| | Description: | This course introduces students to Wolof language and culture. Wolof is a West African language spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. It is also spoken on a smaller scale in Mauritania, Mali, French Guinea, and in the migrant communities in the US and France. This is the first course of a beginning-level of a Wolof program. In order to acquire a basic proficiency, students will practice speaking, reading, writing and listening. Each module will begin with a thematic and practical dialogue from which we can study vocabulary, aspects of grammar as well as a cultural lesson. Interactive material, including texts, images, videos, films, and audio, will be provided. Its aim is to provide students with knowledge of the basic structures of the language and the ability to communicate. Students will also learn important aspects of life and culture of the Wolof. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:30P | Seigle / 210 | DIALLO | May 10 2017 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 22 | 21 | 0 | | | Actions: | | Books | | Syllabus | | Syllabi are provided to students to support their course planning; refer to the syllabus for constraints on use. |
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| | 01 | MT-R--- | 11:30A-1:00P | McMillan / 219 | Mutonya | May 4 2017 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 15 | 8 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:30A | Eads / 203 | Mitchell | See Instructor | 28 | 25 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Defining the concept of "cool" provides a series of challenges to scholars. Simply charting a history of "cool" as a cultural form is an activity that threatens to collapse multiple complex meanings into a single, and ultimately inauthentic, definition. For instance, though most historians agree that "cool" has its origins in West Africa and was used by African American slaves as a strategic defense (first against the violence of slavery and later against the violence of segregation and discrimination), following World War II, white Americans began producing sounds, films, and cultural objects that other white critics described as "cool." Despite this ostensible shift in the racialized meanings of "cool," "cool" remains one important method (among others) of understanding African American responses to violence against their bodies.
This course will serve as an introduction to the study of twentieth century American popular culture through the concept of "cool." Throughout the twentieth century, critics of music, film, visual arts, fashion, commerce, and race have used the term "cool" to describe particular sounds, images, behaviors, objects, and people. This course focuses on "cool" as a cultural form that can be investigated in order to better understand issues of race in particular. People and objects of focus include writers Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Ralph Ellison, jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, and Lennie Tristano, films West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause, and album covers, furniture, and objects designed in the 1950s modern style (or West Coast style). At the end of the semester, students will be able to connect issues of race to interdisciplinary study in the context of American popular culture.
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| | Description: | Sophomores receive priority registration.The history of slavery has long created a sense of unease within the consciousness of many Americans. Recognizing this continued reality, this seminar examines how slavery is both remembered and silenced within contemporary popular culture. Although slavery scholarship continues to expand, how do everyday Americans gain access to the history of bondage? Moreover, how does the country as a whole embrace or perhaps deny what some deem a 'stain' in American history? Taking an interdisciplinary approach to these intriguing queries, we will examine a range of sources: literature, public history, art/poetry, visual culture, movies and documentaries, as well as contemporary music including reggae and hip hop. The centerpiece of this course covers North American society, however, in order to offer a critical point of contrast students will be challenged to explore the varied ways slavery is commemorated in others parts of the African Diaspora. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:30P | Eads / 115 | Mustakeem | No Final | 20 | 13 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | TBA | McCune | Default - none | 2 | 1 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | As a hip-hop artist Kanye West has had unprecedented impact on the sonic force of music, fashion, politics, and videography. Coupling his controversial moments, with his corpus of musical texts with special focus on sonic production, this course illuminates "Mr. West" as a case study for interrogating the interplay between fame, gender, sexuality, and race. Mostly, we explore how racialized ways of doing iconography, complex ways of seeing, creates a distorted or reductive frame through which we see the black and famous. Nonetheless, the course oscillates with entertaining these nuances, while being entertained by the decade-long catalogue of music and visual imagery. Together, we extract the "Politics of Mr. West" in his music and life, while also illuminating the importance of a politics of genius-making in the larger arc of black pop culture tradition. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:30P | Seigle / L006 | McCune | May 9 2017 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 40 | 63 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | "Yeah, I live here," basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar once said of America, "But it's not really my country." The same might be said of basketball; born in Massachusetts in 1891, the game is globally popular such that it belongs to everyone and no one. Since Dr. James Naismith invented it, basketball has been embraced as a progressive form of athletic expression by people across boundaries of race, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural heritage. Tellingly, the game serves social justice warriors like Abdul-Jabbar just as surely as the forces of nationalism he rejected. In this course, we will consider the history, myths, and culture of basketball, and ask: What does basketball tell us about America and Americans? What does it obscure? Who benefits from the game? What are its consequences? From Naismith to Brittney Griner, pick-up ball to the Harlem Globetrotters, we will examine the cultural features of the game and reflect on its impact on millions of people, both in the United States and around the world. |
