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. Students will engage in a semester-long project in the form of a "Collaboratory" that creatively addresses a pressing social problem using course concepts and methods.

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.

The politics of the representation of slavery and abolition are visible everywhere right now in contemporary culture - from monument removals, to school curricula bans, to art that provokes us to "imagine successful slave revolts" (Dread Scott, 2019). In this course, students engage with how the history of slavery and abolition is remembered and invoked in the present in museums, news, social movements, rhetoric, policy, and public space. By situating our inquiry in the racial foundations of colonial modernity, and foregrounding structural continuities and discontinuities, we will analyze the political work various representations accomplish.

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.

Born in the late 1800s, the New Negro movement demanded political equality, desegregation, and an end to lynching, while also launching new forms of international Black cultural expression. The visionary modernity of its artists not only reimagined the history of the Black diaspora by developing new artistic languages through travel, music, religion and poetry, but also shaped modernism as a whole in the 20th century. There are required museum trips, mostly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Harlem Renaissance exhibition and to museums in Philadelphia. These trips will take place in lieu of a class meeting.

This seminar examines Black Latinidad as an epistemology; as a way of knowing that allows us to better understand the historical relationship between race, colonialism and diaspora. Through the analysis of cultural texts: including novels, music, film, and visual art, we will engage in a genealogical examination of Black Latinidad beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century and through the present. Expanding the conceptual, geographical and temporal limitations that continue to produce Latinx Studies as a contemporary, U.S. based field of knowledge, our course will engage a historical approach to Latinx thought that centers blackness.

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 course explores African American history from the Atlantic slave trade up to the Civil War. It is centrally concerned with the rise of and overthrow of human bondage, and how they shaped the modern world. Africans were central to the largest and most profitable forced migration in world history. They shaped new identities and influenced the contours of American politics, law, economics, culture, and society. The course considers the diversity of experiences in this formative period of nation-making. Race, class, gender, region, religion, labor, and resistance animate important themes in the course.

Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore asks: How do we find the place of freedom? And more precisely, how do we make such a place repeatedly? This seminar invites students to meditate on the above questions by applying abolition geographic thought to their research and thinking. We will consider how/why freedom becomes a place by engaging a range of geographic struggles, contemplating the capacity to (re)make such places across time/space. Students will have the opportunity to collaborate and present their research, contributing to forming more intellectually creative and active spaces not bound by institutional boundaries.

Apartheid, the political doctrine of separation of races in South Africa (1948-1990), dominated the (South) African political discourse in the second half of the 20th century. While it lasted, art and visual cultures were marshaled in the defense and contestation of its ideologies. Since the end of Apartheid, artists, filmmakers, dramatists, and scholars continue to reexamine the legacies of Apartheid and the social, philosophical, and political conditions of non-racialized South Africa. Course readings examine issues of race, nationalism and politics, art and visual culture, and social memory in South Africa.

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.

How and when did Islam arrive in Africa? Was the spread of Islam through conquest, slavery, or trade? In what ways has the spread of Islam impacted the relationship between the northern and southern parts of the continent? How was race made? Is it accurate to treat Islam as a race? Are all Muslims Arabs? Are all Arabs Muslims? Who were the first Muslims in America? Between Orientalist and apologetic perspectives on the legacy of slavery in Islamic history, what tools does contemporary scholarship need to develop exemplary approaches to studying race, slavery, and Islam in Africa without reproducing racist tropes?

This class seeks to critically analyze the intersections of race, violence, and medicine in the United States. Through an interdisciplinary lens, students will examine historical and contemporary case studies to understand how violence has been medicalized, and how race plays a significant role in these processes. Discussions will also encompass slavery, structural violence, police violence, public health approaches to violence, and the role of healthcare professionals in addressing racial disparities in the experience and treatment of violence in African American, Latinx, Asian American and Indigenous contexts.

This seminar explores racial capitalism and the right to the city from the perspective of the housing crisis in the US. We will engage historical studies, social theory, and urban ethnography in order to understand how redlining and real estate speculation produce landscapes of housing injustice. We will also consider the ways marginalized communities mobilize to fight insecurity and to guarantee their right to housing. In collaboration with our community partner, a social impact research and design studio, we will organize urban walking tours and interviews in Trenton, and students will produce collaborative multimedia projects.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations.

