Africana Studies Courses

A discipline that examines and critiques the experience of Africans and peoples of African descent, Africana Studies emerged on college campuses in the midst of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and has been a central force in reshaping higher learning in the United States. Representing a strong and continuous intellectual presence in the academy, Africana Studies challenges all students to explore issues of identity and subject formation, of race and difference; to understand the collective experience of black people in today's world; to develop the ability to examine, analyze and interpret these experiences within the context of liberal learning. Involving black people throughout the world and over time, Africana Studies is the only discipline that situates black people at the center of study and offers an intellectual tool without seeking intellectual hegemony. Africana Studies at DePauw is conceived as a multidisciplinary study of the collective experience of Africa and the African Diaspora. As an intellectual pursuit attuned to the ways in which nation, race, social class, ethnicity and gender inform relations, Africana Studies describes, represents, critiques and interrogates the multiple and shifting historical, cultural, social and political meanings of blackness, focusing on the disaporan societies, cultures and people of the United States, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Course Catalog

Requirements for a major

Africana Studies

Requirements for a minor

Africana Studies

Courses in Africana Studies

Introduction to Africana Studies

(Previously BLST 100, Introduction to Black Studies) Designed as the gateway to Africana Studies, this course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the collective experience of blacks in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. The course seeks to provide students an intellectual framework for engagement in a process of self-discovery and for achieving a more global understanding of the unique ways in which Africans and peoples of African descent have constituted our world. The course, which introduces important theoretical approaches and builds critical and analytical skills, provides an overview of the historical, socio-economic and cultural dynamics of black life.

Readings in Literatures of the Black Diaspora

This course explores the literary expressions of Africans and peoples of African descent as they are found in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. Works by such writers as Achebe, Ngugi, Kincaid, Walcott, Guillen, Morejon, Reed and Morrison may be included. Cross-listed with ENG 255.

History of the Black Atlantic

An exploration of the historical foundations and the development of black life in Africa and its later diffusion in the Black Diaspora. Its purview will range from pre-colonial dynamics to the more contemporary manifestations of global Black History in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, Latin America and Melanesia. Topics may include: African cultures before European contact, the slave trade and its impact on Africa and the Atlantic economy, the middle passage, internal migration in Africa and case studies of the creation of diasporic communities and cultures. Cross-listed with HIST 281.

Topics in Africana Studies

This course explores some issue, theme or period related to Africana Studies. May be repeated for credit with different topics.

Identity Politics

This course examines cultural differences and political activities of reference groups, specifically African Americans in the United States. Identity groups (for example, ethnic, gender, and racial groups) are groups that create and sustain a sense of political identity. They are frequently pushed to the margins of social, political, civic, and economic life. Many of these groups experience profound levels of inequality through systemic racism. The course explores the processes of marginalization and potential remedies that marginalized groups have deployed to address being pushed to the margins. We will devote a significant amount of attention to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its impact on these groups.

Black Lives Matter: AntiBlackness & Resistance

This course will examine Black Lives Matter as a social movement while focusing on the role of antiblack racism, structural inequality, and identity in American politics. We will investigate the language used to discuss race and make important distinctions between concepts like racism, prejudice, and anti-Blackness. This course will expose students to competing theoretical frameworks used to understand race, privilege, and difference. Additionally, this course will focus on protest politics, political activism, the prison industrial complex, and state-sanctioned violence against people of color. To study these subjects we will rely on academic literature from Africana Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, and other fields.

Advanced Topics in Africana Studies

An interdisciplinary study of some significant issue, theme or period relevant to Africana Studies. May be repeated for credit with different topics.

Senior Project

Students work with the director of Africana Studies or a faculty member who teaches in the program to complete a major project or paper that focuses on some aspect of the Africana experience.

Independent Study

An in-depth directed study under the guidance of a faculty member associated with the Africana Studies program, using Africana Studies' methodologies and scholarship.

Courses in the Classics in English

Classica Africana

Explores the ways in which modern literature of peoples of African descent engages with ancient Hellenic and Roman literature. This course may concentrate on African American literature, women writers, or literature of the African Diaspora. Example topics include how the art of Derek Walcott's Omeros, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Rita Dove's Mother Love riffs on such works of classical literature as Homer's Odyssey, Euripides' Medea and The Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

Courses in Literature

African-American Literature

A study of African-American writing, including biographies, essays and polemics as well as drama, fiction and poetry.

Courses in Film Studies

African American Cinema

Reading African American cinema as a pivotal archive in African American cultural production, this course explores the diverse black aesthetic traditions that African American film has and continues to develop, explore, and shape. Specifically, the course will track how films produced, written, and/or directed by African Americans are situated in larger debates about the politics of race and representation.

