, pre-Harlem": Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and James Weldon Johnson. We examine diverse genres-from slave narratives, novels, and poems to plays, speeches, and song lyrics and end with Jean Toomer's Cane.

Since Emancipation African American religious leaders and their congregants have employed religion not only as a means of achieving social and political mobility, but also as a means of securing economic growth and independence in light of the conditions created under American capitalism. These approaches have varied from the pragmatic strategies of Booker T. Washington, the socialist leanings of Rev. George Washington Woodbey, the "poor people's campaign" of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the increasingly popular prosperity ministries of today's neo-Pentecostal and Word of Faith communities. Such changes in strategies often coincide with changes in America's political economy over the past century. This course attempts to interrogate the development of these various strands of economic thought using texts by scholars like Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), E. Franklin Frazier (The Black Bourgeoisie), and David Harvey (An Introduction to Neoliberalism) as anchoring texts to frame the social, economic and political contexts in which these strategies emerge. Other texts, including autobiographies, ethnographies, and histories offer details of how these religious understandings are framed and practiced.

Against the historic background of the civil rights struggles in the United States and the decolonizing liberation struggles in Africa and the Caribbean, this course explores how utopian or emancipatory aspirations in diverse genres and media like literature, oratory, and popular music impact people of different racial groups, gendered identities and social classes. Among the authors, public intellectuals and performers whose works we will explore are Ralph Ellison and James Brown, Wole Soyinka and Fela Kuti, Derek Walcott and Bob Marley, and Toni Morrison and Aretha Franklin.

An exploration of recent fiction and films on the African and Caribbean immigrant communities of Europe and North America.

This course provides a survey of the psychology of prejudice and racism, the scientific study of human feeling, thinking, and behavior in situations involving conflict between groups. More broadly, we will consider the psychological factors that contribute to the perpetuation of inequality and discrimination. Throughout the course, we will consider both proximate (immediate) influences on behavior, such as the immediate social situation as well as distal (more remote) influences on behavior, such as human evolution. We will also consider both conscious and unconscious attitudes and behavior.

Hiphop is a global phenomenon that influences social life far beyond the music and entertainment industries. Yet beyond descriptions and critiques of its mass appeal, few have considered hip-hop's development of standards and evaluations across all artistic areas and culture. Moreover, the consequences of an audience trained in the changing standards of hip-hop and charged with upholding them, has not been thoroughly explored. This course provides a critical examination of hip-hop in the US and its role as a cultural, political and artistic resource for youth. It will explore the artistic, social, cultural, linguistic and political implications of hip-hop. It is taught from the perspective of cultural and linguistic anthropology and media studies. Each year the course will include a special topic with guest lecturers. Topics include: gender and sexuality, spirituality, health, psychology, philosophy, education, politics, art, nationalism, etc.

This course explores the concept of race and ethnicity through the analysis of media systems and institutions, communication frames and symbolic representations and social constructions.

This course examines how Hiphop political and social activism has changed how young Americans understand citizenship and active participation in society. We draw on prior research on youth activism in the U.S. and the racial and social class critique introduced in what is known as the `golden era' of Hiphop. The `golden era' occurred between the late 1980s and the mid 1990s. It is generally described as a period of experimentation in music and the introduction of socially conscious lyrics. It was during this period that social activists argued that Hiphop culture would lead to social change. In fact several Hiphop related organizations did develop including: Russell Simmons Hiphop Summit, League of Pissed Off Voters, Bad Boy's Vote or Die campaign and Black August. The overall influence of hiphop activism became apparent in 2005, when Katrina devastated the Gulf areas. For example, Lil Wayne's "Tie My Hands" told the heartbreaking, yet important, story of New Orleans' destruction after Hurricane Katrina and the political mismanagement that compounded the tragedy. The movement against police conduct in Ferguson has also resulted in Hiphop's response. While many are supportive, established leaders lament what they perceive to be a lack of leadership. This course addresses key questions: How do we define activism in the age of Hiphop? What is the relationship and differences between movements like Freedom Summer and Katrina and Ferguson activism. In addition to the traditional aspects of assigned readings, lectures and class discussions, this class will include a significant research component on Katrina and Ferguson protests. There will also be visits with experts in the field, and several activities beyond the classroom.

