How do we know what we know in Black studies? How does what we know translate into action? How can informed action transform the world? In this course, students will examine the relationship between thought and practice, ways of knowing the world, and ways of remaking it by engaging a range of texts, media, art, and movements that diagnose the present-past while prefiguring a world in which many worlds fit.

Roderick Ferguson's concept of "Queer of Color Critique" is a method grounded in intersectional feminism which allows us to consider the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality and how economic and political systems are linked to queer identity. We will use Ferguson's methods to examine Black LGBTQ+ representation across various media including documentaries, television, social media, and literature. And we will consider what queer theory has to say about identity formation, spirituality, space making, resistance, and definitions of freedom.

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 a particular consideration given to his critical reflections on race and democracy.

The course traces how anti-Black racism shaped the development of western medicine in the Americas. It will examine how ideas of anti-Blackness shaped the work of health practitioners and the experiences of patients. It will engage the emergence of racial science and scientific racism, and how they contributed to the production of medical knowledge. It will also address the enduring legacies of anti-Black racism in medical practice, and its impact on health inequality.

The Virgin Mary is the world's most storied person. Countless tales have been told about the miracles she has performed for the faithful who call upon her. Although many assume that African literature was only oral, not written, until the arrival of Europeans, Africans began writing stories about her by 1200 CE in the languages of Ethiopic, Coptic, & Arabic. This course explores this body of medieval African literature and paintings, preserved in African Christian monasteries, studying their themes of healing, reparative justice, & personal ethics in a violent world. It develops skills in the digital humanities & comparative literary studies.

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.

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.

In this course, students will engage the archive of contemporary Black speculative fiction and Black studies scholarship to interrogate the possibilities and limits of the Black radical imagination as it appears in fantasy, horror, graphic fiction, and other genres. Students will read narrative fiction written after the Black Arts Movement to interrogate what the speculative offers in terms of thinking about Black worlds. The course argues that speculative writing-narrative fiction and theoretical writing-gesture to other social and political modes of thinking about and being in the world.

This course explores the history of intellectual appropriation of Blackness through an intersectional lens. We will first focus on intellectual appropriation within the entertainment industry and social media. Students will then analyze the historical connection between intellectual erasures, racialized enslavement, and colonialism. This course will also closely examine Blackfishing, the memeification of Black celebrities, and the intellectual appropriation of Black emotionality and struggles.

Students will examine histories of and historiographical debates over sex and gender within Black communities. The following questions will orient the course: How have issues of sex and gender been articulated, used, or represented within the context of Black life? To what extent has the study of racialized gender/sexuality changed over time? Which methods have researchers taken up to pursue this line of research? And, what uses, limitations and ethical dilemmas do different modes of historical inquiry pose when deployed in the study of racialized gender/sexuality? Three subjects anchor the course: AIDS, the "closet," and gender mutability.

Are robots racist? Is software sexist? Are neural networks neutral? From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed up, and even deepen discrimination. Using the Black Mirror TV series as a starting point, we will explore a range of emerging technologies that encode inequity in digital platforms and automated decision systems, and develop a conceptual toolkit to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. Students will apply design justice principles in a collaborative project and learn to communicate course insights to tech practitioners, policymakers, and the broader public.

A survey of 20th- and 21st-century African American literature, including the tradition's key aesthetic manifestos. Special attention to how modern African American literature fits into certain periods and why certain innovations in genre and style emerged when they did. Poetry, essays, novels, popular fiction, a stage production or two, and related visual texts.

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.

This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.

This course we will undertake the deceptively simple question: how do we read Toni Morrison? In taking up this task, we will devote our attention to various scenes and sites of reading across Morrison's oeuvre, asking how Morrison is encouraging us to read history, slavery, violence, geography, time, space, gender, and friendship. We will also engage with Morrison's own status as a reader by considering her work as an editor and literary critic. Through regular engagement with the Toni Morrison Papers housed at Firestone we will consider what it means to be able to read Morrison in such close proximity to these archival materials.

In this course, we will develop a history of concepts in Black Studies and explore concepts that are often taken for granted - like freedom, revolution, culture, and politics. We will throw them into crisis to better understand the liminal underpinnings of many of our long-held theoretical and conceptual assumptions. By placing pressure on the concepts upon which we rely, we offer ourselves and those around us alternate terrains of thought and struggle. Much of our exploration and interrogation of these concepts will mobilize the creative theoretical and literary conceptual articulations of Sylvia Wynter.

