| | 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.
For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | DIALLO | No Final | 5 | 9 | 1 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course satisfies the one semester foreign language requirement. |
| | | 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 | -TWR--- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | Mutonya | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 1 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course serves as an introduction to the analytic category race. Students will be exposed to major theories concepts, processes, frameworks, and scholars of race. They will develop the skills and language to critically examine and discuss race, with emphasis on how conceptions of race and collective identity have deep historical roots and have changed over time. This course takes the position that race-like gender, class and sexuality-is socially constructed. That said, while race is socially constructed, this course also emphasizes that racialization and racial categories have social, political, and economic consequences in people's everyday lives. Meaning the socially and historically constructed category of race has real implications for people and communities. Ultimately, the purpose of the course is to teach students to read, think and write critically about one of today's most contentious topics-race-by exposing them to readings and other course materials that consider race and the process of racialization in specific contexts and time periods throughout the world. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Bailey | Take Home Exam | 120 | 118 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfills Area 2 of the AFAS major. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 5:00P-6:20P | TBA | Parsons | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 7 | 0 | | Desc: | Course will be offered MW 5:00-6:20pm. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | TBA | Schmidt | No Final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 02 | TBA | | TBA | DIALLO | No Final | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | (None) / | Parsons | No Final | 1 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course introduces students to the histories and traditions of the African novel. While paying attention to the anticolonial legacies of the African novel, this course explores questions of memory and mourning in African writing. Through analyses of works by writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, J.M Coetzee, and others, we will trace how African writers have used their novels to imagine creative ways of bearing witness to their pasts and imagining their futures. In addition to novels, we will also read secondary critical writing on African literature. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Mbatha | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 6 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area Requirements 1 or 4 for AFAS. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 5:30P-7:00P | TBA | Mutonya | Paper/Project/Take Home | 10 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | Discover the stories of Black Saint Louisans and their contributions to the city, the region, and the nation. From Dred and Harriet Scott to J. D. and Ethel Lee Shelley, from Scott Joplin to Chuck Berry, from James Milton Turner to Tishaura Jones, the course will engage first-hand accounts and innovative scholarship to examine St. Louis's deep and rich history of Black life, culture, resistance, and civic engagement that has shaped the city for three centuries. Beyond the classroom, students will experience this history through visits to key sites in the city's African American past, tour local Black museums, and learn directly from area history-makers and custodians of African American history. Students will apply their learning through collaborative work with a community partner that elevates histories of the African American experience in St. Louis. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Schmidt | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 15 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:20P | TBA | [TBA] | Paper/Project/Take Home | 12 | 10 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Area 2 for AFAS majors. |
| | | 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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| | Description: | As the original home of humanity, the African continent has, over the millennia, produced an incredible diversity of tangible and intangible arts and aesthetic practices - in sculpture, architecture, masquerade, royal and religious regalia, rock painting, pottery, and much more. However, this richcultural heritage has, historically, largely been approached, studied, and curated according to Western academic, museological, and cultural heritage management approaches. These have often been disconnected from the lived realities of Africans across the continent. Critics of these interconnected
hegemonic paradigms and practices have argued that the needs, interests, aspirations, aesthetic philosophies, and concepts of preservation and patrimony of local communities have long been neglected, overlooked, and even undermined by colonially derived and often ethnocentric approaches and understandings of material culture, as well as the expropriation of much of Africa's historic art, much of it now held in Western museum and private collections. These criticisms highlight Africa's ongoing struggle for its art and heritage: to repatriate it, curate it, and represent it in ways more in accordance with various African philosophies and practices. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | Kemper / 103 | [TBA] | Paper/Project/Take Home | 20 | 20 | 1 | | |
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| | Description: | The course provides an overview of the field Africana Studies and provides analysis of the lives and thoughts of people of African ancestry on the African continent and throughout the world. In this course we will also examine the contributions of Africana Studies to other disciplines. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing from history, philosophy, sociology, political studies, literature, and performance studies and will draw examples from Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and South America. When possible, we will explore Diaspora relationships and explore how the African presence has transformed societies throughout the world. This class will focus on both classic texts and modern works that provide an introduction to the dynamics of African American and African Diaspora thought and practice. |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Manditch-Prottas | May 7 2025 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 30 | 30 | 1 | | Desc: | Required course for AFAS majors and minors. |
| | | 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 | TBA | | (None) / | Manditch-Prottas | No Final | 0 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | Waits managed by dept. |
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| 02 | TBA | | (None) / | Schmidt | No Final | 0 | 0 | 1 | | Desc: | Waits managed by dept. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | TBA | Weeden | See Instructor | 0 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | Waitlist managed by department. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | (None) / | [TBA] | See Instructor | 0 | 0 | 1 | | Desc: | Waitlist managed by department. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | DIALLO | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 17 | 2 | | | 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 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Parsons | See Instructor | 15 | 3 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors this course counts as Area Requirement 4. |
| | | 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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| | Description: | From the Transatlantic slave trade to chattel slavery and, then, institutionalized racism, Black people have long been subjected to some of the most horrific forms of violence and suffering at the hands of colonization, white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Yet, despite the tremendous pain endured, we continue to generate systems of healing and repair that allow us to reclaim our power and reestablish healthy relationships to ourselves and our communities. In this course, students will engage the spiritual, political, and physical frameworks of healing that Black people deploy as a response to harm and oppression. This course engages the tradition of Black healing and will prioritize the literal application of various healing practices in our time of study by collectively experimenting with new ways of learning,thinking, theorizing, creating, doing and being.