Women have been an important part of Hiphop culture since its beginnings in the 1970s. As more artists, bloggers and scholars debate feminism and sexuality, young feminist scholars are introducing new approaches and theories that incorporate the multiple and intertwining layers of gender, sexuality, race and social class within Hiphop and as a basis for revealing and understanding the social lives of women and girls. Hiphop feminism disrupts second-wave conceptualizations of good or bad feminist identities and essentialism. This course seeks to address, analyze, explore and contest the political aspects of Hiphop music and culture through a close examination of feminism. It is an analytic space for debate and discussion about the impact of Hiphop culture on the sexual, gender and political understandings of Americans and others around the world. In addition to the traditional aspects of assigned readings, lectures and class discussions this class will include a significant independent research component, visits with experts in the field, and several activities beyond the classroom.

This course is a historical survey of the centuries-old Christian traditions in Africa. It begins with an outline of the trajectory of Christianity's origins and presence in Africa from its beginning in ancient Mediterranean lands through the early period of European missionaries to the contemporary period. The course provides the ethnography of the old mission churches, indigenous independent African churches, and contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Charismatic movements. The course explores the role of Christianity in relation to historical, cultural, social, and material realities of the African continent. It examines a broad range of topical issues related to conversion, missionization, and the development and growth of Christian agencies in Africa in relation to the construction of social, theological, and religious identities, as well as Christianity's response to cultural pluralism, nationhood, citizenship, and civil society.

This seminar explores critical and interdisciplinary approaches to the place of religion and the emergence of the new immigrant and diaspora communities in the modern world, and the discourses emerging from the practice of diaspora and migration scholarship. Using historical, ethnographic, and textual sources, the course will illuminate the lived religious experiences of immigrant and diaspora communities in the United States and elsewhere. It introduces critical perspectives on forms of interaction between religion and other aspects of social identity - ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, age, and sexuality, as well as transnational and global influences on social and cultural identity. The course also examines the complex networks of economic, cultural, and technological innovations that the "new" diaspora and immigrant communities have developed to make sense of their spiritual and cultural lives in new situations.

This seminar explores historical, theoretical, methodological, and conceptual issues central to the study of indigenous religions of the world. It examines the critique of indigeneity and explores emerging topics about the role that religion plays in indigenous peoples' lives, communities, and societies. Special topics will explore issues related to land, environment, conversion, health, the state, gender, aggression, violence, justice, and human rights. The seminar examines the interface of indigenous religions and modernity, colonial and postcolonial conditions, and local and global forces that shape the practices of indigenous traditions in various regions of the world.

This course focuses on African American English and discourse and provides a critical exploration into the notions of language life, death and power. It is concerned with the language, discourse and symbolic systems that construct and represent race, class and gender in the US. We use methods from linguistic anthropology and philosophy to explore language ideologies and the relationship between power and powerful speech. In this course we will review and critique theories of language, communication, culture, and identity as they relate to ethnicity, race, gender, and power. In particular, we are interested in how language mediates and constructs identity, how we associate language with race, class and gender, and how we resist and manipulate these associations. To answer these questions we examine both public and popular culture, as well as education, literature, film and other media. Topics include: Discourse of Politics, Race, Class, Radical Language Theory and Ideology, Breaking and Making Linguistic Rules. Marking Blackness, Normalizing Blackness, Grammaticalization and Ideology.

This course examines anthropological theory, research and practice that relates to constructions of blackness as well as African-diasporic identities. African-diasporic contributions to anthropology as well as anthropological research and theory concerning Africana identities will be explored. This course introduces students to basic concepts and qualitative methods in the social sciences including ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of face-to-face communication. It focuses on the details of everyday activities across a number of communities and interactive environments. It is meant to provide a bridge between communications, the social sciences, linguistics and socio-cultural anthropology through the introduction of concepts and analytical techniques that privilege observation, participation, video recording and transcription of spontaneous interaction (as opposed to experimental tasks or introspection).