Courses in History

Diversity, Society and Culture in African History

The study of Africa's pre-colonial past has produced a particularly wide variety of views and interpretations. Some writers have asserted, for example, that Africans possessed little political organization in the past, while others celebrate ancient African kingdoms. This course introduces students to the diverse histories of Africa, from the development of early African communities to the late 19th century. The course will offer a broad survey of the history of Africa, including its diverse cultures, belief systems, political complexities, statecraft, and the fluid nature of African societies. We will examine pre-colonial texts, ideas, cultures, institutions, geography, communities, arts, technologies, and commercial systems to explain the major dynamics of economic, social, and political change in Africa. The purpose of this course is to help students make their own judgments about competing claims and conflicting interpretations of the African past. We will acquaint ourselves with the various methodologies and sources that historians of pre-colonial Africa use in their craft, including archaeology, linguistics, oral traditions, historical anthropology, environmental history, and documentary evidence. As we will see, one of the most exciting aspects of African historical study is that it draws upon kinds of evidence which historians in other parts of the world rarely use, and so gives us an unusual perspective on the human past.

Legacies of Empire and Decolonization of Africa

This course introduces students to the history of the African continent from the 1880s (the eve of colonial rule) to the late twentieth century. The central themes the course considers include European scramble for Africa and the African responses; Colonial rule, economic policies, and colonial health policies; the development of African nationalism; colonial legacies and the struggle to achieve justice, freedom, economic opportunities, and democracy; and the challenges of postcolonial Africa. The first section of the course focuses on the European conquest of Africa and the effects of colonial rule on African politics, economies, cultures, and communities. The second section looks at the rise of African nationalism and the methods liberation movements used to fight colonial rule. The third section examines the challenges of postcolonial Africa - economic, social, and political challenges. The course will provide students with a historical framework for analyzing and assessing the legacies of colonialism to help them critically think about the postcolonial challenges African countries face today.

Politics and Society in Africa

This course introduces students to the major African issues, debates, and historical patterns of social diversity, Africa's role in the globalizing world, and economic and political developments in Africa in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The course explores a sequence of significant themes in contemporary Africa, including terrorism; dictatorships, and contested elections in Africa; Africa's position in the global economy; women and the youth's political and economic participation; climate change; health care transformations; the state of the entertainment industry in Africa; social media and everyday life in Africa; Gender and Sexuality; the state of the media in Africa: and the efforts by different ethnic, religious, LGBTQIA+, political, and racial groups to achieve equality, recognition, and constitutional protections. We will examine African governments' and citizens' responses to global issues impacting local economies, governance, cultures, social movements, natural resources management, and civil and political rights. The course will provide students with a historical framework for analyzing and assessing Africa's civil society, cultures, development, economies, and politics to help them critically think about the news and other information they encounter in their everyday life about Africa and Africans.

African American History

A survey of the black experience in the United States focusing on ways African Americans reacted individually and collectively to their condition and how they have contributed to the development of the United States.

History of the Black Atlantic

An exploration of the historical foundations and the development of Black life in Africa and its later diffusion in the Black Diaspora. Its purview will range from pre-colonial dynamics to the more contemporary manifestations of global Black history in North America, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, Latin America and Melanesia. Topics include: African cultures before European contact, the slave trade and its impact on Africa and the Atlantic economy, the middle passage, internal migration in Africa and case studies of the creation of Diasporic communities and cultures.

African Nationalism, 1890-1985

A survey of African resistance to European imperialism with emphasis on the national peculiarities of the European penetration, the experience of Settler and non-Settler Africa, the personnel and methodology of proto-nationalist and nationalist resistance, and the general outcome of these efforts.

African Slavery

A review of the processes of incorporation into slavery; slaves in production and exchange; the resistance history of slavery; the gender implications of the slave state; slaves and social mobility, interdependence and the manipulations of class; and the dynamics of manumission and abolition.

Civil War and Reconstruction

From the 1850s to the 1870s, monumental struggles over slavery, race, political authority, economy, the Constitution, and the very dimensions of the United States roiled North America. A bloody sectional war and the emancipation of millions of African Americans catalyzed profound change. A highly contested process to restructure the nation on a continental scale ensued. To comprehend these revolutionary times, we weave together the stories of the freedom seekers and enslavers, soldiers and civilians, the battlefront and the home front. The inspiring potential and tragic limits of what Lincoln called a 'new birth of freedom' drive our inquiry.