This interdisciplinary seminar introduces graduate students to African American intellectual traditions. Reading across disciplines and genres, we engage theories and histories of racial formation, racial capitalism, slavery and empire, social movements, and cultural representation. Particular attention is paid to Black radicalism, to the ways various thinkers have imagined the relationship between theory and praxis, and to Black intellectual activity as a dynamic site of both critique and knowledge production.

This course explores the relationship between, sex, sexuality, and religion in the United States over the last two centuries. We employ historical methodologies to trace how sex and sexuality have been contested and contentious issues within certain American religious contexts and focus on how religiously informed notions of sex and sexuality have touched every area of American life, including popular culture, politics, and the law. Sex not only "sells" as the old adage states, but the control and/or prohibition of sex and sexuality have set the terms for most aspects of American society.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

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.

The seminar explores philosophical intersections of race and architecture, revealing Blackness as a negative aesthetic formation in historical and theoretical discourses. The transfiguration of Blackness from "inferior" historical racial sign to compelling architectonic language parallels John Dewey's formulations on rhetoric and "becoming." The result is a new spatial rhetoric founded on Blackness. Blackness is discussed as an aesthetic principle rather than a strictly socio-political condition. The distinction allows us to understand how race and architecture coexist.

The seminar takes as its starting point that Black life consists of among other things a series of discontinuous frequencies. Understanding Black life's frequencies as both complexly material and deeply abstract, we ask: What can frequency offer us as a way of understanding Black life? What insights does it provide for responding to anti-Blackness? How might it help us to see, hear, and feel the power of Black life's irrepressible desire and drive toward creating a different kind of present and future? Lastly, how might attending to Black frequencies offer us new sites of possibility?

"Identity politics" has become a derogatory term across the political left and right to name divergent ills shaping contemporary US political culture. Yet present usages stem far from those of the Black queer feminists/socialists who coined the term in 1977. Why have "identity politics" become such a malleable anti-hero? How do Asian Americans figure in these debates? Through the work of Black feminists, postcolonial theorists, and activists, we will explore the liberatory and fraught nature of identity-based movement, tracing how negotiations of difference across gender, racialization, immigration status, and ability shape political culture.

Students in this course will work with Princeton Arts Fellow Michael J. Love and his collaborators, film-based artist Ariel René Jackson and rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown, Jr., to develop a new multi-channel video and live performance installation - to feature video by Jackson, live performance by the students (choreographed and directed by Love), and an electronic music-based composition by Brown. Students will engage with curated readings and media, lectures by Love, Jackson, and Brown, and weekly technique classes and choreography rehearsals. The course will culminate in a live performance and exhibition

Poet Patricia Smith, Poet and Executive Director of JustMedia Mahogany Browne, and choreographer Davalois Fearon will collaborate through the course to craft a multimedia theatrical production that shines an unflinching light on the problem of missing black women and girls. In 2020, 268,884 women were reported missing, and nearly 100,000 were Black women and girls but there is a huge disparity in how the cases of Black missing girls and women are treated by media and law enforcement. The artists will work with students interested in music, theater, and dance to assemble the production, which will then be performed for the Princeton community.

Students will collaborate with legal scholar Patricia Williams, literary historian Autumn Womack, and guest artists and performers to creatively explore the theatrical and performative archives that animate what we'll understand as black (gendered) legal performances. We will investigate a range of sites - from the Margaret Garner trial to Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing - and the embodied, visual and sonic histories that score them. Alongside filmmakers, visual artists, and performers, students will construct a multi-modal creative record that fills in the silences and supplements the noise that accompanies these trials.

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.

This introductory survey course gives equal weight to scholarly study and embodied practice, using both approaches to explore a range of hip-hop dance techniques, as well as the cultural and historical contexts from which these dances emerged. Special attention will be given to breaking - the most prominent hip-hop form - as a foundation for exploring other forms of movement. By critically exploring these physical and historical connections, individuals will adapt and apply their own philosophies to dance in order to develop a personalized style.

The course will focus on postcolonial writing from the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which have come increasingly to be viewed as sites where issues of global import are conspicuously articulated. Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, questions to be discussed will feature some that loom especially large: the genesis of a distinct multiethnic and multilingual community; the phenomena of migration and diaspora; ongoing tensions between former colonies now incorporated, as peripheral departments, by the "center," that is, France and the European Union; and not least, the matter of geography and the environment.

This class is designed so that students can discover, recognize and debate two key objectives on Black entrepreneurship and business history: 1) Celebrate the achievements and resilience of the Black entrepreneurial community over the history of the country, and 2) explore the social, cultural and legal obstacles Black entrepreneurs faced and the impact of those obstacles until present day.

Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean Literature: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt. These past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean in ways that necessitate attention to gender, race, and environment.

This course will focus on two "representative men" of the nineteenth century. It will propose that Emerson and Douglass are two of America's greatest defenders, precisely because they are its greatest mourners. While they point to America's unfulfilled promise of universal representation, they seek to realize it in their own acts of writing. This course attends to these writers' relations to the period's broader discourses surrounding race, ecology, empire, and nation-building. Alongside Emerson and Douglass, we will read short texts by naturalists, politicians, and activists such as J.B. Lamarck, James Madison, and Ida B. Wells.

This course explores the recent intellectual history of media, sex, and the racialized body. We will analyze the representation of the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in film, advertisements, the fashion industry, reality TV, animation, and music videos. This course will also closely examine the predominance of White heteronormativity in film, the representation of gender in K-pop and K-dramas, and the hypersexualization of Blackness and Latinidad in Blaxploitation films and telenovelas.

This course explores the intellectual history of the racialization of beauty. We will begin by analyzing how the history of Atlantic slavery and scientific racism set precedents for the contemporary dominant conceptualization of beauty in the body, art, and nature. Students will then concentrate on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in beauty pageants, advertising, and the plastic surgery industry. This course will also closely examine racialized fat phobia, the racial politics of hair, transnational colorism, and racialized exploitation in beauty service work.

This course explores the recent history of ideas about contemporary unfreedom, focusing on the influence of discourses about race, gender, and sexuality. We will study how scientific racism and racial capitalism fuel contemporary slavery. Students will analyze how the silencing of the pervasiveness of contemporary slavery is tied to the narrative of "abolition" and the globalization of economic dynamics based on the exploitation of predominantly people of color. This course will also examine the racialization of child exploitation, survivor criminalization, and representation of unfreedom in anti-trafficking campaigns.

From "Chinese opium" to Oxycontin, and from cocaine and "crack" to BiDil, drug controversies reflect enduring debates about the role of medicine, the law, the policing of ethnic identity, and racial difference. This course explores the history of controversial substances (prescription medicines, over-the-counter products, black market substances, psychoactive drugs), and how, from cigarettes to alcohol and opium, they become vehicles for heated debates over immigration, identity, cultural and biological difference, criminal character, the line between legality and illegality, and the boundaries of the normal and the pathological.

The history of the Americas is indelibly marked by mass, violent, racialized enslavement. How did this come about - and how can, and should, we write about it? This class will explore different primary sources, consider the ethical issues they raise, and read brilliant recent work by leading historians of the subject. It will focus mainly on the overlooked epicenter of North American slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries: the islands of the British West Indies, Barbados and Jamaica. It is intended to be collaborative, and to strengthen students' ability to write successful junior and senior theses in history or in any other subject.

How have Black healers and communities conceived of health and healing throughout history? Notions of health and healing and healing practices in the "Black Atlantic" (inclusive of Africa and the Americas) from the era of slavery to the present are the focus of this course. Students will engage with primary sources, historical and sociological scholarship, and historical documentaries concerning healing and Black life.

Major U.S. news outlets have a long history of excluding, misrepresenting and maligning Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian communities. In fact, a significant portion of America's news business was built on the publication of ads for the sale and capture of enslaved people. In this course, we will explore the ways that journalists have succeeded and failed in covering marginalized racial communities, both in the distant and the more recent past. Students will study many examples of excellent reporting on race and take on their own original enterprise assignment, learning to find, pitch, report and write a polished, newsworthy feature story.

This course examines what it means to be Caribbean, or of Caribbean descent, in the diaspora- either the United States, England, and France due to their stake in colonizing the Caribbean in the quest for imperial power and modernity, and how Caribbean culture has been defined in historical and contemporary contexts through a survey of Caribbean diasporic literature. In this course students will learn how legacies of colonialism and modernity affect Caribbean populations and how they negotiate empire, identity, language, culture, and notions of home.

This course explores transnational and diasporic formations of race in the Americas. Drawing on Ethnic Studies, Latin American Studies, and anthropological and historical approaches, we explore racial formations in Latin America and its transnational communities. A central goal for this course is to understand race and racial formations as culturally contextualized and situated within the politics of difference. How are U.S. racial-ethnic categories embraced, contested, or reconfigured across the Americas, and vice versa? Topics include multiculturalism, mestizaje, border thinking, transnationalism, and racial democracy among others.

