African American Studies

Courses

For course offerings in African languages, see African Studies.

AFAM 505b / AMST 643, Theorizing Racial Formations  Kobena Mercer

A required course for all first-year students in the combined Ph.D. program in African American Studies; also open to students in American Studies. This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field.
W 11:15am-1:20pm

AFAM 537b / FILM 710b / HSAR 715, Contemporary Art, Race, and the Philosophy of Media  Rizvana Bradley

This course draws from a diverse range of writing in philosophy (especially the philosophy of media), contemporary critical theory (phenomenology, new materialism), contemporary feminist thought, queer theory, and black studies in order to question underlying assumptions about the body and embodied spaces in contemporary art and culture. Drawing from film, literature, performance, and contemporary art, students think about a range of philosophical and critical themes, including the role of the body, the virtual construction of time and space, questions of affect, and sensation, all of which inform concerns over representation, embodiment, and materiality.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 584b / SOCY 584b, Inequality, Race, and the City  Elijah Anderson

Urban inequality in America. The racial iconography of the city is explored and represented, and the dominant cultural narrative of civic pluralism is considered. Topics of concern include urban poverty, race relations, ethnicity, class, privilege, education, social networks, social deviance, and crime.
M 11:30am-1:20pm

AFAM 588b / AMST 710b / ENGL 948b, Autobiography in America  Robert Stepto

A study of autobiographical writings from Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative (1682) to the present. Classic forms such as immigrant, education, and cause narratives; prevailing autobiographical strategies involving place, work, and photographs. Authors include Franklin, Douglass, Jacobs, Antin, Kingston, Uchida, Balakian, Als, and Karr.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 605b / AMST 686b / HIST 769b, Introduction to Documentary Studies  Zareena Grewal

This mixed graduate/undergraduate seminar surveys documentary work in three media—film, photography, and sound—since the 1930s, focusing on the documentary both as a cultural form with a history of its own and as a parcel of skill sets and storytelling and production practices to be studied and mastered. Readings and discussions cover important scholarly approaches to documentary as a genre, as well as close readings of documentaries themselves and practitioners’ guides to various aspects of documentary work. Topics include major trends in documentary practice across the three media, documentary ethics, aesthetics and truth-claims, documentary’s relationship to the scholarly disciplines and to journalism, and documentary work as political activism. Class meetings include screenings/viewings/soundings of documentary works, and practitioners’ panels and workshops with Yale documentarians (including Charles Musser, Zareena Grewal, Elihu Rubin, Gretchen Berland, and Laura Wexler) and local New Haven documentarians such as Jake Halpern (Yale ’97, This American Life). Students’ final projects may take the form of a traditional scholarly paper on some aspect of documentary history or a particular documentary producer, or an actual piece of documentary work—a film treatment, a brief video, a set of photographs, a sound documentary, or script.
TTh 4pm-5:15pm, M 7pm-9pm

AFAM 612b / ENGL 958b, James Baldwin, On Stage  Staff

Using Baldwin’s years in the theater as a timeline, we read black and queer playwrights who came out of the postwar naturalistic tradition that the author upheld in his scripts, while moving on to various traditions—the Black Arts Movement, Queer Theater, Black Surrealism, and so on—that Baldwin did not embrace but that served to enrich the scene. In addition to reading Baldwin’s essays and published thoughts about the theater and film, we analyze his plays, including his unpublished stage adaptation of his 1955 novel Giovanni’s Room. Also subject to discussion are his brilliant contemporaries, whom we read for context, including Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Charles Gordone, Hanif Kureishi, Caryl Phillips, Ntozake Shange. The class concludes with plays written by Baldwin’s former student Suzan-Lori Parks.
F 9am-10:50am

AFAM 624a / FREN 624a, Slavery and Its Aftermath in French and Francophone Literature  Christopher Miller

The practices, effects, and culture of both slavery and emancipation in the French empire and the postcolonial francophone world, as seen through literary writings. Readings on New France, the Code Noir, the Encyclopédie, the Haitian Revolution. Literary authors include Olympe de Gouges, Claire de Duras, Victor Séjour, Alfred Mercier, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Ousmane Sembène, Gisèle Pineau.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 648b / AMST 679b, Accounting for Black Life  Hazel Carby

In this seminar we consider a variety of contemporary works that challenge and transcend how blackness and black lives have been historically constituted and limited through frameworks of loss, trauma, social death, or erasure. We engage their theoretical and methodological approaches to rethinking the boundaries of the human, innovative practices in the archive and think creatively about the form in which we narrate pastness and futurity. Readings include unpublished sections from Jennifer Morgan’s new work, Reckoning with Women in Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Modern Black Atlantic, and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (both Morgan and Hartman have agreed to visit the seminar); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive; Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.
M 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 649b / AMST 624b / ENGL 918b / WGSS 624b, Psychoanalysis and the Critical Tradition in the Humanities  Greta LaFleur

This seminar introduces students to major works in the psychoanalytic tradition, including but not limited to works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. It is designed to allow graduate students to develop better fluency in psychoanalytic vernaculars, frameworks, and large-scale theories in order to gain a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the persistence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in the broader critical tradition in the humanities. Importantly, this is not a seminar dedicated solely to the psychoanalytic tradition; rather, it introduces students to seminal works by some of the major thinkers of early twentieth-century psychoanalytic thought in order to build a basis from which to understand the impact of psychoanalysis on the development of later twentieth-century critical movements, including woman-of-color feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and black studies. In other words, the course provides a graduate-level introduction to the intellectual history and critical aftermath of psychoanalysis as a field of thought. It pays special attention to understanding psychoanalytic theories of the self, the subject, and the abject (among others), and putting these modes of conceptualizing the subject into conversation with both contemporaneous and later theories of subjectivity (materialist, Foucauldian, etc.). Readings include works by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Grosz, and others. Assignments include a midterm annotated bibliography and a 20–25-page final research paper. This course satisfies the “theory” course requirement for the Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 716a / AMST 910a / HIST 764a, Working Group on Latina/o Studies I  Alicia Camacho and Stephen Pitti