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Samuel | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 14 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfills Area 1 for AFAS majors. |
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| | Description: | This course explores two distinct themes: how African descended people have been depicted in American and British children's literature and how African Americans have established a tradition in writing for children and young adults. It will also examine two related questions: How has African American childhood been constructed in children's literature and how have African American writers constructed childhood in children's literature? We will look at such classic white writers for children like Helen Bannerman, Annie Fellows Johnston, and Mark Twain as well as efforts by blacks like the Brownies Book, published by the NAACP, and children's works by black writers including Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Arna Bontemps, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, Mildred Taylor, Floyd and Patrick McKissack, Julius Lester, Rosa Guy, Sharon Bell Mathis, bell hooks, and others.
For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | TBA | Early | May 6 2025 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 15 | 9 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Manditch-Prottas | Paper/Project/Take Home | 20 | 20 | 9 | | |
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| | Description: | Everyone is a critic. But what are the stakes of cultural criticism? Whom do we trust to tell us when something is a classic novel, album, or film? Professional Critics? Fan reviews? Academic analysts? How is such acclaim, or denunciation, determined? Indeed, the stakes of these questions are only heightened when critique is directed at works produced by African Americans. This course will consider these questions and more by reading/viewing/listening to a series of canonical African American cultural texts across mediums (ex., Novels, albums, films, and art exhibitions). Upon initial reading/listening/view, students will work through methods of close reading of primary texts and provide their own critical review. Beyond engaging with canonical works and multidisciplinary methods, this course would introduce students to the various ways Black cultural production is critically received. What type of expectations are set? Where are these works consumed and reviewed? What kind of language do critics consistently use? Etc. This will aid students in gaining a sense of their subjectivity concerning their subject matter. NOTE: This course fulfills the fieldwork requirement for the AMCS major.
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Manditch-Prottas | Paper/Project/Take Home | 20 | 15 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | Mutonya | Paper/Project/Take Home | 15 | 12 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfils Focus Area 4 for AFAS Majors |
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| | Description: | Urbanism and urbanization - the emergence and development of densely populated towns, often cradles of novel and specific arts, institutions, industries, philosophies, ideologies, and identities - have a deep history on the African continent. From the earliest settled towns of the ancient world in
Tichitt (in present-day Mali and Mauretania) and the Nile Valley, to the bustling "Medieval" metropolises of Ilé-Ifè (Nigeria), Great Zimbabwe, and the Swahili coast (East Africa), the continent witnessed a range of trajectories and outcomes of urban development, leading to diverse forms of hierarchy, heterarchy, social organization, technologies, and arts often very distinctive from those of Europe and the Islamic world beyond Africa. Given that much of the continent did not use written documentary sources until relatively recently, approaches and methods from the disciplines of archaeology and art history are among the best tools to investigate and understand its deep-rooted
and sophisticated urban past, and the fundamental contributions of this to the modern world. This class explores the origins, development, and florescence of forms of urbanism and statehood across the African continent, focusing on the complex social structures and dynamics that emerged from,
and shaped, these processes, as well as the rich archaeological and artistic record that they stimulated. It will begin by moving chronologically through this long history, and later branch into largely coeval regional examples. Students will have the opportunity to learn about the archaeology and arts of critical urbanized polities such as the early Sahelian metropolis of Djenne-Jeno (Mali), the empires of Dahomey, Oyo, Benin (West Africa), and the kingdom of Kongo (Central Africa) among others. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 1:00P-2:20P | Kemper / 103 | [TBA] | Paper/Project/Take Home | 40 | 10 | 0 | | |
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| | Description: | This course leverages the recent enactment of the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act in December 2022 as a gateway to exploring the profound historical significance of Black cemeteries across the United States. Students will investigate the development and preservation of Black cemeteries. They will trace historical shifts in Black cemeteries-including the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the Civil Rights Movement and the present. General course themes include cemeteries as reflections of African American life, death, and resistance in the face of systemic racism and segregation. Through case studies of prominent Black cemeteries both in St. Louis and nationally, students will explore how these sites have served as places of mourning, celebration, and community organization, as well as how they have been impacted by urban development, neglect, and efforts at preservation. Course readings will expose students to how scholars use the stories of individuals and communities buried in these cemeteries, highlighting the ways in which Black cemeteries provide a counter-narrative to mainstream historical accounts and offering insights into the lived experiences, spiritual practices, and cultural expressions of African Americans across centuries. Students will also engage with
contemporary discussions on the preservation and restoration of these cemeteries, understanding their significance not only as historical sites but as ongoing symbols of cultural identity and heritage. While St. Louis is the focal point and setting for the class, this course will equip students with tools for understanding cemeteries as not only places of death and mourning but also of Black commemoration
and memory-making.
