This course introduces students to the discipline that studies and compares other cultures. Students learn about the main concepts used in anthropology and how anthropologists conduct research, while also discovering how people live in other times and places. Students will learn about theories that provide frameworks for understanding and comparing cultures. Ethnographies--descriptions of life in particular places--give students factual materials with which to apply and critique such theories. Through this introduction to the study of culture in general, and an exposure to specific cultures, students inevitably come to re-examine some of the premises of their own culture.

This course introduces students to the discipline that studies and compares other cultures. Students learn about the main concepts used in anthropology and how anthropologists conduct research, while also discovering how people live in other times and places. Students will learn about theories that provide frameworks for understanding and comparing cultures. Ethnographies--descriptions of life in particular places--give students factual materials with which to apply and critique such theories. Through this introduction to the study of culture in general, and an exposure to specific cultures, students inevitably come to re-examine some of the premises of their own culture.

A survey of African fiction mainly of the latter half of the twentieth century, focusing on the way Africa's cultural traditions, historical problems, and political objectives have revised and resisted Western narrative forms. What narrative forms develop as a result of the machinations of power in modern Africa? How, for example, does the need to present historical information and political argument to the broadest possible local audience favor realism and popular styles? How have important earlier forms of African fiction evolved in recent years? We'll examine the variety of responses to the Nigerian civil war and other major political events ; and how the impact of modernization on traditional life and the problem of post-independence corruption call for unique forms of treatment in different times and places. Related topics include the transmission of oral culture into literary form, the impact of external patronage on local literary cultures, the influence of writers educated abroad on literature at home, and, most importantly, the result of the African effort to "decolonize" literary forms of expression. We will read selections from critical and nonfiction works (including Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Decolonising the Mind, Ayei Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest?, Kofi Anyudoho's The Pan African Ideal in Literatures of the Black World, and Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature, and the African World); and fiction by Ngugi, Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Hama Tuma, Nuruddin Farah, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Okri, and Bessie Head. This course meets the post-1900 requirement. Prerequisite: junior or senior standing; or ENGL 210-291; or permission of instructor. Offered every third year.

In August 1619, "twenty and odd negars" were traded for food by the crew of a Dutch sailing vessel. That commercial transaction represented the first recorded incident of a permanent African presence in America. Over the next 146 years, this population of Africans would grow to create an African-American population of over four million. The overwhelming majority of this population was enslaved. This course will be an examination of those enslaved millions and their free black fellows--who they were, how they lived, and how the nation was transformed by their presence and experience. Particular attention will be paid to the varieties of African-American experience and how slavery and the presence of peoples of African descent shaped American social, political, intellectual, and economic systems. Students will be presented with a variety of primary and secondary source materials; timely and careful reading of these sources will prepare students for class discussions. Students will be confronted with conflicting bodies of evidence and challenged to analyze these issues and arrive at conclusions for themselves. Fulfills the history major and minor premodern requirement.

This class examines various ways that people and ideas from the United States have influenced Africa during the past two centuries and how Africans have responded to that involvement. Although much interaction has been at the institutional level of governments and organizations, we will focus primarily on the history of U.S.-African relations at the personal and local level within Africa, studying specific examples of trans-Atlantic cultural, economic, and political influence that changed over time and varied between different parts of Africa. Among the cases to be considered will be several involving African Americans, such as the founding of Liberia and the development of Pan-Africanism. Other topics will include Christian missionaries, explorers, the Cold War, and recent U.S. political, economic, and humanitarian interest in Africa. There are no prerequisites.

This course will discuss black women of the Atlantic world, from Africa to the United States, the Caribbean, and South America, from the seventeenth century to the present. We will pay particular attention to commonalities among black women of the Atlantic world. The course will examine the impact on black women of the Atlantic slave trade, enslavement, and colonialism. The course will also examine the status of black women cross-culturally, as well as social organization, race, class, and culture. Lastly, the course will analyze the role of black women both in the struggle for freedom and in the women's movement. Works of fiction and films will be used extensively.

This course explores the contours of the religious expressions of the African Diaspora in the Americas. It will survey various Orisha traditions in Cuba, Brazil, the United States, and Trinidad and Tobago; Regla de Palo and Abakua in Cuba; Kumina in Jamaica; Vodou in Haiti and the United States; Afro-Christians Traditions in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana; and Rastafari in Jamaica and beyond. The course will pay close attention to the social history of these traditions, their understanding of universe, their social structure, and their rituals and ceremonies. The aim of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the formation and history, the major beliefs and ceremonies, the leadership and community structure, and the social and cultural significance of these religious traditions.

This mid-level course focuses on the American legal system's effect on racial, ethnic, and minority groups in the United States as well as on the manner in which such groups have influenced the state of the "law" in this country. It is intended to stimulate critical and systematic thinking about the relationships among American legal institutions and selected racial, ethnic, and minority populations. The class will examine various social and cultural conditions, as well as historical and political events, that were influenced in large part by the minority status of the participants. These conditions will be studied to determine in what ways, if any, the American legal system has advanced, accommodated, or frustrated the interests of these groups. Through exposure to the legislative process and legal policymaking, students should gain an appreciation for the complexity of the issues and the far-reaching impact that legal institutions have on the social, political, and economic condition of racial, ethnic, and minority groups in America. The primary requirement of this course is completion of a comprehensive research project. Prerequisite: introductory sociology course (100 level) or permission of instructor. This course may be counted toward the law and society concentration, African diaspora concentration and the American studies major.