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| | Description: | While this course includes the insights of political science, history, anthropology, law, and cultural studies, it is based in sociology. If political science can be said to focus on theories of governance and the mechanics of governmental administration, political sociology can be said to focus on the underlying social forces making civic and political thought and action possible, the consequences of political thought and action, the impact of informal civic and political worlds on the state, and power dynamics between and within groups. In this course, we will consider each of these topics across seven sections. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:30P | Seigle / L004 | Vieyra | May 10 2017 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 20 | 6 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | France and Africa have a long historical relationship, dating back to the early Euro-Mediterranean empires, the first explorers, long-distance traders, Christian missionaries, colonialists, and today's French West and North African communities. In this course, we delve into this long process of interaction between France and its colonies of Africa. During the first half of the semester, we explore these historical relationships and examine the scientific constructs of race in the 19th and early 20th century. We touch on themes that defined the colonial encounter, including the development of the Four Communes in Senegal, the Negritude movement, and French Islamic policies in Africa. The curriculum for this course includes articles, films, and monographs, to explore these themes and includes writers and social activists living in France and the African diaspora. The second half of the course examines Francophone Africa after independence. Here the course explores the political and cultural (inter) dependence between France and its Francophone African partners. In addition, we examine the challenges of many African states to respond to their citizen's needs, as well as France's changing immigration policies in the 1980s, followed by the devaluation of the West and Central African Franc (CFA). |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-4:00P | Seigle / 210 | DIALLO | May 10 2017 3:30PM - 5:30PM | 20 | 16 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-1:00P | Duncker / 101 | Flowe | May 8 2017 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 37 | 37 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | For over 150 years the Civil War has evoked powerful memories of heroism, brotherhood, violence, and rebirth. Its legacy has an enduring capacity to inspire, but to what ends? Today, as protests rage over the Confederate flag and Confederate memorials-and as grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter advance historical arguments about racial injustice-the promise of emancipation and the meaning of the Civil War remain as contested as ever. What was the Civil War, and how should we determine its "winners"? How is it still being fought, and on what terms? To answer these questions, this interdisciplinary course focuses on the centrality of slavery and race. It grapples with vexing issues of memory, public history, and reenactment. Students engage a range of scholarly and cultural texts, from history to literature, law, film, journalism, and politics, in order to explore the multifaceted, living legacy of the Civil War. Students will also examine their own conceptions of the ongoing struggle by identifying and analyzing cultural artifacts from the present day. Attendance is mandatory in this course. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 9:30A-11:00A | TBA | Henry Claude, Diadie Bathily | See Instructor | 0 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | This class will take place at COCA Staenberg Studio, 524 Trinity Avenue, St. Louis MO 63130
This stunning space measuring 56´ x 37.5´ is available exclusively for dancers and other performance artists. |
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| | Description: | The African Diaspora and more importantly variations of blackness, black bodies, and black culture have long captured the imagination of audiences across the globe. Taking a cue from exciting trends in popular culture, this course bridges the world of history, film, and culture to explore where and how historical themes specific to African descended peoples are generated on screen (film and television). Fusing the film world with digital media (ie. online series and "webisodes") this class will allow students to critically engage diasporic narratives of blackness that emerge in popular and independent films not only from the United States but other important locales including Australia, Brazil, Britain, and Canada. Moving across time and space, class discussions will center an array of fascinating yet critical themes including racial/ethnic stereotyping, gender, violence, sexuality, spirituality/conjuring, and education. Students should be eitherof junior or senior level and have taken at least one AFAS course. Permission of the instructor is required for enrollment. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | McMillan / 219 | Mustakeem | May 8 2017 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 20 | 8 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | When someone says, black woman writer, you may well think of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. But not long ago, to be a black woman writer meant to be considered an aberration. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Phillis Wheatley's poems were "beneath the dignity of criticism," he could hardly have imagined entire Modern Language Association sessions built around her verse, but such is now the case.