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 2:30P-3:50P | TBA | [TBA] | Paper/Project/Take Home | 12 | 0 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfills Focus Area 2. |
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| | Description: | This course will examine major Black literary works produced between 1880 and 1920, the period the great Howard University historian Rayford Logan called the Nadir of American race relations when lynchings were at their height and segregation and disfranchisement were rigidly enforced. The writers we will read include fiction writer Charles Chesnutt, poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson, scholar/essayist W.E.B. Du Bois, Tuskegee Institute president, Booker T. Washington, and poet and fiction writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others. We will also examine some of the Black popular music of this era, particularly the rise of ragtime. How did Black Americans build their own institutions and cultural expressions in light of the virulent racism of this era?
For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 1. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | Early | May 6 2025 6:00PM - 8:00PM | 12 | 1 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfills Area 1 requirement for AFAS majors. |
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| | 01 | TBA | | TBA | DIALLO | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 02 | TBA | | TBA | Schmidt | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 03 | TBA | | TBA | Mutonya | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 04 | TBA | | TBA | Parsons | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 06 | TBA | | TBA | Ward | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 07 | TBA | | TBA | Mustakeem | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 09 | TBA | | TBA | Fenderson | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 10 | TBA | | TBA | Parikh | See Department | 0 | 0 | 1 | | |
| 11 | TBA | | TBA | Shearer | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
| 12 | TBA | | TBA | Early | See Department | 0 | 0 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Lloyd | No Final | 10 | 4 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | --W---- | 3:00P-5:50P | TBA | Parikh, Caldwell | No Final | 20 | 9 | 0 | | |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 10:00A-11:20A | TBA | DIALLO | Paper | 15 | 5 | 0 | | Desc: | For undergraduate AFAS maors, this course fulfills Area 4. 5103 is for graduate students and meets in the same room as 4103. |
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| | Description: | Duke Ellington playing the Cotton Club. Raccoon coats, Stutz Bearcats, and militant Garveyites parading down Lenox Avenue. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston exchanging quips at the Dark Tower salon. These are the some of the best-remembered scenes of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement of African American artists--literary, musical, and visual--who personified the "New Negro" and transformed uptown Manhattan into an international headquarters of Black intellectual life in the 1920s. This class will reexamine Harlem's modernizing rebirth on the centennial of some of its earliest productions, exploring the intricate histories behind the iconic images. We'll study poems, stories, novels, and essays by a varied group of writers (Hughes, Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesse Fauset, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown) and their debts to a number of pioneering jazz and blues musicians (Ellington, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller) and influential visual artists (Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Bennett). We'll learn about these figures' visions of the Great Migration and the Black Metropolis, racial pride and racial passing, Jazz Age sexuality and respectable secrecy, avant-garde experiments and modernist primitivisms. Finally, we'll sample some of the most important recent chapters in Harlem Renaissance scholarship, from studies of the movement's American cultural nationalism (George Hutchinson), to theories of its international links to Black diasporan travel and translation (Brent Hayes Edwards and Michelle Stephens), to intimate histories of the everyday Afro-modernism of "riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals" (Saidiya Hartman). Satisfies the Twentieth Century and later requirement. This course may fulfill the global or minority literatures requirement for students who declare an English major in the fall 2021 semester and beyond. |
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| | 01 | -T-R--- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Maxwell | No Final | 15 | 15 | 4 | | |
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| | Description: | Brazil is the country with the largest population of people of African descent outside of the African continent. However, with its history of race mixture under colonialism and slavery, many have imagined Brazil as a racial paradise such that race minimally influences one's social, political, or economic quality of life. The main focus of this course will be to understand from an interdisciplinary approach, first, the historical and sociocultural conditions of the African diaspora in Brazil. Second, we will focus on how national ideologies of racial mixture employ a rhetoric of inclusion that incorporates selective aspects of black culture into Brazilian national identity while excluding black people from the protections and pleasures of full citizenship. Beginning with the experiences of enslaved Africans, we will engage how Afro-Brazilians have developed ideas and spaces of freedom and belonging through social movements, religion, the arts, and resistance well into the black consciousness movements of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course, we will collaboratively read, view, and listen to a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to analyze and write about blackness and the lives of black people in Brazil across history, intersecting, most predominantly, with the social structures of gender, sexuality, class, and religion.