The course focuses on language as a social construct and its importance and constitutive function in culture, appropriation, and performance of gender within and across traditional and national lines. The purpose of this course is to study, analyze and critique theories concerning the discursive construction of gender identity(s) and forms of representation of cultures. It will explore the relationship between power and powerful speech through reviews and critiques of theories of language, culture, and identity as they relate to gender, and nationalism. In particular, we will focus on how language and identity are constructed and mediated in literature, film and other media. Finally we will explore language and discourse surrounding women's language as well as language discourse styles used in the construction of regional, national, and global communities.

This seminar investigates critical issues in Africa's rich urban centers. Architecture, city planning, spatial framing, popular culture, and new art markets will be examined.

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific, medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the nineteenth century, for example, the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today, diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. This course examines the ways people reproduce and challenge contemporary visions of society through the lens of social injury, and in the process cultivate subjectivities that are marked by race, gender, class.

This course explores the history of the musical tradition known as jazz from its roots in African American popular musical styles at the turn of the 20th century to its contemporary life as a global improvisational art music. We devote considerable attention to the history of jazz improvisation as a musical process and also explore the cultural, aesthetic, racial, and social debates that shaped the development of the music. On the one hand, jazz fashioned itself as the ultimate modern music with freedom and justice for all, and, on the other, provided an arena in which complex debates about race, cultural ownership, and social disparity repeatedly took place.

This class explores the ways in which both race and class are implicated in the development and practice of religion in the U.S. Through historical, anthropological and sociological works we explore the theoretical underpinnings of race and class and ponder their influence upon varying expressions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

The course focuses on the history of African American popular music from Ray Charles to P-Funk to Erykah Badu with particular emphasis on its long-term impact on American culture. The rise of classic R & B, Soul, Motown, Funk, the Philly Sound and Neo-Soul are featured. Key artists include Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, Michael Jackson, Prince, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Usher, Alicia Keys, and D'Angelo. The course is especially concerned with tracing the interrelationships among music, politics, spirituality, and race relations during the Civil Rights and Black Power years and their legacy for today. During these years the sound of African America indelibly shaped mainstream American popular culture in far reaching and transformative ways.

An advanced seminar in theories and processes of theory-making by queer people of color in the US from the Harlem Renaissance through the present. Topics include feminism, AIDS, spirituality, community, migration, affect, and performance. Texts include works by Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzladua, Marlon Riggs, Cathy Cohen, E. Patrick Johnson, Jose Esteban Munoz, Cheryl Dunye, David Eng, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni Jones, Roderick Ferguson, and Jewelle Gomez.

A seminar on children and childhood in African American history and cultures from 1773 through the present. Authors may include Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Suzan-Lori Parks; topics may include slavery, abolition, literacy, popular performance, film and television, Civil Rights, celebrity, the Moynihan Report, systemic violence (including poverty), education, and the American Girl Dolls.

This course is a basic introduction to the history and phenomenology of traditional religions of the African peoples. Using diverse methodological and theoretical approaches, the course will explore various forms of experiences and practices that provide a deep understanding and appreciation of the sacred meaning of African existence: myth, ritual arts, and symbols selected from West, East, Central, and Southern Africa.

Major art movements in 20th-century Africa as well as critical issues which have framed related discussions will be treated. Painting, sculpture, photography, graphic arts, architecture, and performance traditions will be explored with an eye toward both their unique African contexts and the relationship of these traditions to contemporary art movements in a more global perspective.

This course examines the changing place of medicine in the long history of modernity. Focusing on key moments - the birth of the clinic, the colonial frontier (where biomedicine met its therapeutic "others"), the consolidation of medicine as self-governing profession, the age of genomics and biocapital - it explores the distinctive role of medical knowledge in the making of modernist persons, identities, and social worlds. Readings are drawn from across the social sciences, with material from Africa, Europe, and North America. Part lecture, part discussion, the class will be open to upper-level undergraduates and graduates.

