Africana Studies

AFRS BC2004 INTRODUCTN TO AFRICAN STUDIES. 3.00 points.

Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the study of Africa, moving from pre-colonial through colonial and post-colonial periods to contemporary Africa. Focus will be on its history, societal relations, politics and the arts. The objective is to provide a critical survey of the history as well as the continuing debates in African Studies

AFRS BC2005 CARIBBEAN CULTURE ＆ SOCIETIES. 3.00 points.

This course offers a chronological study of the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone insular Caribbean through the eyes of some of the region’s most important writers and thinkers. We will focus on issues that key Caribbean intellectuals--including two Nobel prize-winning authors--consider particularly enduring and relevant in Caribbean cultures and societies. Among these are, for example, colonization, slavery, national and postcolonial identity, race, class, popular culture, gender, sexuality, tourism and migration. This course will also serve as an introduction to some of the exciting work on the Caribbean by professors at Barnard College and Columbia University (faculty spotlights)

AFRS BC2006 INTRODUCTION AFRICAN DIASPORA. 3.00 points.

Interdisciplinary and thematic approach to the African diaspora in the Americas: its motivations, dimensions, consequences, and the importance and stakes of its study. Beginning with the contacts between Africans and the Portuguese in the 15th century, this class will open up diverse paths of inquiry as students attempt to answer questions, clear up misconceptions, and challenge assumptions about the presence of Africans in the New World

AFEN BC3009 TONI MORRISON: AN ETHICAL POETICS. 4.00 points.

Toni Morrison set herself a challenge: to engage language in complex literary ways in order to reveal the ‘fact’ of race in the lived experiences of Americans—those made to bear the burden of being ‘raced,’ those exercising the prerogative of ‘racing,’ and those who imagine that none of this applies to them. We travel with her artistic path from The Bluest Eye to her later novels to learn how her choice to create figurative, logical narratives seek their own understanding of the ethics of what she called the “manageable, doable, modern human activity” of living in ‘the house of race.’

AFRS BC3021 Queer Caribbean Critique. 4.00 points.

This seminar analyzes the different critical approaches to studying same-sex desire in the Caribbean region. The region’s long history of indigenous genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism, have made questions about “indigenous” and properly “local” forms of sexuality more complicated than in many other regions. In response, critics have worked to recover and account for local forms of same-sex sexuality and articulated their differences in critical and theoretical terms outside the language of “coming out” and LGBT identity politics. On the other hand, critics have emphasized how outside forces of colonialism, imperialism, and the globalization of LGBT politics have impacted and reshaped Caribbean same-sex desires and subjectivities. This course studies these various critical tendencies in the different contexts of the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch Caribbean

AFRS BC3065 Writing Diasporic Cities. 4 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Ethics and Values.

This course considers representation of four cities in which diasporic communities have settled and negotiated the psychic and material terrain that stretches from a past homeland to a settled homeland.  We look at New York, London, Kinshasha, and Cape Town where communities of different African diasporas- historical and contemporary- as well as South Asian diasporas have settled.   Locally, we enter a space like the contemporary Malcolm Shabazz market to attend to the transnational, mercantilist as well as cultural public spheres that it creates.  We also look at earlier transmigrations by African Diasporic groups moving from Jamaica to Harlem to Marseilles.  We consider London in the 1980s and the early 2000s.   Thematically, we consider different kinds of displacement and their impact upon women.  We foreground race, ethnicity, nationalist discourses, global economies, and the publishing, distribution and marketing networks of the Arts produced in these cities.  We read across genres and consider graffiti in neighborhoods that have diasporic communities.

AFRS BC3083 Black Women's Freedom Narratives. 4.00 points.

