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 focuses on the networks, the imaginaries and the lives inhabited by Black artists, makers, and subjects from the 18th through 19th centuries. It revolves around the Caribbean (particularly the Anglophone Caribbean), North America and Europe. We will reflect on how pre-twentieth century Black artists are written into history or written out of it. We will explore the aesthetic innovation of these artists and the visionary worlds they created, and examine their travels, their writings, along with the social worlds and communities they formed. The course incorporates lectures and readings and, if possible, museum visits.

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.

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 to produce knowledge that is intellectually and socially engaged. This is a writing-intensive seminar with weekly essay assignments.

This course explores the intellectual history of scientific racism, paying close attention to how its theories influence power and institutions today. Reading primary sources from the history of science, each class will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health. Our conversations will consistently analyze the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and age in the legacies of scientific racism. We will also examine the impact of scientific racism in public discourse about the Black Lives Matter Movement and collectively brainstorm for activism towards restorative justice.

This course surveys the major debates and conundrums that shaped Black political life from the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The primary aim of the course will be to introduce students to concepts, events, and themes that are central to the study of contemporary racial politics. For example, students will learn about the determinants of Black political behavior, the effects of intra- and inter-group conflict on Black politics, the relationship between politics and popular culture, the limits of formal political representation, etc.

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 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.

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.

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.

The course examines how issues of race and gender shape the medical, social, and cultural discourses of reproduction. It will explore contested meanings of reproductive health alongside histories of eugenics, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, emerging reproductive technologies, and reproductive justice activism. It will also address the enduring legacies of racism and reproductive violence in medical practice, and their impact on current issues of health inequality.

This course explores the evolution of Black literature and literary culture from the mid-18th century to the early 20th. Moving across a range of genres - from poetry to drama to fiction - and mediums - from the periodical to the bound novel - we will interrogate the relationship between literary form, aesthetics, and cultural politics, while developing a deep understanding of the emergence of 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.

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.

Massive protests in the summer of 2020 reignited discussions about the most effective path to equality. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) have been thrust into the spotlight as a site for potential cross-racial cooperation and space for redress. This course will explore persistent inequality in American education through the lens of these colleges that were created in the shadow of emancipation. It will focus on history and impact of HBCUs on African American life and culture, their role in the political and cultural development of the nation and the possibilities they represent in efforts to create "a more perfect union."

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games. As we consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies, we scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize and interact with race and, in doing so, we advance an intersectional approach that also accounts for class, gender, and sexuality. The course's core set of theoretical and methodological tools helps students to engage with gaming critically and to create alternative games in the future.

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

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.

In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.

Resistance to imperial expansion and exploitation is a familiar theme of twentieth-century projects of Black liberation. Less familiar are the specific, but no less significant, cases where empire is imagined as a source of Black freedom and self-determination. This seminar surveys U.S.-originating works of Black imperial representation and critique from the 1900s to the present. Framed by readings of historical and speculative fiction, the seminar engages scholarly debates on Blackness, diaspora, coloniality, and empire through writings by Sylvia Wynter, Adom Getachew, Nadia Nurhussein, and Erica R. Edwards.

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century whose writings are critical in rethinking our world. In this course we will read all of Fanon's major writings: Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as essays in Alienation and Freedom. Students must acquire and read David Macey's biography, Frantz Fanon: A Life, before the seminar begins.

What constitutes the current conjuncture in global environmental governance, and in what ways and to what ends is biological life-human and non-human-made part of neoliberal environmental projects? This course will use the concept of neoliberal natures to explore the challenges rapid global environmental change pose for conservation, sustainability and ecosystem health in the contemporary era. We consider the ecological and political implications of growing efforts to enroll material nature in market-based environmental schemes, and explore how these schemes unfold across different contexts to shape social and environmental sustainability.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Ethiopia underwent rapid processes of expansion and modernization in the highlands of Northeast Africa, and at the same time became a beacon of hope for global Black movements, perhaps made most visible through Rastafarian culture and beliefs. This course introduces students to the history of the modern Ethiopian state and its role shaping moments and movements in global history. It highlights the way African histories are essential to, but often ignored (or erased) in the telling of modern world history. Students will engage with primary and secondary historical texts, literature, and film.

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 surveys the history of cities in the United States from colonial settlement to the present. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of "melting pots" and cutting-edge innovation, as well as urban crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment.

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.

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the literature of African-American History, from the colonial era up to more recent times. Major themes and debates are highlighted. The course should help students to define interests within the field to pursue further study and research and also to aid preparation for examinations.

This course will explore the intellectual history of race, gender, and sexuality in Latin America. We will first analyze the representation of these intersections in reggaetón and Latin trap. Students will then examine the impact of conquest, colonization, and slavery in the rise of racial categories and heteronormative gender norms in the history of Latin America. Furthermore, we will focus on multiple case studies, such as the legacies of the Haitian Revolution, the history of racial genocide in Puerto Rico, the Hollywood representation of Latin America, and colorist beauty standards in Brazil and Mexico.

This course examines various political controversies that surround the role of race and ethnicity in American society. These controversies and issues affect public opinion, political institutions, political behavior, and salient public policy debates. Thus this course will assess and evaluate the role of race in each of these domains while also examining historical antecedents. 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 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections.

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 seminar we examine how the modern constructed categories of "race" and "religion" have interacted in American history and culture. We explore how religious beliefs and practices have shaped ideas about race and how American racialization has shaped religious experience. We consider the impact of religion and race on notions of what it means to be American and how these have changed over time. Topics include race and biblical interpretation; religion and racial slavery; religion, race, and science; popular culture representations; race, religion, and politics; and religious resistance to racial hierarchy.

How have racial and ethnic inequalities in housing and neighborhood development become hallmarks of many U.S. cities? This course focuses on the complex topics of race and racism from a spatial perspective, paying particular attention to the effects of interlocking systems of oppression on primarily urban African-American communities. However, we will not just examine the built environment of such communities. People shape and are shaped by the places they physically occupy. We, therefore, also delve into the narratives and everyday experiences of racialized city dwellers through the social sciences, the humanities, and media.

This course studies contemporary representations of Black Europeans in film, music, and popular culture in dialogue with critical works about diaspora, citizenship, and transnational blackness. We will read critical works by scholars who focus on Black Europe including,Tiffany Florvil (Germany), Grada Kilomba (Portugal), SA Smythe (Italy) among others as we explore different ways in which Black European artists engage with questions of national and transnational belonging. Students will write, conduct research, and engage in hands-on creative film and media projects as they think critically along with the various cultural and critical texts.