In this class we will survey the range of Anglophone African American women authors. Writers likely to be covered include Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Wilson, Nella Larsen, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, and Rita Dove, among others. Be prepared to read, explore, discuss, and debate the specific impact of race and gender on American literature. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:30A | Seigle / 301 | Zafar | May 8 2017 10:30AM - 12:30PM | 20 | 12 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course introduces students to contemporary black filmmaking practices in sub-Saharan Africa and Britain and to the central political and social issues that define Black cinema in these contexts. Broken up into three units, this class will focus specifically on Francophone African Cinema, Cinema in South Africa, and Black British Cinema. The African continent has a long history of filmmaking practices and scholars often credit South Africa with having one of the oldest filmmaking industries in the world. The first section of this class (Francophone African Cinema) will focus on filmmaking practices by Africans since the 1960s, when African countries started becoming independent from colonial powers. The second section (cinema in South Africa) will focus on representations of blackness and filmmaking practices in South Africa, with a focus on the post-1994 period. Lastly we will examine Black British Cinema and the social, political, and cultural issues that gave rise to a distinct filmmaking practice in Britain.
This class will focus on both the form and the content of these films by examining the ways that black filmmakers project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. We will discuss the different aesthetic forms and genres chosen by the filmmakers (i.e. social realism, avant-gardism, magical realism, melodrama, etc.) and also look at the types of social critiques the films engage in as they tackle topics such as gender politics, polygamy, migration, corruption, human rights, homosexuality, economic crisis, apartheid, and Westernization.
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Phillips | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 05 | TBA | | TBA | Zafar | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Duncan | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | Mustakeem | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | Baugh | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | Bedasse | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Interrogating Health, Race, and Inequalities is intended for graduate students in the School of Social Work and in Arts & Sciences as well as advanced undergraduates in Arts & Sciences who have previous coursework in medical anthropology, public health, or urban policy. The fundamental goal of the course is to demonstrate that health is not merely a medical or biological phenomenon but more importantly the product of social, economic, political, and environmental factors. To meet this goal the course is designed to examine the intersection of race/ethnicity and health from multiple analytic approaches and methodologies. Course readings will draw from the fields of public health, anthropology, history, and policy analysis. Teaching activities include lectures, group projects and presentations, videos, and discussions led by the course instructors. These in-class activities will be supplemented with field trips and field-based projects. By the end of the course it is expected that students will have a strong understanding of race as a historically produced social construct as well as how race interacts with other axes of diversity and social determinants to produce particular health outcomes. Students will gain an understanding of the health disparity literature and a solid understanding of multiple and intersecting causes of these disparities. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | TBA | Thompson | No Final | 0 | 3 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | The period between World War II and the 1970s was one of profound cultural, political, and demographic shifts that brought the problems of ethno-religious and racial prejudice to the forefront of U.S. national consciousness. Religious leaders, secular social activists, media industry professionals, and African American civil rights leaders often worked together to combat intolerance, bigotry, and inequality. What did these activists achieve in their attempts to deploy U.S. broadcast media in what they sometimes referred to as "propaganda against prejudice"? How did this activism relate to the institutions of broadcast media, including governmental agencies, national networks and local broadcasters? What was television and radio's impact on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s? In addressing these questions, we will consider a wide range of media: public service programming as well as commercially produced series, specials, network news and documentaries produced between the 1940s and the 1970s. Programs considered will include A New World 'A Coming, Amos 'n Andy, ' American Bandstand, NBC White Papers: Sit In, Sanford and Son, Eyes on the Prize, and Soul Train, among many others. REQUIRED SCREENING Tuesdays @ 7pm |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-4:00P | Seigle / 408 | Kelley | May 8 2017 3:30PM - 5:30PM | 22 | 7 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:30P | TBA | Zafar | No Final | 15 | 2 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M------ | 5:30P-8:30P | McMillan / 219 | Parsons | May 5 2017 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 15 | 6 | 0 | | Desc: | Students registering for this course must also register for L22 49IR/31 for 1 unit |
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Phillips | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 05 | TBA | | TBA | Zafar | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Duncan | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | Martin | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 999 | 1 | 0 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | Himes | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 12 | TBA | | TBA | Baugh | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Phillips | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 05 | TBA | | TBA | Zafar | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Duncan | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Phillips | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 05 | TBA | | TBA | Zafar | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Duncan | See Department | 2 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | Bernstein | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 999 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | Maxwell | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | 02 | TBA | | TBA | Phillips | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 05 | TBA | | TBA | Zafar | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Duncan | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | Bedasse | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 08 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 12 | TBA | | TBA | [TBA] | See Department | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
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