During the journey of this course, we will individually and collectively utilize myriad materials to examine the intricacies, nuances, and trajectories of freedom, primarily in literary texts grounded in the United States. However, a couple of required books are centered beyond the geographical and imaginary boundaries of the United States. Even though one of the texts for this course is a “traditional” slave narrative of a previously enslaved woman of African descent in the Caribbean (The History of Mary Prince), we will examine different narratives of Black women from the colonial period to the contemporary era that engage and reckon with the processes of freedom- imagining, freedom-creating, and freedom-making. We will approach the subject matter utilizing a variety of genres (e.g., slave narratives, oral histories, speeches, essays, poems, as well as novels (epistolary and science fiction). For this course, students will submit 2 short essays and a final paper/project. Small groups of 2-3 students will also co-lead some sections of class discussions on selected reading assignments

AFRS BC3110 THE AFRICANA COLLOQUIUM. 4.00 points.

The Africana Studies Department offers special topics courses every year as colloquia. These colloquia provide opportunities for students to explore areas of particular interest within African Diasporic Studies in a seminar environment. Students earn 4 credits for these courses. There are multiple colloquia offered by the department every year. Some of the topics for these colloquia have included Critical Race Theory, Indian Ocean Diaspora, The New Black, Caribbean Women, and Black Shakespeare. As the topics change, students should check with the Chair of the Africana Studies Department if they have any questions about the topics for a particular academic year

AFRS BC3121 Black Women in America. 4 points.

BC: Fulfillment of General Education Requirement: Historical Studies (HIS).

Prerequisites: Students must attend first day of class and admission will be decided then. Priority will be given to CCIS students (Africana Studies, American Studies and Women's Studies majors; minors in Race and Ethnic Studies). Enrollment limited to 20 students.

Examines the roles of black women in the U.S. as thinkers, activists and creators during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the intellectual work, social activism and cultural expression of African American women, we examine how they understood their lives, resisted oppression and struggled to change society. We will also discuss theoretical frameworks (such as "double jeopardy," or "intersectionality") developed for the study of black women. The seminar will encourage students to pay particular attention to the diversity of black women and critical issues facing Black women today. This course is the same as WMST BC3121.

AFEN BC3134 UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN. 4.00 points.

How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a mythic unity? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora.

AFEN BC3135 Zora Neale Hurston: A Writing Life. 4.00 points.

On her “Record of Freshman Interest” form, Zora Neale Hurston, Barnard class of 1928, wrote in response to the question of what vocation or profession she had in mind after graduation, “I have had some small success as a writer and wish above all to succeed at it. Either teaching or social work would be interesting, but consolation prizes.” No consolation prize was necessary as Hurston became one of American and African American literature’s finest writers, America’s first Black anthropologist, and a Black feminist ancestor and icon. A deep dive into Hurston’s work and writing life, this course reads Hurston as a narrative stylist and theorist in multiple genres: as poet, essayist, writer of short stories, novelist, playright, folklorist, and autobiographer. The goal of this class is to read Hurston closely and widely and to identify and examine her aesthetic philosophy and stylistic choices as one of the first African American women able to have a writing “career.” In Spring of 2026, this class will center the cultural context in which Hurston wrote, using the New York Historical’s exhibition Gay Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was an active part of a coterie of artists and intellectuals who made up the “queer mentorship and gay-inclusive salons and friendship circles that helped sustain the Harlem Renaissance.” We will also partner with the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard, as well as Barnard Archives, in the preparation of final digital projects that can be shared with the college community

AFRS BC3145 Black Women’s Histories in the United States. 4.00 points.

In this course you will be examining paper tracings and other sources related to the lived experiences of Black women. You will be required to review and interrogate materials on triggering subjects; some of these items include violent descriptions, images, and acts. In order to join in our collective engagement with the history of Black women, within the context of the U.S., you will critically analyze items that have not been sanitized for popular consumption. Thus, we will not be “erasing history” in this course by avoiding the deployment of white supremacy and its vast, related violence(s) against Black women’s bodies and lives, as well as the various manifestations of resistance of Black women throughout the history of the United States

AFRS BC3160 Fanon’s Psychology of the Oppressed. 4.00 points.