A study of classical art songs written by composers of African descent in the United States, the Americas and Europe. A survey of the rise of classical art song after the American Civil War, 1865 to the present. Course will cover the social and political obstacles that black composers faced, the repertoire composed and the singers and other musicians who performed the music. Course will involve lectures, guest speakers and performance, culminating in a written project and public vocal recital. Students will have a final paper and those who wish to publicly perform in the recital will be encouraged to do so. Musical background is not required.

A creative performance lab that engages spoken word, storytelling, devised theatre and physical movement to explore domestic and international structures of liberation, expression, oppression, social movements, and political power. Research assignments, as well as observations and analysis of masterworks, including Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Ntozke Shange's For Colored Girls, and the documentary film series Plutocracy, will generate critical responses to theories of decolonization, power structures, as well as political and domestic forms of violence and peace.

This course will examine the musical, historical, and cultural aspects of jazz throughout its entire history, looking at the 20th century as the breeding ground for jazz in America and beyond. During this more than one hundred year period, jazz morphed and fractured into many different styles and voices, all of which will be considered. In addition to the readings, the course will place an emphasis on listening to jazz recordings, and developing an analytical language to understand these recordings. A central goal is to understand where jazz was, is, and will be in the future, examining the musicians and the music that has kept jazz alive.

The 14th Amendment is the centerpiece of constitutional debates about equality. This class explores the development and ongoing debates over the 14th Amendment, including the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. We also give attention to some additional statutes, notably Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The readings will largely be rooted in decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, with a focus on race, sex, sexuality, religion, and disability. What constitutes discrimination and 'anti-discrimination'? What ought to be the goal for understanding equality, diversity, and acceptance?

African Americans in the United States have encountered myriad barriers to their quest for inclusion. Drawing on a mix of history and social science, we will come to understand why certain segments of America oppose the full inclusion of African Americans. We will also discuss the political strategies undertaken by the Black community to combat social, political, and economic injustices. The first half of the course will focus on historical antecedents such as the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. The second half of the course will focus on the nature of contemporary racial attitudes in the 21st century.

Short stories and music will serve as vehicles for a deeper understanding of the major political and social shifts that have affected the landscape of the Contemporary Portuguese-speaking world. We will hear an array of voices and delve into a diversity of narratives as we explore the interconnected historical, social, political, and cultural aspects of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Timor-Leste.

Through literature, film, music, and archive, we will explore how race, as a form of human hierarchization, shaped and connected the history, cultures, and social realities of Brazil, Portuguese-Speaking Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, among others), and Portugal. We will examine how racial discourses changed throughout time and operate today in those spaces through key historical moments and topics such as slavery, colonization, race-mixing, fascism, military dictatorship, decolonization, migration, contemporary urban life, Indigenous thought, and Afro-futurism. Readings and discussions will be entirely in English.

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.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? Drawing on history, social-scientific research, and reporting, this seminar will attempt to unravel this question. Weekly, we will discuss a topic central to understanding the causes and consequences of, and solutions to, American poverty. We will take field trips, welcome guests, and collaborate on projects to abolish poverty.

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.

Prejudice is one of the most contentious topics in modern American society. There is debate regarding its causes, pervasiveness, and impact. This goal of this course is to familiarize students with the psychological research relevant to these questions. We will review theoretical perspectives on prejudice to develop an understanding of its cognitive, affective, and motivational underpinnings. We will also discuss how these psychological biases relate to evaluations of, and behavior toward, members of targeted groups. In addition, research-based strategies for reducing prejudice will be discussed.

We will explore the foundations of black performance theory, drawing from the fields of performance studies, theater, dance, and black studies. Using methods of ethnography, archival studies, and black theatrical and dance paradigms, we will learn how scholars and artists imagine, complicate, and manifest various forms of blackness across time and space. In particular, we will focus on blackness as both lived experience and as a mode of theoretical inquiry.

Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community. This course will explore the material culture of this community from three perspectives: Architecture + Location, Visual Artists and Exhibitions, and Black Queer BDSM communities with a significant research focus on finding and presenting new materials. We will consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera.

This seminar examines the radical possibilities of collaboration as fundamentally a process of radical composition through which collaborators bridge different modalities of creative expression - textual composition, artistic composition, speculative composition, among others - that span multiple media, forms and practices. By modeling and exploring collaboration as radical composition, this course seeks to reframe it as more than a dynamic of participation and coordination, and to recognize it as a generative methodology for producing critical scholarly and creative work.