The course will cover (i) classical readings in the field, (ii) conceptual questions focusing on the often counter-intuitive theoretical insights to be gained from the non-Western legal systems, (iii) law and colonialism, (iv) liberalism, difference, and the law in the postcolonial world, and (v) the judicialization of politics around the globe. Throughout, attention will be given to the lessons to be learned from legal anthropology for interrogating the present moment in the global north. Grades will be based on class participation, course presentations, and a term paper.

This seminar focuses on biographical and autobiographical writings in a historical examination of the role of the individual in the American legal process. We will seek to understand how specific African Americans (as lawyers, judges, and litigants) made a difference-how their lives serve as a "mirror to America"-and also to understand the ways personal experience informs individual perspectives on the law and justice.

The seminar examines the historical development of religion in Nigeria and explores its intersection with ethnic identity, culture, and society in pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary periods. The course provides an understanding of various cultural tradition, historical events, and social forces that have shaped Nigeria's religious express. Many topical issues will be explored such as indigenous religious culture, Christian and Muslim identities, civil religion, and civil society and democratization, as well as religion and politics in present-day Nigeria.

How do we understand development in Africa? This introductory course explores the question of sustainable development through a number of methods and perspectives, such as education, health, governance, (post-)conflict, and human rights. The course will examine the challenges of development, understood as the interaction between economic, environmental, political, and social processes. Students will gain the tools needed to examine African contexts today, including policy choices and the use of indicators and comparative analysis.

This course critically examines the health status of the poor, and of African Americans and other socially disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups in the US. Attention will be focused on the patterned ways in which the health of these groups is embedded in the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, and arrangements of US society. Topics covered include the meaning and measurement of race, the ways in which racism affects health, the historic uses of minorities in medical research, how acculturation and migration affects health, and an examination of the specific health problems that disproportionately affect nondominant racial groups.

This course focuses on the history of "race" as a category of difference and explores why "race" has become a globally-accepted idiom to classify humans. It assesses the prominent roles that science and scientists have played in the process of naturalizing "race" and analyzes how "scientific" theories of race were developed and disseminated globally in the modern period. We trace the formation of these ideas in the North Atlantic, their diffusion to various areas of the world, and the manner in which cultural and political elites adopted or challenged them. We will devote considerable time to the emergence of eugenics, the science of racial improvement, in Europe, the Americas, and Africa and study the process of institutionalization of this science in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, including the United States. A final section of the course discusses the impact of contemporary science on ideas of race. Students in this class will work with texts and archival materials related to these scientists, some of whom were Harvard faculty.

This course seeks to explain why social revolutions have taken place in Latin America and analyzes their impact on the region. The objective is for students to gain a critical understanding of the origins, development, and impact of revolutionary movements in Latin America during the twentieth century. We will try to identify: (1) the historical factors that led to revolutions in the region (the so-called revolutionary situations); (2) the strategies followed by different movements and how successful they were; (3) the programs and policies instituted by the different revolutionary governments; (4) the social and political forces opposed to those policies, including international forces; and (5) the ability of these revolutionary movements to hold on to power for extended periods of time. The course examines several case studies, which may include Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, and the so-called "Bolivarian revolution" of Venezuela. Our goal is to identify similarities and differences among these cases.

In a story titled Africa Rising (2011), The Economist argued that the continent epitomizes both the "transformative promise of [capitalist ] growth and its bleakest dimensions. This workshop will explore Africa's changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. It will also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory about current conditions world-wide. The workshop, open to faculty and students, will meet Mondays from 6:00-7:30. 15 students will be permitted to take it as a course; they will also meet on Mondays, 12:00-1:30. Grades will be based on participation and a term essay.

In a story titled Africa Rising (2011), The Economist argued that the continent epitomizes both the "transformative promise of [capitalist] growth" and its bleakest dimensions. This workshop will explore Africa's changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. It will also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory about current conditions world-wide. The workshop, open to faculty and students, will meet Mondays, 6:00-7:30. 15 students will be permitted to take it as a course; they will also meet on Mondays, 12:00-1:30. Grades will be based on participation and a term essay.