Frantz Fanon’s ideas have been influential for decades among theorists, practitioners, and activists alike. This seminar is focused on understanding Fanon’s particular perspective on the psychology of the oppressed and its relevance for examining the experience of past and present racialized inequality and its effects in society. The course is divided into four sections, which build cumulatively. I). An introductory section introduces Fanon’s central ideas (e.g., dialecticism, existentialism, post-colonialism) in their intellectual and socio-historical context (e.g., the Algerian revolution, African decolonization, South African Apartheid, the US civil rights and women’s rights movements). II). A second section locates Fanon in psychological theory and therapeutic theory and practice. The cultural and political (Eurocentric?) roots of psychological theory and practice are examined as are notions of oppression causing psychological and physical violence as well as psychopathology / psychological disorder. III). A third section examines Fanon and others psychological approaches to identity with particular attention to the presumed “inferiority complex” of oppressed peoples, nationalist and other reconstructions of identity in opposition to oppression, sociological psychological conceptualizations of stigma, and Dubois’s influential ideas regarding double consciousness. IV). A fourth and final section focuses on resistance and rebellion. The focus here is on the psycho-moral implications of (violent, peaceful, non-disruptive) action against oppression with reference to the distinct perspectives of Fanon in comparison to influential figures like Gandhi and M.L.K Jr. These issues are linked to a post-Fanon approach to the psychology of the oppressed called Liberation Psychology

AFEN BC3196 HARLEM RENAISSANCE LITERATURE. 4.00 points.

Home to Harlem focuses on the relationship between art, activism and social justice during the Harlem/ New Negro Renaissance. Exploring the cultural contexts and aesthetic debates that animated Harlem in 1920s to 1930s, the course discusses the politics of literary and theatrical production, while exploring the fashioning and performance of New Negro identity through fiction, poetry, essays, and artwork. Topics considered include: role of Africa/slavery/the south in New Negro expression, patronage, passing, primitivism/popular culture, black dialect as literary language, and the problematics of creating a “racial” art in/for a community comprised of differences in gender, class, sexuality, and geographical origin

AFRS BC3516 Environmental Humanities in the Global South. 4.00 points.

"This interdisciplinary course studies how individuals and communities in the Global South attempt to make sense of the ‘sense of an ending’ that underlines all warnings about environmental crisis and climate change. Our interdisciplinary course has a doubled foundation out of which our readings and discussions will grow: communal understanding and knowledge about local environments, on one hand, and the relation between such knowledge and the data and information gathered by scientists." "We therefore begin with a simple question: what is the relation between the Humanities and the work of scientists? Scientists undertake painstaking, necessary research to provide communities and their governments with vital, necessary information. Individuals and communities interpret and translate this information, often affectively. An organization of scientists studying carbon levels across Africa can list the progressive increase in temperatures across Africa over a period of years and calculate anticipated increases. An image based on this data may visualize the projected rise:" "A glance reveals something dire based on the way we associate red with danger. Our course is oriented towards who lives beneath the surfaces of data and images that ‘draw a picture’ for us. We read for how communities and individuals explain and communicate their relation to the historical and changing environments. In other words, we attend to narration, in different forms—fiction, poetry, song, travelogue—to grasp how experiences are rendered comprehensible. There is a broad ‘where’ as well, and a fluid ‘when.’ ‘Where’ takes us into the portmanteau category of ‘The Global South.’ We bracket the scope of this category to focus upon specific places in the Indian Ocean, sub-Saharan Africa and diasporic African communities. ‘When’ permits us to think of time, the time of the world, the times of change and the times of aftermaths. Go into an archive, open a history book, a sacred text and you will encounter ‘endings.’ We enter British colonial archives to see how signs of ‘When’ also allows us to face an underlying dread that might be called a ‘sense of an ending’ and to see just how many such ‘endings’ have come to pass. This is how we enter the diasporic histories of environmental change related to colonialism and the enslavement and transportation of whose descendants live in the broader ‘Global South’ Africans

AFRS BC3519 Race Before Race: Premodern Constructions of Social Difference. 4 points.

