This course examines the lives and legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker. These three figures were central to the Black Freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century and stand as examples of different models of leadership and organizing that remain influential today. Through their biographies and writings, we will examine the complexities of the Black Freedom movement, the overlap and contrasts of their philosophies, and their styles of leadership. Biography and primary source material will guide our efforts.

This topic examines the nature of race & racism at the heart of the American project through a historical lens of wealth creation, labor markets, political culture, social institutions, immigration, human rights, foreign relations, & civic life. Drawing on African American & immigration history, (post) colonial studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies, students will gain historical knowledge required for leadership in a 21st century, multi-racial democracy. Students who plan to work in non-profits, government agencies and policy circles will also gain analytical tools to help lead institutions in an ever more diverse world.

Global Blackness is a cross-disciplinary transnational multi-lingual survey course that will introduce students to a range of texts, including film, literature and popular culture produced by and about Black people outside of the United States. Students will learn about the legacy of European expansion in Africa and the Americas, the impact of the transatlantic slave trade beyond the United States, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in places like Haiti and Eritrea, as well as engage with a diversity of Black cultural art, identities, politics, social movements, and expressions that come from these knowledges and beyond.

What is the structural in structural racism? Founding Father John Jay insisted that "those who own the country ought to govern it," and many features of the U.S. constitutional system actively protect and incentivize racism, capital accumulation, and resource hoarding. This course gives particular attention to the two-party system; the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College; the U.S. tax code and welfare state; the reality and mythology of civil rights and anti-discrimination law; and the criminal legal system.

This course surveys history of African American art during the long 20th-century, from the individual striving of late 19th century to the unprecedented efflorescence of art and culture in 1920s Harlem; from the retrenchment in black artistic production during the era of the Great Depression, to the rise of racially conscious art inspired by the Civil Rights Movement; from black feminist art in the 1970s, to the age of American multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s; and finally to the turn of the present century when ambitious "postblack" artists challenge received notions of black art and racial subjectivity.

This course examines the lives, labors, cultures, and experiences of Black women in the United States from slavery to Emancipation and throughout the twentieth century. The class will pay particular development to the historical, social, economic and political factors that contributed to the rise of Black feminist consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s.

This course investigates the political, social, and aesthetic conditions that shaped the development of 19th-century African American literary culture. As we read across genres and archives, will develop a deep understanding of the key questions and preoccupations that animate an African American literary tradition.

This lecture offers an introduction to the major themes, critical questions, and pivotal moments in post-emancipation African American history. It traces the social, political, cultural, intellectual, and legal contours of the Black experience in the United States from Reconstruction to the rise of Jim Crow, through the World Wars, Depression, and the Great Migrations, to the long civil rights era and the contemporary period of racial politics. Using a wide variety of texts, images, and creative works, the course situates African American history within broader national and international contexts.

As a required course for AAS majors, 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 to produce knowledge that is intellectually and socially engaged. This is a writing-intensive seminar with weekly essay assignments.

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. We aim 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.

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, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered 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.

This course is designed to introduce students to the relationship of the museum as a history-specific institution which arose in the late 18th and early 19th century in Western Europe (and then, the United States), and its relationship to colonial medicine. The course also asks students to imagine other models of medicine and practices of curation juxtaposing historical case studies with current debates in museology and curatorial praxis, around collection histories and the possibility of transforming the museum into a space of healing and repair. Collection visits at Princeton and field trips to Philadelphia will form part of the course.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

This course explores the continuities and ruptures, the striking similarities and the radical differences between Black freedom struggles from the 1960s to the present. Putting #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives in historical context, the course considers the history and legacy of the civil rights, Black Power, and anti-apartheid movements. In thinking about freedom movements past and present, we will pay particular attention to questions of philosophy, strategy, leadership, organization, and coalition building.

Through the course of study, readings, and lectures, majors apply their AAS knowledge into developing independent writing and research assignments, leading to the senior thesis. In AAS, the thesis is the culminating research informed by a student's subfield and a subject of inquiry of the student's choosing. Majors will workshop their thesis for clarity and improvement and also practice becoming conversant about their research by contextualizing their work alongside pertinent contemporary issues and news stories.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

Why do certain populations have longer life expectancies? Is it behavior, genes, structural inequalities? And why should the government care? This course unpacks taken-for-granted concepts like race, evidence-based medicine, and even the public health focus on equalizing life expectancies. From questions of racism in the clinic to citizenship and the Affordable Care Act, 'Race and Medicine' takes students on a journey of rethinking what constitutes social justice in health care.

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games in a global age. We consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies to scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences within U.S. and Japanese media. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize race, advancing an intersectional approach that accounts for class, gender, and sexuality.

