Antipathy toward "Critical Race Theory" has led policymakers to restrict curriculum, ban books, and even fire teachers. But what is Critical Race Theory? This reading-intensive lecture course introduces sophomores to some of its foundational scholarship. Lectures and readings contextualize Critical Race Theory in the history of the civil rights movement, especially the hard won but limited impact of civil rights legal victories. The course concludes by considering how the actual framework of Critical Race Theory is useful for analyzing the contemporary attack on "Critical Race Theory".

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.

This course explores the evolution of New World African and African American literature and literary culture from its beginnings in the middle of the 18th century to the turn of the twentieth century. Moving across a range of genres-including slave narratives, poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and essays-and media-from the periodical to the bound novel-we will interrogate the relationship among literary form, cultural politics, and historical phenomena, while developing a deep understanding of the emergence of an African American literary tradition.

This course surveys histories of Black health activism and their legacies in the US. It addresses the pursuit of Black health and healing from the Atlantic slave trade through twenty-first century Black feminist manifestos on radical self-care. We will center the political labor and social movements of Black patients, doctors, scientists, and organizers - and their efforts to secure health equity for Black Americans - as fundamental to the arc of the long Civil Rights movement. Topics include: the Black Panthers' free clinics, Black eugenics, reproductive justice, "citizen" science, the anti-psychiatry movement, and HIV/AIDS activism.

This course asks: What is Black feminist literature? We will attend to the aesthetic practices of twentieth-century novels and the theoretical premises of key texts in Black feminist criticism that serve as touchstones for the field. We will analyze representations of gender, sexuality, class, and race and question our definitions of habituated terms and reading methods. We will cultivate an active reading practice that enables our capacity for critical analysis, creative writing, and their intersection.

This course will explore the major issues that have shaped the Caribbean since 1791, including: colonialism and revolution, slavery and abolition, migration and diaspora, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy. We will examine the Caribbean through a comparative approach--thinking across national and linguistic boundaries--with a focus on Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While our readings and discussions will foreground the islands of the Greater Antilles, we will also consider relevant examples from the circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora as points of comparison.

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 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.

This course focuses on the representation of slavery and unfree labor in historical and contemporary artistic production, in a global context. It follows the lead of contemporary artists who have 'returned' to the plantation, and whose work consequently compels us to explore more closely the implications and afterlives of the plantation in our contemporary moment. Like these artists, this course also uses the lens of repair to look back at the plantation's visual histories, and to track its legacies in the present, while also considering what a term like repair can look for us now, and in the future.

This course explores the history of what has been described as an "impossible but inevitable city" over three centuries. Settled on perpetually shifting swampland at the foot of one of the world's great waterways, this port city served as an outpost of three empires and a gateway linking the N. American heartland with the Gulf Coast, Caribbean, and Atlantic World. From European and African settlement through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will consider how race, culture, and the environment have defined the history of the city and its people.

How can we read, write, and critically think (imagine) about African politics and society? The course presents contemporary ethnography on African politics and society during the postcolonial era, emphasizing the multiplicity, complexities, and diversity of African ideas, imaginations, practices, and experiences, in along with the variety of national and international factors that either influence or are impacted by them. Upon completing the course, students will have the essential critical thinking abilities and analytical tools required to recognize and challenge reductionist and biased narratives concerning Africa.

This course addresses reparations as a matter of design. Aside from matters of economics, history, or policy, engaging with reparations requires multiple environmental epistemologies. This course pursues a transcalar and interlocking approach. While the topic of reparations has circulated broadly with the work of activists and scholars, such as Angela Y. Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates, architectural discourse has only recently begun to engage with reparations.  Literature, research, and policy related to reparations intersect the built environment, urbanism, planetary climate crisis, postcolonialism, art history, and aesthetics.

Easily recognized as among the most important examples of canonical African art, Kongo sculpture, textiles, and ritual design are famous for their conceptual density, stylistic variety and rigorous abstraction. The course examines the role of art in the life of the Kongo Kingdom and related peoples, from the arrival of Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 15th century, through the era of Belgian colonization from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, to the period since political independence in 1960. The seminar coincides with and will explore the Kongo Across the Waters exhibition at the Princeton University Museum.

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 Hip-Hop dance aesthetic from multiple perspectives, in order to help students develop their own personal relationship to the culture and its influences. Structured around a series of guest workshops by dancers from a range of Hip-Hop dance traditions, the course will engage with these forms on their own terms, but also with an eye towards exploring the more abstract artistic options that Hip-Hop dance offers.

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.

African literature has been a global literature for several millennia. Some of the most important writers and thinkers of the classical era and late antiquity were Africans (Augustine, for instance). We'll start with those early writers, then move on to texts by the medieval inventor of sociology, Ibn Khaldun; the epic of the medieval Mali empire, Sundiata; a medieval Ethiopian saint's life; colonial writing about Africa by Europeans, and colonial-era literature by African writers; the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka and others that confront the legacy of colonialism; and recent Africanfuturist art, film, and literature.

Cuba was one of the first New World colonies of Europe yet among the last to sever the colonial bond. The island was among the last places in the hemisphere to abolish slavery, yet home to the first black political party in the Americas. After the revolution of 1959, among the most radical of the modern world, it became an important international symbol of third world socialism and anti-imperialism, and an unexpected focus of global Cold War struggles. This course serves as an introduction to that fascinating history and to the major themes that have shaped it: race and slavery; nationalism and empire; revolution and socialism.

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.

History of Slavery in Africa and the Middle East focuses on the experiences of enslaved individuals and the powerful social, legal, and political regimes that attempted to define their subjection. Attention will be concentrated on the themes of race, gender, class, and diaspora to examine how these histories both differ from and are informed by histories of slavery globally. This course will analyze the relationship between abolitionist discourses and imperialism, underpinning the ongoing transition from slavery to freedom. Students will engage with literature to understand how historical production has distorted and silenced enslaved lives.

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.

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 will engage broad questions of how racial politics has impacted democratic health in the United States. Students will design and collect data on measures of racial climate and access to democratic institutions. Students will gain direct training in how to collect original data with an opportunity to visit a government archive and compile novel datasets on race and democracy in the United States.

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 asks, how do religious communities develop and construct space, foster and develop from movement? How are these processes influenced by the constructions of power reflected in defining religion, race and geography?

This course examines 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.

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.

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

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.

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.