Undergraduate certificate African American Studies

Princeton University

Bachelor's degree

In Princeton (USA)

Price on request

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Description

  • Type

    Bachelor's degree

  • Location

    Princeton (USA)

The Department of African American Studies offers an undergraduate certificate that expands and deepens a students understanding of race in the United States and in the world. The certificate is equivalent to an academic ‘minor’ in African American Studies. Earning a certificate is straightforward and allows students an enriching course of study which complements any Princeton concentration. Students who opt to pursue a certificate gain access to an extraordinary bibliography that prepares them to think about race and difference in sophisticated ways. 

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Start date

Princeton (USA)
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08544

Start date

On request

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Subjects

  • Housing
  • Dance
  • Poetry
  • Music
  • Writing
  • Public
  • Art
  • Politics
  • Latin

Course programme

AAS 201 Introduction to the Study of African American Cultural Practices Fall SA As the introductory course required to concentrate or earn a certificate in African American Studies, this course examines the past and present, the doings and the sufferings of Americans of African descent from a multidisciplinary perspective. It highlights the ways in which serious intellectual scrutiny of the agency of black people in the United States help redefine what it means to be American, new world, modern and postmodern. I. Perry, E. Glaude Jr., N. Murakawa

AAS 202 Introductory Research Methods in African American Studies (also

SOC 202

) Not offered this year SA The purposes of this course are to assist the student in developing the ability to critically evaluate social science research on the black experience and to do research in African studies. To accomplish these goals, the course will acquaint students with the processes of conceptualization and basic research techniques, and some of the unique issues in conducting research on the black experience. A variety of appropriate studies will be utilized. One three-hour seminar. Staff

AAS 211 The American Dance Experience and Africanist Dance Practices (See DAN 211)

AAS 213 The Lucid Black and Proud Musicology of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka (See LCA 213)

AAS 221 Inequality: Class, Race, and Gender (See SOC 221)

AAS 222 Introduction to Hip-Hop Dance (See DAN 222)

AAS 223 An Introduction to the Radical Imagination (See DAN 223)

AAS 230 Topics in African American Studies (also

ENG 231

) Fall LA This course examines the selected non-fiction writings of one of America's most influential essayists and public intellectuals: James Baldwin. Attention will be given to his views on ethics, art, and politics - with particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy. E. Glaude Jr.

AAS 235 Race Is Socially Constructed: Now What? (also

SOC 236

) Spring SA The truism that "race is socially constructed" hides more than it reveals. Have Irish Americans always been white? Are people of African descent all black? Is calling Asian Americans a "model minority" a compliment? Does race impact who we date or marry? In this course, students develop a sophisticated conceptual toolkit to make sense of such contentious cases of racial vision and division as the uprising in Ferguson. We learn to connect contemporary events to historical processes, and individual experiences to institutional policies, exercising a sociological imagination with the potential to not only analyze, but transform the status quo. R. Benjamin

AAS 236 Muslims in America (See NES 238)

AAS 239 Introduction to African Literature and Film (See COM 239)

AAS 245 Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movements (also

ART 245

) Fall LA This course surveys important moments in 20th-Century African American art from the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s to the 1960s Black Arts movement. Our close studies of the work of major artists will be accompanied by examination of influential theories and ideologies of blackness during two key moments of black racial consciousness in the United States. We shall cover canonical artists and writers such as Aaron Douglas, James van der Zee, William H. Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, James Porter and Jeff Donaldson. C. Okeke-Agulu

AAS 256 African American Religious History (See REL 256)

AAS 260 Introduction to African Art (See ART 260)

AAS 261 Art and Politics in Postcolonial Africa (See ART 261)

AAS 262 Jazz History: Many Sounds, Many Voices (See MUS 262)

AAS 263 Bondage and Slaving in Global History (See CLA 225)

AAS 300 Junior Seminar: Research and Writing in African American Studies Fall SA As a required course for AAS concentrators, this junior seminar introduces students to theories and methods of research design in African American Studies. Drawing on a wide-ranging methodological toolkit from the humanities and social sciences, students will learn to reflect on the ethical and political dimensions of original research in order to produce knowledge that is intellectually and socially engaged. This is a writing-intensive seminar with weekly essay assignments. N. Murakawa, J. Guild

AAS 302 Political Bodies: The Social Anatomy of Power & Difference (also

SOC 303

/

ANT 378

/

GHP 302

) Spring SA Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural and political contexts. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics and social problems. The course explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography and citizenship status, carefully examining how social differences come to appear natural. Analyzing clinics, prisons, border zones, virtual realities and more, students develop a conceptual toolkit to analyze how society "gets under the skin", producing differential exposure to premature death. R. Benjamin

AAS 305 The History of Black Gospel Music (also

REL 391

/

MUS 354

/

AMS 355

) Fall LA This course will trace the history of black gospel music from its origins in the American South to its modern origins in 1930s Chicago and into the 1990s mainstream. Critically analyzing various compositions and the artists that performed them, we will explore the ways the musichas reflected and reproached the extant cultural climate. We will be particularly concerned with the four major historical eras from which black gospel music developed: the slave era; Reconstruction; the Great Migration, and the era of Civil Rights. W. Best

AAS 310 American Pentecostalism (See REL 310)

AAS 311 Citizenships Ancient and Modern (See CLA 310)

AAS 312 Special Topics In Urban Dance (See DAN 322)

AAS 313 Modern Caribbean History (also

HIS 213

/

LAS 377

) Spring HA This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison. R. Goldthree, R. Karl

AAS 315 Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Latin America (See SOC 315)

AAS 317 Race and Public Policy (See WWS 331)