This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film and also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson's policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson's legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.

A studio course introducing students to African dance practices and aesthetics, with a focus on how its evolution has influenced American and African American culture, choreographers and dancers. An ongoing study of movement practices from traditional African dances and those of the African Diaspora, touching on American jazz dance, modern dance, and American ballet. Studio work will be complemented by readings, video viewings, guest speakers, and dance studies.

Assumptions and practices by the nonprofit industrial complex, government agencies and affordable housing developers treat poor communities, especially poor communities of color as problems to be managed by those from outside these communities. The Reclamation Studio explores the humanistic design practices applied by social entrepreneurs from low-status communities near Princeton (our "clients") that counteract that history of systemic bias with innovative development projects designed to retain the talent from within their communities. Students will have the opportunity to learn from, and contribute to their efforts.

The readings and discussions will consider how the literature and arts of Haiti affirm, contest, and bear witness to historical narratives concerning the world's first black republic. The course will sample an array of historical accounts, novels, Afro-Caribbean religion (Vodun), plays, music, film, and visual arts of this unique postcolonial nation.

This course is an examination of the major political and economic trends in twentieth-century African history. It offers an interpretation of modern African history and the sources of its present predicament. In particular, we study the foundations of the colonial state, the legacy of the late colonial state (the period before independence), the rise and problems of resistance and nationalism, the immediate challenges of the independent states (such as bureaucracy and democracy), the more recent crises (such as debt and civil wars) on the continent, and the latest attempts to address these challenges from within the continent.

This course examines the history of modern Brazil from the late colonial period to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions challenge prevailing narratives about modernity to highlight instead the role played by indigenous and African descendants in shaping Brazilian society. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous rights; uneven economic development and Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization.

This course proposes a counter-narrative of the myths and fantasies that have been created about the Caribbean and of the historical and cultural realities surrounding them. Through a close reading of literary, artistic, critical, and historical texts we will examine race, ethnic, and gender identity constructions; the rise of the plantation economy; and the emergence of modern nations. The relationship between coloniality and the emergence of diasporic Caribbean voices of dissidence will be a guiding tone for our conversations throughout the semester as we unpack the links between colonialism and diaspora in the Caribbean.

Students will engage with broad questions of democratic health in the U.S. They will also gain direct training on original data collection. The data elements of the course focus on factors that can serve as objective indicators of access to the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship in the U.S., across time and geography. In short, students will develop their research skills while helping to build a public good - the first democracy index of the United States that accounts for subnational differences in the quality of democracy due to racial climate and institutional context.

This course will analyze the role of cinema in the construction (and deconstruction) of national and transnational identities and discourses in the Portuguese-speaking world. We will examine recurring cultural topics in a wide variety of films from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa and Asia, situating works within their socio-historical contexts and tracing the development of national cinemas and their interaction with global aesthetics and trends. Through these cinematographic productions we will illuminate complex relationships between Portuguese-speaking societies and analyze significant cross-cultural differences and similarities.

The enslavement and colonization of Africans disarticulated African and Afro-Diasporic historical time and social memory, fragmented by the dispersion and oppression of their/our bodies, cultures, and territories. Lately, memory has reclaimed a central space in politics, particularly concerning minorities, and cinema has become a privileged medium of/for memory. We explore film genres, topics, and aesthetics seen in African and Afro-Brazilian cinemas to recreate pasts, presents, and futures, exploring different forms of memory, from traditional archives (documents, pictures) to memory as an embodied, practiced, and inscribed presence.

This course explores the history of Black religions from the colonial times to the present. We study African American religions within and in relation to the African Diaspora and how various forces of modernity have shaped Black religions and the resilience and ingenuity of Black people across the centuries. Students will come away with an enhanced sense of the complexities of Black religious life through explorations of race and religion, religion and resistance, and the emergence of New Religious Movements like the Black Hebrews, Buddhists and Hip Hop.

In this course we engage questions of approach, method, periodization, and scope in the study of religion in America through the Civil War. Texts consist of secondary literature with both classic and contemporary importance to the field, along with brief primary sources selected and presented by students.

Analyzes the historical construction of race as a concept in American society, how and why this concept was institutionalized publicly and privately in various arenas of U.S. public life at different historical junctures, and the progress that has been made in dismantling racialized institutions since the civil rights era.

This course immerses students in the dynamic world of South African physical theatre. Through full-body training, improvisation, and ensemble work, students explore movement as protest, storytelling, and community-building. Inspired by Lecoq's teachings of the four core elements namely Earth, Air, Fire and Water; we will dive into building a performance vocabulary based on gesture, rhythm, and space. Students create original performances, using the body as the primary text, culminating in a showcase of devised physical theatre work.