This course introduces students to zoning as an urbanistic tool related to representation, classification, and design. Readings investigate zoning as a form of both ideation and technology through texts that include Keller Easterling, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Michel Foucault, Aristotle, and Samuel Delany, as well as the Zoning Resolution of the City of New York, films, video games, archival materials, and many forms of bureaucratic tables. Students will complete two texts that either analyze an existing zoning or propose a new zoning to operate on the built environment, socio­economics, ecology, or other aspects of a specific site.

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.

This seminar examines the impact of the International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Program, military dictatorships, and political crises on artistic production in the 1980s, and the dramatic movement of African artists from the margins of the international art world to its very center since the 1990s. How familiar or different are the works and concerns of African artists? What are the consequences, in Africa and the West, of the international success of a few African artists? And what does the work of these Africans at home and in the West tell us about the sociopolitical conditions of our world today?

Recent developments in the United States and throughout the world have exposed fault lines in how communities design and regulate forms of citizenship. But current debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? (How) are exclusion and marginalization wired into the historical legacies and present-day practices of citizenship?

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 advanced studio course explores the technique, aesthetics, cultural contexts and histories of Hip-Hop dance forms. We'll not only study the physical movements associated with each form, but also the deeper Afro-Diasporic aesthetic principles that guide those movements as well as their connection to other art forms of Hip-Hop culture. We'll study the relationship between movement and embodied knowledge by encouraging students to critically engage with their own experience of these dance forms. Goals will be facilitated through regular interaction with course professors as well as classes with recognized expert practitioners of the dance.

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.

This course is on the structure and form of the modern manifesto, its role in the shaping of a poetics of decolonization and the making of postcolonial literature. Starting with Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848), the course focuses on the manifesto as a linguistic and performative genre connected to the experience of disenchantment. We closely read the manifestos of the early modern avantgardes (Futurism and Dadaism), explore the work of the genre in the poetics of the New Negro (Alain Locke), and end with its appropriation by anticolonial writers from the 1930s to the 1960s (Surrealism and the Black Arts Movement).

The seminar focuses on the literature, art, and culture of New York in the 1960s. Six writers guide our inquiry: Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Jane Jacobs, Frank O'Hara, and Susan Sontag, but we read widely and engage a range of media and scholarship. We also pay special attention to the little magazines of the period, especially the magazines associated with the mimeograph revolution.

This course examines the connections between climate change and longstanding processes of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. We will examine the history and evolution of the climate justice movement, including its connection with the environmental justice and civil rights movement in the United States and ongoing calls for climate reparations particularly among African-descended populations. We explore the ways wider scale systems of power and domination produce unjust environmental and climatic conditions and the disproportionate ways these systems impact BIPOC communities across the globe.

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 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.

Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.

This seminar in history and documentary film explores personal narrative and how individual experience contributes to profound social change. We study 1960s youth through oral history, archival research, ethnography and journalism. Trenton NJ is the case study. Themes include: civil rights and Black power; immigration and migration; student uprisings and policing; education; gender and sexuality; churches and city institutions; sports; work, class and neighborhood; politics, law and government. Using documentary narrative, the course asks how a new generation of storytellers will shape public conversations and policy.

This course examines ebbs and flows in U.S. drug policy, and how issues of race and identity inform the creation, implementation, impact, and dismantling of substance control policy. From "Chinese opium" in the 19th c. to "Hillbilly heroin" (as OxyContin was once labeled) and from "crack" cocaine to menthol cigarettes and marijuana, we examine the forces shaping drug policies, how policies are transformed, why they change, and what drug laws reveal about society. We also examine how social, political, and economic circumstances shape drug policies, and how the US built a vast system governing people and the substances they can and cannot use.

This seminar will examine this global history of anticolonial, anti-racial, and postcolonial thought during the twentieth century. We will read the works by key 20th century anticolonial thinkers and activists - Mahatma Gandhi, WEB Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and others. Will read these historical texts critically and ask: How do they understand colonialism and its relationship between colonial domination and race, culture, and economy? How do they understand colonialism as a global system? How do they think of liberation and world transformation?