The Entrepreneurship in Africa (EIA) course, AAAS 212 is designed for students who have a passion for development in Africa. The goal of the course is to inspire and equip potential (social) entrepreneurs with knowledge and skills necessary for driving economic and social development in Africa. Students will examine challenges and innovation in various spheres, dialogue on solutions and identify viable routes to leapfrog change on the continent. The course will expose students to the important role of leadership and how entrepreneurs can leverage their ideas to create policy-level change. The course is designed to run as a seminar course, featuring faculty from across and beyond Harvard. A distinctive feature of the AAAS 212 course is the sessions with successful entrepreneurs from Africa who will come in to share practical experience, interact with students and reinforce learning. Students will form teams to develop a project or business plan that address enterprise and development needs. The course is open for cross-registration to all Harvard graduate students, limited by capacity to college students.

This course will offer an in-depth examination of the historic Mau Mau reparations case in London's High Court of Justice, and the ways in which historical and legal expertise combined to produce a landmark settlement more than fifty years after British colonial rule in Kenya. Drawing upon the instructors' direct involvement in the case, this course will look at the revisionist history that provided the basis for the claims, the particulars of the case, and the historic nature of the two strike out hearings, as well as the British government's settlement of the claims in 2013. The course will also place this case in comparative perspective, both with regard to other historical reparations cases, as well as potential future cases from the former British Empire and elsewhere.

This proseminar introduces students to some of the main themes and core literature in the history of modern Africa. The focus of this proseminar will be on the major questions that have dominated the historiography, as well as current and future trends in the field. Sources and methods will be an implicit part of this course, as will theory, ranging from classical theorists, such as Marx and Weber, to more recent theorists such as the Comaroffs, Chakrabarty, and others. This course is designed to let students sample ways of interpreting the histories of modern Africa, and to provide a framework that will enable them to think critically when reading the field on their own.

This graduate readings seminar surveys African American history from the slave trade through the early twentieth century. We will examine the experiences of African Americans alongside the history of race relations in a larger American context. Topics include slavery, abolition, and the transition to freedom; regional and cultural differences among African Americans; black politics; and issues of gender and class in black communities. We will also discuss the nature of historical inquiry and differing modes of historical interpretation.

This yearlong seminar introduces students to current questions and debates in the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. The course analyzes how different "racial formations," incorporating different combinations of indigenous, African, and European peoples and their descendants, have developed in Latin America since colonial times. Through the systematic comparison of several cases, the course discusses how ideas of race and nation have interacted in Latin America, shaping opportunities for mobilization and public policies; how racial identities have been formed and invoked for different cultural and political purposes; and how ideas of race and ethnicity have contributed to the stratification of Latin American societies, which are among the most unequal in the world. A final section looks at the creation of transnational networks of cooperation by indigenous and black activists and how their exchanges have shaped ideas of race and forms of mobilization in their respective societies. Students in this class will have the opportunity to meet with the authors of some of the works we are reading.

Students in this seminar will work with the editor of Transition to design, edit, and produce the journal. Housed at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research (http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition), Transition is the longest running Pan African cultural magazine in history. Founded in Uganda in 1961, the journal quickly became Africa's leading intellectual forum. It was later edited by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka in Ghana before arriving at Harvard in 1991, with publishers Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Some of the best scholars and minds of the Diaspora have contributed to this journal, including Martin Luther King Jr., Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Julius Nyerere and many others. Students in this class will familiarize themselves with the history of Transition; chart new directions for the journal; identify topics of Pan African significance and potential contributors on those topics; and serve as critical readers of materials submitted for publication to the journal. Students will be listed in the issues of the journal they help produce as "student associate editors".

