During the first week of course preregistration for spring and fall
terms, you may register for a total of four academic courses,
including a maximum of two Five College courses. This limit does not
apply during the add/drop periods. However, According to Amherst
College policy, students may register for a maximum of two Amherst
College courses per semester.
| Course | Title (click to view description) | Credits | Meeting Info |
|---|
| AFCNA-141-01 | Intro Modern African History | 4.00 | MW 10:00AM-11:15AM Reese 324 |
| This course provides an introduction to African history over the past three centuries. Venturing beyond the stereotypes, we will explore the complex histories that constitute a diverse continent. Special attention is given to spotlighting the voices of African people through a range of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs, film, music, cartoons, speeches and photography. Students will gain knowledge of African geographies and histories, develop the skill of primary source analysis, and be able to connect events in -- and narratives of -- present-day Africa to a deeper historical past. |
| AFCNA-200-01 | Foundations/Africana Studies | 4.00 | MW 11:30AM-12:45PM Reese 324 |
| This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different? What can we glean from contemporary discourses grounded in the consideration of global black lives? |
| AFCNA-241BA-01 | Black Atlantic Diasporas1 | Variable | TTH 03:15PM-04:30PM Skinner Hall 210 |
| 1This course is variable credit: Taught in English. Students interested in developing their German language speaking skills in conjunction with this course are encouraged to enroll in the GRMST-231BA-01 section of the course and in the 2-credit discussion section GRMST-295-01.
|
| We explore modern encounters of African-Americans and Afro-Europeans in the spaces and peripheries of the Black Atlantic, as the spaces constitute diasporic practices. Diasporic Blackness serves as a critique of and community-based resistance to global anti-Blackness, largely in response to Europe's colonial and imperial activities. Our materials frame anti-Blackness as a source of trauma, travel, and resistance, where each of these is a vital part of an emancipatory movement. We include textual and visual materials that examine the consequences of representations of past, present, and future Black freedom dreams and their lived effects. How is diasporic Blackness constituted through time and space? How does the critique of Black-white binarist thought compel a rethinking of controlling narratives of race as nation? What about encounters with other racialized folks? |
| AFCNA-241EN-01 | Early African American Novel | 4.00 | TTH 03:15PM-04:30PM Shattuck Hall 217 |
| This course tracks the beginnings of the African American novelistic tradition in the nineteenth century. The early African American novel had to contend with a number of other literary forms within its political and cultural context such as the slave narrative with its central claim to truth. We will consider: What is specific to the form of the novel? How does it differentiate itself from and even include other forms of writing and literature? What are the politics of the early African American novel in the era of slavery and abolition? We will examine how early novels by Black Americans imagine more emancipatory futures while also critiquing the unfreedom of the nineteenth century. |
| AFCNA-241TR-01 | Tragicomedy in Black | 4.00 | TH 01:30PM-04:20PM Shattuck Hall 318 |
| The course examines horror and comedy as genre conventions that become strained and distorted when bent to the demands of black critical expression This course will center on themes of life and death as they are framed in black film and literature through idioms of the absurd and the ghastly. We will encounter film and writing by Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Toni Morrison, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Bill Gunn, Donald Glover. Students will learn how to close-read our media-saturated environment, thinking through the ways in which representation functions to condition our perception of enjoyment and terror. |
| AFCNA-241WM-01 | African/American Woman in Lit | 4.00 | MW 03:15PM-04:30PM Shattuck Hall 319 |
| This course surveys historical representations of Black female subjects in the literature of the African Diaspora. We will read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, Efuru by Flora Nwapa, and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi as well as a curated list of short stories. Discussions will center on the changing notions of values for these women as a result of their geographical location: how does space/relationship to land shape African/American women's identities? Students will also compose critical reflections and a final creative project which may include an art collection, documentary, short story, or a series of blog posts. |
| AFCNA-341DC-01 | Decolonization & Civil Rights | 4.00 | W 01:30PM-04:20PM Clapp Laboratory 422 |
| This course explores pan-African collaborations between the continental Africans and the African Diaspora during the age of decolonization and the Civil Rights Movement. It examines key developments in the global black movement with a focus on (de)segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, decolonization, and the Black Power Movement. Through readings and discussions, students who complete this course will come to understand the contributions of continental Africans to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the responses of the African Diaspora to social, political, and economic conditions in post-colonial Africa. |
| AFCNA-341MT-01 | Bodies of Thought | 4.00 | TTH 09:00AM-10:15AM Shattuck Hall 318 |
| This course tracks uses of the body as a metaphor in literature by black writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. Thinking about the body as a conceptual unit that refers to a broad range of configurations -- the physical body, the national body, bodies of knowledge, and so on -- this course will ask students to think about the limits and potentials of the body as form when it is marshaled by black writers toward a range of political, social, and aesthetic projects. We will read texts by Frantz Fanon, James Hannaham, Jesmyn Ward, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, and others. |
| AFCNA-341SE-01 | Black Sexual Economies | 4.00 | T 01:30PM-04:20PM Shattuck Hall 319 |
| At once viewed as a dysfunction of normative ideas about sexuality, the family, and the nation, Black sexualities are intimately linked to and regulated by political and socioeconomic discourses. Slavery studies scholars remind us of how it has proven foundational for modern notions of race and sex by making explicit links between labor and exploitation. Thus, this course moves through themes such as slavery historicity, intersections between Black feminisms and Black sexualities, sexual labor/work, pleasure, and the erotic, in order to consider the stakes of our current critical approaches to Black sexual economies and interrogate its silences and possibilities. |
| AFCNA-395-01 | Independent Study2 | Variable | |
| 2This course is variable credit: 1.00-8.00 credits.
2This course requires instructor permission
|
| No description provided by host campus. |