Courses in Political Science

African American Politics

This course focuses on how the continuing struggle for Black political empowerment has helped influence and shape the current African American political community. An interdisciplinary approach incorporating economics, history and sociology will be used to gain an overall understanding of the African American community and its critical influence upon the American political system.

The Politics of Race

This course explores the centrality and significance of race in the modern American political system. The course covers, but is not limited to, the role of race in electoral politics, urban politics, the political and social attitudes of Americans and the debates about the scope and function of the federal government.

Politics of Developing Nations

An introduction to the similarities and unifying characteristics of heterogeneous developing nations. Emphasis on diversities to be found in different regions of the Third World. The focus is on issues and problems and not countries and regions, though case studies are used for illustrative purposes. The course covers theories and approaches to the study of the Third World; changes in the Third World (political, economic, governmental and regime); contemporary issues (hunger and famine, multinationals, foreign debt and the New International Economic Order); and Third World ideologies and movements (nonalignment, developmental socialism, anti-Americanism and Islamic revivalism).

Courses in Religious Studies

Caribbean Religions and Culture

An exploration of the relationship between Caribbean religious traditions and culture in the development of Caribbean identity and nationhood. It focuses on how the major world religions were modified through the encounter between peoples of Amerindian, African, European and Asian descent. Further, it studies the impact of slavery, emigration, colonialism, and globalization on the emergence of indigenous Caribbean religious traditions (Vodun, Santeria, Rastafari).

Liberation Theology

An examination of the interaction between Western religious traditions and the foremost liberation movements: Third-World, black, gay and women's liberation.

Malcolm, Martin & Co.: A Religious Interpretation

This course explores the religious dimensions in the life, philosophy, and work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., two iconic figures whose complicated lives and articulate rhetoric were deeply shaped by religion, and their transformative role in the modern Civil Rights movement, the African American struggle for inclusion, law, and the construction of a democratic ethos in America and beyond. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, it emphasizes how the religious dynamic in Malcolm and Martin's heritage, personal development, consciousness, constructions of self, and society, impacted their significant and lasting contributions toward America's 'long civil rights movement,' and pursuit of its utopian promise. It also reflects on the ways in which their religious commitments and activism, framed between chaos and community, affected their environment, families, relations with other major figures in the global black struggle for emancipation--across the lines of gender, race, and sexuality. Ultimately, it reflects on their interrogations of contemporary society, the pathways of freedom they kept open, and the ways in which they are remembered.

Bob Marley, Caribbean Religion and Culture

This course is a close study and analysis of the religious core and communicative rationality in Bob Marley's life and music. It develops the intersections between Caribbean religion and culture based on Marley's affiliation to Rastafari.

Courses in Anthropology

African Cultures

In this course, students examine the cultural, political, economic, psychological and social aspects of life in Africa. Through lectures, discussions, films and a variety of readings, students will explore a number of issues, including ancient Egypt, slavery, colonialism, religion, music, art, African cinema and Pan-Africanism. Prerequisite: ANTH 151, sophomore standing or permission of instructor.

African Diaspora Religions

This course is designed to explore the history, functions, and communities, which encompass religions of the African Diaspora such as Santer'a, Vodou, and Candombl'. Lectures, discussions, films, and a range of ethnographic literature will introduce students to these religious systems. Among the topics and themes to be addressed in relation to religion are issues of identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and class. Case studies in Brazil, Cuba, and among Latinos in the U.S. will illuminate the multivocality of the religious beliefs and practices found in the African Diaspora.

Courses in Sociology

Racial and Ethnic Relations

This course explores the origins, changes and possible futures of racial and ethnic relations. It is concerned with both the development of sociological explanations of ethnic and racial conflict, competition and cooperation as well as with practical approaches to improving inter-group relations. The course surveys global and historical patterns of inter-group relations but focuses on late 20th-century and early 21st-century United States. Prerequisite: SOC 100 or sophomore standing.

Black Issues and Identity

This course considers how oppressive social realities inform the lives and the study of socially marginal and politically disempowered groups. While emphasis is placed on the experiences of people of African descent, the class covers issues of power, definition, bias, resistance, and resilience that are also prominent in the histories of other marginalized groups in the U.S. Prerequisite: One course in Sociology or permission of instructor.

Social Inequalities

This course examines multiple systems of privilege and oppression, such as gender, race, ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. The course considers how these systems of inequality intersect to influence people's experiences of social processes (e.g., discrimination, stereotyping, and violence) and various social institutions (e.g., family, paid labor, education, and media).