This seminar introduces students to the booming historiography of slavery and the law in Latin America and the United States. Earlier generations of scholars of race and slavery (Frank Tannenbaum, Stanley Elkins) relied heavily on the law to draw sharp contrasts between U.S. and Latin American slavery. Although the social historians of the 1970s and 1980s were highly critical of this approach, due to its lack of attention to economic and social factors, in the last twenty years scholars have turned again to the study of slave legal regimes. The most recent scholarship, however, does not approach the legal history of slavery through the study of legal codes, as previous scholars used to do, but through slaves' own legal initiatives and actions. In short, these scholars analyze how slaves themselves participated in the creation of legal institutions, understandings, and "rights." How do slave regimes in the United States and Latin America compare in light of this recent scholarship? New works of comparative synthesis are just beginning to appear.

This seminar offers a systematic comparison of race relations in the United States and Latin America after emancipation. Writing in 1950, Alfred Metraux, a Swiss-American anthropologist who became the Director of the UNESCO Division for the Study of Race Problems, captured the then prevalent view that race operated very differently in "Anglo-Saxon" and "Latin" America. He made reference to the "favorable impressions produced by Brazil's race relations" and to the fact it had "been hailed as one of the rare countries which have achieved a 'racial democracy'." Whereas rigid forms of racial segregation characterized the United States, most countries in Latin America were seen as mestizo, racially-mixed nations that did not have a rigid color-line. Scholars have been debating the accuracy of these characterizations during the last sixty years. This seminar offers an introduction to this scholarship, assesses the current state of the field, and seeks to identify problems and questions for future research.

Students are introduced to major themes, classic texts, and representative current work in the broad interdisciplinary field of African and African American Studies, with a focus on the Humanities (Literature, Art, Music, and Religion).

Students are introduced to major themes, debates and texts in the broad interdisciplinary field of African and African American Studies. African and African American Studies 302, in the spring term, focuses on the social sciences.

Allows students to work with an individual member of the faculty in a weekly tutorial.

Requires students to identify and carry out a research project under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin work on the research paper required for admission to candidacy.

Requires students to identify a major essay and carry it out under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin to work on the research paper that is a requirement of admission to candidacy.

Gikuyu is a Bantu language spoken by Kenya's most populous ethnic group. The Gikuyu are among Africa's most recognized peoples because of the Mau Mau freedom fighters who were mainly Gikuyu.

Continuation of Gikuyu A. Gikuyu is a Bantu language spoken by Kenya's most populous ethnic group. The Gikuyu are among Africa's most recognized peoples because of the Mau Mau freedom fighters who were mainly Gikuyu.

Advanced reading in Gikuyu.

Advanced reading in Gikuyu II.

A study of the lingua franca of East Africa at the elementary level. Contact hours supplemented by language lab sessions. Emphasis on written expression, reading comprehension, and oral fluency.

Continuation of Swahili A. A study of the lingua franca of East Africa at the elementary level. Contact hours supplemented by language lab sessions. Emphasis on written expression, reading comprehension, and oral fluency.

Advanced reading in Swahili.

Advanced reading in Swahili II.

Twi is one of the regional languages of the Akan speaking peoples of Ghana, constituting the largest ethnic group in Ghana. Twi is fast becoming the lingua franca of the country. This course aims to help students acquire the Twi language at the basic or elementary level.

Continuation of Twi A. Twi is one of the regional languages of the Akan speaking peoples of Ghana constituting the largest ethnic group in Ghana. Twi is fast becoming the lingua franca of the country. The Akan people are well known for their art and culture, especially the traditional colorful Kente cloth.

Advanced reading in Twi.

Advanced reading in Twi II.

Yoruba is spoken in the West African countries of Nigeria, Benin Republic, and parts of Togo and Sierra Leone, therefore constituting one of the largest single languages in sub-Saharan Africa. Yoruba is also spoken in Cuba and Brazil. Students will acquire the Yoruba language at the basic or elementary level.

Continuation of Yoruba A. Yoruba is spoken in the West African countries of Nigeria, Benin Republic, and parts of Togo and Sierra Leone, therefore constituting one of the largest single languages in sub-Saharan Africa. Yoruba is also spoken in Cuba and Brazil. Students will acquire the Yoruba language at the basic or elementary level.

Advanced reading in Yoruba.

Advanced reading in Yoruba II.