A continuous workshop for graduate students in American Studies, History, African American Studies, and related fields. This group devotes the fall term to intensive reading and discussion of important interdisciplinary texts in Latina/o studies. Students interested in participating should contact
F 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 718b / AMST 911b / HIST 765b, Working Group on Latina/o Studies II  Stephen Pitti

A continuous workshop for graduate students in American Studies, History, African American Studies, and related fields. The spring term focuses on the development of individual research projects and on public history work with the Smithsonian Museums and organizations in New Haven. Students interested in participating should contact
F 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 738a / AMST 706a / HIST 711a / WGSS 716a, Readings in African American Women’s History  Crystal Feimster

The diversity of African American women’s lives from the colonial era through the late twentieth century. Using primary and secondary sources we explore the social, political, cultural, and economic factors that produced change and transformation in the lives of African American women. Through history, fiction, autobiography, art, religion, film, music, and cultural criticism we discuss and explore the construction of African American women’s activism and feminism; the racial politics of the body, beauty, and complexion; hetero- and same-sex sexualities; intraracial class relations; and the politics of identity, family, and work.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 745a / HSAR 786a, Black Atlantic Visual Arts since 1980  Kobena Mercer

This seminar surveys black diaspora practices in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art while questioning the survey genre as such. Examining contributions of black artists to paradigm shifts that have interrogated the identity of art over the past thirty years, we review the demands that issues of race and ethnicity place on interpretive models in the historiography of art. Considering thematic categories in which to understand what is distinctive to the diasporic conditions of Black Atlantic practitioners, while consistently relating their concerns to broad patterns in art practice as a whole in an era of globalization, the aim is to identify critical terms that best narrate the transformations black diaspora artists have introduced to a period characterized by the shift from modern to postmodern to contemporary.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

AFAM 752b / HIST 937b / HSHM 761b, Medicine and Empire  Carolyn Roberts

A reading course that explores medicine in the context of early modern empires with a focus on Africa, India, and the Americas. Topics include race, gender, and the body; medicine and the environment; itineraries of scientific knowledge; enslaved, indigenous, and creole medical and botanical knowledge and practice; colonial contests over medical authority and power; indigenous and enslaved epistemologies of the natural world; medicine and religion.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 763a / AMST 731a / HIST 747a, Methods and Practices in U.S. Cultural History  Matthew Jacobson

This sampling of U.S. cultural history from the early national period to the present is designed to unfold on two distinct planes. The first is a rendering of U.S. culture itself—a survey, however imperfect, of the major currents, themes, and textures of U.S. culture over time, including its contested ideologies of race and gender, its organization of productivity and pleasure, its media and culture industries, its modes of creating and disseminating “information” and “knowledge,” its resilient subcultures, and its reigning nationalist iconographies and narratives. The second is a sampling of scholarly methods and approaches, a meta-history of “the culture concept” as it has informed historical scholarship in the past few decades. The cultural turn in historiography since the 1980s has resulted in a dramatic reordering of “legitimate” scholarly topics, and hence a markedly different scholarly landscape, including some works that seek to narrate the history of the culture in its own right (Kasson’s history of the amusement park, for instance), and others that resort to cultural forms and artifacts to answer questions regarding politics, nationalism, and power relations (Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters). In addition to providing a background in U.S. culture, then, this seminar seeks to trace these developments within the discipline, to understand their basis, to sample the means and methods of “the cultural turn,” and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of culture-based historiography as it is now constituted.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 764a / AMST 715a / HIST 715a, Readings in Nineteenth-Century America  David Blight

The course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century: sectionalism, expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 773a / SOCY 630a, Workshop in Urban Ethnography  Elijah Anderson

The ethnographic interpretation of urban life and culture. Conceptual and methodological issues are discussed. Ongoing projects of participants are presented in a workshop format, thus providing participants with critical feedback as well as the opportunity to learn from and contribute to ethnographic work in progress. Selected ethnographic works are read and assessed.
M 11:30am-1:20pm

AFAM 805b / AFST 800b / FILM 754b, Novel, Film, and History in French Africa  Christopher Miller

African history as represented in historiography, novels, and films. Limited to French and Francophone Africa. Themes include empire and epic; orality and literacy; the slave trade; contact, conquest, and resistance; the Congo Free State; the role of colonial intermediaries; the two world wars; decolonization and neocolonialism; and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 832a or b, Workshop on Race and Ethnicity in the Social Sciences  Gerald Jaynes

This workshop is devoted to in-depth exploration of new, cutting-edge research in the social sciences treating the interaction of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The workshop focuses on methods of analysis ranging from ethnography to quantitative approaches as utilized in the disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and interdisciplinary fields utilizing any combination of these disciplines. We intend to address new approaches to classic issues and contemporary questions of interest to social scientists and policy makers such as (but not limited to): race relations; inequality; racial and class formation; criminal justice; politics; and education and social mobility. Graduate students taking the workshop for course credit must attend consistently and write an end-of-term paper. This course satisfies the social science requirement in African American Studies.
HTBA

AFAM 880a or b, Directed Reading  Staff

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

AFAM 895a and AFAM 896b, Dissertation Prospectus Workshop  Gerald Jaynes

A noncredit, two-term course, which graduate students in their third year of study must satisfactorily complete. This workshop is intended to support preparation of the dissertation proposal.  0 Course cr per term
HTBA