This course expands the reach of traditional analyses of race and ethnicity by demonstrating the key role of premodernity (Classical, Medieval and Early Modern eras) in developing modes of race thinking that shape the modern world. We will use intersectional approaches and critical race theory to examine both theorizing about race and primary materials that (re)produce race across time and in the present moment. What does it mean to look at premodernity through the eyes of the African Diaspora? Our examination of the different types of premodern race thinking will culminate in a collaborative class project in which students will be asked to apply critical race theory inflected approaches to editing an early modern text.

AFRS BC3532 ROMARE BEARDEN:HOME IS HARLEM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem, is an exploration into one of the greatest American artists finding home in Harlem. The noted painter, collagist, intellectual and advocate for the arts, spent his childhood and young adult life in Harlem. Known for chronicling the African-American experience, he found rich sources for artistic expression in the Manhattan neighborhoods above 110th Street

AFRS BC3550 GAY HARLEM. 4.00 points.

This course explores representations of queer Harlem in African American literature, sonic culture, and performance. We will consider the history and making of Harlem, key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and the aesthetic innovations of writers and artists who defied the racial, sexual, and gendered conventions of their time. We will be guided by an intersectional approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality and the methods of Black queer studies, African American and African diaspora literary studies, as well as sound and performance scholarship. We will ask when, where, and what was/is gay Harlem; how we might excavate its histories; map its borders; and speculate on its material and imagined futures

AFRS BC3552 BLACK WOMEN STYLE＆PERFRMNCE. 4.00 points.

Black Women, the Apollo, and the Politics of Style

AFRS BC3562 Caribbean Sexualities. 4 points.

The seminar offers an interdisciplinary study of sexualities in the Caribbean from the conquest to the contemporary moment. The principal focus will be on how sexualities intersect with questions of gender, race, nation, and diaspora in the Anglophone, Francophone and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. We will approach the study of Caribbean sexualities from various disciplines and areas of study, including history, anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, performance studies, literary studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. The first part of the seminar addresses Caribbean sexuality in the context of conquest, colonization and slavery, and then national independence. The remainder of the course addresses areas that have drawn particularly intense scholarly debates, including Caribbean family formation, masculinity, and same-sex desire, as well as sex tourism, and the gender and sexual politics of Caribbean popular music and dance.

AFRS BC3565 Art ＆ Culture in Harlem. 4.00 points.

Harlem is a community with a long and storied legacy of arts and entertainment that dates back to the late 1800s. Its legacy extends through the many cultural movements that have helped to define the community such as the Harlem Renaissance in the early 1900s, the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, and Hip Hop in the 1970s and 1980s, to the current renaissance of venues that anchor Harlem as a neighborhood vibrant with varied opportunities for cultural engagement. Harlem is home to several historic and iconic venues devoted to the arts and entertainment such as the Apollo Theater, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the National Black Theatre. These and many other venues along with many others throughout the neighborhood have helped to anchor Harlem as a beacon for Black creative expression that has been instrumental in shaping American culture. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library, stands as a repository for much of this history and as an emblem of Harlem’s extensive cultural history. In recent years, Harlem has also seen a burgeoning of new galleries, performance spaces, and cultural events that have reignited and brought new audiences to the community. In this course, we will explore Harlem’s early history and how it evolved from a place known primarily for its entertainment venues to one with a mix of standard and more cutting edge artistic and cultural ventures. Community, politics, and economics will also be considered as we look at various cultural and artistic movements. As part of our exploration, we will examine whether shifts in demographics and the ideas, notions, and sometimes, myths about the neighborhood have influenced arts and entertainment in the community. We will seek to define what distinguishes arts and entertainment in Harlem from other New York City neighborhoods and how Harlem has contributed over the years to Black arts and entertainment in NYC and beyond. This course will include visits to venues and visits from guest speakers, all relative to in-class discussions and deeper exploration of the space arts and entertainment have continued to hold for the community and for the people of Harlem. Along with guided walking tours, visits to selected venues will help to delineate Harlem’s cultural past and its continuing evolution through the work of artists, curators, administrators, scholars, culture bearers, and others. Students are encouraged to attend events at some of the institutions and venues covered in the course. Dates, times, and links for events, activities, and guest speakers will be provided in advance

AFEN BC3516 WATER WORLDS IN LITERARY IMAGINATION. 4.00 points.