AAS 318 Black Women and Spiritual Narrative (also

REL 318

) Spring LA Analyzes narrative accounts of African American women since the 19th century. Drawing on the hypothesis that religious metaphor and symbolism have figured prominently in black women's writing--and writing about black women--across literary genres, the class explores the various ways black women have used their narratives not only to disclose the intimacies of their religious faith, but also to understand and to critique their social context. Students will discuss themes, institutions, and structures that have traditionally shaped black women's experiences, as well as theologies black women have developed in response. One three-hour seminar. W. Best

AAS 319 Caribbean Women's History (also

LAS 368

/

GSS 356

) Spring HA This seminar investigates the historical experiences of women in the Caribbean from the era of European conquest to the late twentieth century. We will examine how shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, class, and the body have shaped understandings of womanhood and women's rights. We will engage a variety of sources - including archival documents, films, newspaper accounts, feminist blogs, music, and literary works - in addition to historical scholarship and theoretical texts. The course will include readings on the Spanish-, English-, and French-speaking Caribbean as well as the Caribbean diaspora. R. Goldthree

AAS 321 Black Power and Its Theology of Liberation (also

REL 321

) Not offered this year HA This course examines the various pieties of the Black Power era. We chart the explicit and implicit utopian visions of the politics of the period that, at once, criticized established black religious institutions and articulated alternative ways of imagining salvation. We also explore the attempt by black theologians to translate the prophetic black church tradition into the idiom of black power. Our aim is to keep in view the significance of the Black Power era for understanding the changing role and place of black religion in black public life. E. Glaude Jr.

AAS 322 Afro-Diasporic Dialogues: Black Activism in Latin America and the United States (also

LAS 301

/

LAO 322

/

AMS 323

) Fall HA This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how black activists and artists from the US have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings. R. Goldthree

AAS 324 Muslims, Jews and Christians in North Africa: Interactions, Conflicts and Memory (See NES 316)

AAS 325 African American Autobiography (also

ENG 393

/

REL 366

) Not offered this year LA Highlights the autobiographical tradition of African Americans from the antebellum period to the present as symbolic representations of African American material, social, and intellectual history and as narrative quests of self-development. Students will be introduced to basic methods of literary analysis and criticism, specifically focusing on cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory on the constructed self. Staff

AAS 327 20th Century Master (also

GSS 368

) Not offered this year LA This special topics course will focus on artists and intellectuals whose corpus reflects and illuminates 20th century African American life. Lorraine Hansberry, the first African American female playright to have a play open on Broadway, explored a series of critical themes in her work, including: race, migration, colonialism, gender and social class. In addition to having a distinguished career as a playright, Hansberry was an activist and advocate for gender and racial justice. Students will study her published and unpublished plays, essays and poetry, as well as relevant social and cultural history and literary criticism. I. Perry

AAS 328 Slavery and Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean (also

LAS 352

) Fall HA This course explores the history of African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean from the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade in the early sixteenth century to Brazilian emancipation in 1888. The course will focus on the lived experiences of enslaved Africans, while also examining the broader social, political, legal, and cultural contexts. The assigned materials will include a variety of written primary and secondary sources, films, and visual images. R. Goldthree

AAS 342 Sisters' Voices: African Women Writers (also

COM 394

/

AFS 342

) Spring LA In this class, we study the richness and diversity of poetry, novels, and memoirs written by African women. The course expands students' understanding of the long history of women's writing across Africa and a range of languages. It focuses on their achievements while foregrounding questions of aesthetics and style. As an antidote to misconceptions of African women as silent, students analyze African women's self-representations and how they theorize social relations within and across ethnic groups, generations, classes, and genders. The course increase students' ability to think, speak, and write critically about gender. W. Belcher

AAS 346 The American Jeremiad and Social Criticism in the United States (See REL 367)

AAS 350 Rats, Riots, and Revolution: Housing in the Metropolitan United States (also

SOC 362

) Spring HA This class examines the history of urban and suburban housing in the twentieth century US. We will examine the relationship between postwar suburban development as a corollary to the "underdevelopment" of American cities contributing to what scholars have described as the "urban crisis" of the 1960s. Housing choice and location were largely shaped by discriminatory practices in the real estate market, thus, the course explores the consequences of the relationship between public policy and private institutions in shaping the metropolitan area including after the passage of federal anti-housing discrimination legislation in the late 1960s. K. Taylor

AAS 351 Law, Social Policy, and African American Women (also

GSS 351

) Spring SA Journeying from enslavement and Jim Crow to the post-civil rights era, this course will learn how law and social policy have shaped, constrained, and been resisted by black women's experience and thought. Using a wide breadth of materials including legal scholarship, social science research, visual arts, and literature, we will also develop an understanding of how property, the body, and the structure and interpretation of domestic relations have been frameworks through which black female subjectivity in the United States was and is mediated. I. Perry

AAS 352 Topics in the Politics of Writing and Difference (See SPA 352)

AAS 353 African American Literature: Origins to 1910 (also

ENG 352

) Fall LA This introductory course focuses on black literature and literary culture from the mid-18th century to the early 20th; it will cover the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Paul L. Dunbar; the political oratory of Sojourner Truth and David Walker; slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs; non-fiction prose by W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper; and Frances Harper's and James Weldon Johnson's novels. In readings, assignments, and discussions, students will explore the unique cultural contexts, aesthetic debates, and socio-political forces that surround the production of an early African American literary tradition. A. Womack

AAS 355 Pleasure, Power and Profit: Race and Sexualities in a Global Era (See GSS 345)

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Undergraduate certificate African American Studies

Price on request

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