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| | 01 | M-W---- | 11:30A-12:50P | TBA | Mundell | Paper | 15 | 10 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 4. |
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| | Description: | What are the discursive histories and futures of blackness? Taking as its point of departure this question, this advanced-level course sets out to investigate the genealogies of black critical studies and their theoretical implications on how we talk about race, gender, nationality, and political resistance. We will explore such topics as the formation of racism and blackness, the cartographies of black resistance, Afropessimism, and the critiques of historical constructions of blackness as an analytic of history. Our interlocutors include such central figures to black studies
as Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, Saidiya Hartman et al, but also more recent scholarship that aims to further complicate our study of blackness - Zakiyyah Jackson, Kevin
Quashie, and others. |
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| | 01 | M------ | 3:00P-5:20P | TBA | Mbatha | Paper/Project/Take Home | 19 | 1 | 0 | | Desc: | The course fulfils Focus Area 2 for AFAS majors. |
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| | Description: | This course explores and engages the intellectual and political genealogies of intersectionality, a theory, analytic, framework, metaphor, and approach primarily employed by Black feminists and other feminists of color. We will examine intersectionality as a theoretical framework with attendant analytics, as well as the socio/political projects out of which it emerges and influences. In so doing, the scholarly materials in this course, primarily, examine the ways in which structures and categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability create and maintain intersecting forms and experiences of difference that underpin overlapping social inequalities in U.S. society and abroad. Some of the other intersecting forms of social difference we will explore include, ethnicity, nation/migration, class, ability/disability, and indigeneity, reproduction, and HIV/disease status. Our approach to examining these categories/vectors of power will include feminisms of color, critical race theory/studies, queer theory/studies, queer of color critique, transgender theory/studies, and critical geography, all of which have shaped and been shaped by intersectionality. |
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| | 01 | -T----- | 3:00P-5:50P | TBA | Bailey | May 6 2025 1:00PM - 3:00PM | 15 | 7 | 0 | | Desc: | For AFAS majors, this course counts as Area Requirement 3. |
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| | Description: | This course examines the intersection of U.S. law and Black life, exploring how legal frameworks and systems have shaped, and been shaped by, the experiences of Black people and communities historically as well as in the contemporary context. Through a combination of historical analysis, theoretical inquiry, and legal case studies, students will investigate the role of law in reinforcing, challenging, and complicating racial inequalities and injustices.
Understanding the intersection of law and Black life is increasingly vital in today's socio-political climate. This course highlights the urgent need to examine how Black life is shaped and constrained by legal frameworks and policies that not only reinforce systemic racism but that give rise to Black resistance, social movements, and political strategies. It provides historical context to understand how systemic racism's legacy affects Black communities today, empowers students to advocate for equitable reforms, and fosters informed citizenship by enhancing understanding of legal processes. It also explores the intersectionality of law with various aspects of identity, sharpens critical thinking skills, and encourages dialogue and collaboration across communities. This course is taught by law students under the supervision of School of Law faculty, Adrienne Davis. |
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| | 01 | ---R--- | 3:00P-5:20P | TBA | Davis | Paper/Project/Take Home | 50 | 8 | 0 | | Desc: | This course fulfils Focus Area 2 for AFAS majors. This course is taught by law students under the supervision of School of Law faculty, Adrienne Davis. |
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| | Description: | This course provides an overview of the education of Black children and youth in the United States. Covering both pre- and post-Brown eras, students in this course offers a deep examination of the research focused on Black education. The social, political, and historical contexts of education, as essential aspects of American and African-American culture and life, will be placed in the foreground of course inquiries. Prerequisite: Completion of any 1000, 2000, or 3000-level Education course, graduate standing, or permission of instructor. Enrollment Note: All students are enrolled onto the waitlist. Undergraduate students must enroll in Educ. 4607, and graduate students must enroll in Educ. 5607. |
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| | 01 | --W---- | 4:00P-6:50P | Eads / 211 | Michelle Purdy | Paper | 5 | 5 | 0 | | |
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