This seminar examines the history of antislavery movements and struggles from the end of the seventeenth century to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery in 1865. With intensive reading in an array of primary sources, including speeches, manifestos, private letters, poetry, and more, supplemented with pertinent secondary readings, it inquires into how antislavery fitfully moved from the margins of American politics and culture to become, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a mass political movement that won national political power and sparked the Civil War.

This course explores the different ways that medicine is represented in the fields of literature and the visual arts, using the concept of storytelling to examine themes that are at once medical and existential, and that are part of everybody's lives, such as death and dying, epidemics, caregiving, disability, and public health. Focusing on literary texts and art, we'll analyze how these themes are staged in the different sources. We'll develop a toolbox of concepts and techniques by which to investigate the narrative structures used to convey meanings about medicine, be it as a field of knowledge, a set of practices, or a mode of experience.

News outlets have a long history of excluding, misrepresenting, and maligning Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other racialized communities. Today, journalists grapple with the legacy of longstanding racial injustices even as new challenges - like algorithmic bias and artificial intelligence - continue to emerge. In this course, we will explore ways that journalists succeed and, all too often, still fail in reporting on racialized communities. Drawing on these lessons, we will brainstorm, discuss, and devise more-inclusive and reparative ways of covering the news.

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.

This course explores how Latina sexualities and sexual economies are integrated with U.S. development and expansion of capital in Latin American countries. We trace the history of capitalism and its reliance on the construction of racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects. We will explore how, similar to Asian and Black women, Latina's sexualities are integral to the accumulation of wealth in the United States. We focus on the sex trades, such as sex tourism in Cuba, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, the booming online sex work industries in Colombia, and independent pornography industries like OnlyFans in the U.S.

A performance course in West African drumming with a focus on music from the Manding/Mali Empire. Taught by master drummer Olivier Tarpaga, the course provides hands-on experience on the Djansa rhythm. Students will acquire performance experience, skills and techniques on the Djansa rhythm, and develop an appreciation for the integrity of drumming in the daily life of West Africa.

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 keeping jazz alive.

This course introduces students to the political and social philosophy of Marxism, and poses a critical question. Can the philosophy, so grounded on economics and class oppression, properly account for the ills of racial oppression? In exploring this question, we will look at the theoretical work of Black revolutionaries inspired by Marxism, such as Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones and Walter Rodney; as well as work by some contemporary philosophers. This course will familiarize students with the thought of historical figures, and different views of the relationship between racial and class oppression, and how they operate.

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.

This course merges research in American religious history with creating an archive using digital and deep mapping practices. It explores the politics of mapping, geography and race before delving into a place-based exploration of American religious communities during the late 19th century. The course investigates extant archives of postemancipation southern Christian communities and applies strategies of historical analysis to explore the formation and transformation of American religious community.

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.

This course looks at late twentieth and twenty-first century Black urban life in the United States. We analyze the impact of social, political, and economic realities in shaping Black urban communities in the post-Civil Rights Movement era. We read about each of these areas: spatial isolation and ghetto formation; broad political economy in the 1970s and 1980s and its impact on Black communities; and developments in Black politics from electoral politics to Black Lives Matter.

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.

This course is a cross-comparative spatial history of caste in South Asia and race in the United States. Exploring architecture's deep entanglement in property and capital, students will learn how modern property co-emerged with contextual assemblages of race, caste, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to examine intertwined histories of settler colonial and colonial spatial practices in these different geographies, students will engage humanities research methods through critical reading and writing while simultaneously learning to analyze and draw from visual and material culture.

The "truths" found in traditional archives are incomplete: books and mainstream film productions are often biased; silences and omissions enter every level of archive-making and historical production. Students will engage in the critical analysis of the historical relationship between race, diaspora, and citizenship as they appear in film, media, and cultural productions. Building on original stories and artistic materials presented in class, students will create their own project (short film, podcast, story map). The goal is to make the archive a tool for teaching, learning and an artistic piece for the larger community.