This interdisciplinary course surveys literary, cinematic, historical and other archival text representations of time and change in and around waterways in the Global South—oceanic, riverine, at the littoral and in hinterlands. It is animated by questions of how people live with water as horizon, resource, life-giving source, as ancestral boundaries and threat. We do so now in a time when climate change refocuses our dependencies upon, and vulnerabilities to, water. Our themes are shaped by water’s influence on the rhythms of lives, and how these rhythms have been changed and are changing—deliberately, as in dam building and its aftermaths in lives, and through climate change

AFRS BC3532 ROMARE BEARDEN:HOME IS HARLEM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: This course is limited to 20 students Romare Bearden: Home is Harlem, is an exploration into one of the greatest American artists finding home in Harlem. The noted painter, collagist, intellectual and advocate for the arts, spent his childhood and young adult life in Harlem. Known for chronicling the African-American experience, he found rich sources for artistic expression in the Manhattan neighborhoods above 110th Street

AFEN BC3815 SHANGE ＆ DIGITAL STORYTELLING. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester.
Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: https://bit.ly/AFEN3815. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Shange’s stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in feminist history. We will examine Shange’s works through the dual lenses of “embodied knowledge” and historical context. In conjunction with our multidisciplinary analysis of primary texts, students will be introduced to archival research in Ntozake Shange’s personal archive at Barnard College. Thus the seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shange's work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Women's Studies. You can find more information and apply for the course at https://bit.ly/AFEN3815

AFEN BC3817 Black Shakespeare. 4.00 points.

This course examines Shakespeare’s role in shaping Western ideas about Blackness, in processes of racial formation, and in Black freedom struggle. As one of the most enduring representations of a Black man in Western art Shakespeare’s Othello will be a focal point. However, this course will examine other “race” plays as well as works perceived as “race-neutral” in tandem with Black “respeakings” of Shakespeare’s works. This class is antiracist in intent and is shaped by several interlocking questions: What is Black Shakespeare? Can creators and scholars separate Shakespeare from the apparatus of white supremacy that has been built around his works? What are the challenges for BIPOC actors performing Shakespeare on the dominant stage? What are the challenges and obstacles for BIPOC scholars working on Shakespeare in academia? Can performing Shakespeare be an activist endeavor

AFRS BC3998 SENIOR SEMINAR. 4.00 points.

A program of interdisciplinary research leading to the writing of the senior essay. All Africana majors must complete the one-semester Africana Studies Senior Seminar in the fall and submit a senior essay as one of the requirements for this course. A student who has successfully completed the Africana Studies Senior Seminar, has demonstrated the ability to complete a senior thesis, and has obtained approval from the faculty member teaching the Senior Seminar may take an Independent Study with a Barnard or Columbia faculty member or a second thesis seminar in another department in order to complete a senior thesis in Africana Studies in the spring semester

AFRS GU4001 Afro-Latin America in the Artistic Imagination. 4.00 points.

How have painters, filmmakers, novelists, and other artists portrayed the history of Africans and their descendants in Latin America? How do those portrayals – of the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, abolition, and contemporary social movements, to name a few examples – compare to scholarly approaches to those same subjects? To answer these and other questions, this class brings together a wide array of materials covering more than five hundred years of Afro-Latin American history. The course will move chronologically from the 15th century to the present, with each week devoted to grappling with a topic relevant to the history of Afro-Latin America in a given era, as viewed through both artistic and scholarly sources. Students will come to class prepared to consider what each has to offer to our understanding of the past. We will also debate the possibilities of using art to disseminate historical knowledge, and whether there any dangers to privileging artistic over scholarly approaches to history (or vice versa). In addition, because NYC is home to so many museums, archives, and cultural institutions relevant to our subject, it will serve as an experiential laboratory where we will spend several of our class meetings. Learning outcomes. By the end of the semester, students will be skilled at the following:  analyzing artistic and scholarly sources on their own terms  discussing them in relation to one another  evaluating the utility of these diverse materials to the process of understanding the past