This seminar brings together readings from a variety of scholarly fields to explore the wide spectrum of twentieth-century social and political movements organized by African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean people. The overall purpose of the course is to rethink the terms of politics and political engagement that have been available in what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "darker parts of the world" through an examination of the history of diverse struggles against racism, colonialism, capitalism, and other forms of the structural inequality. The seminar will frame the inquiry in basic questions; how and why political regimes and ideologies are established and legitimated, how and why political movements arise to challenge, usurp, and collaborate with said regimes, as well as when and where movements succeed, collapse, transform, and revitalize.

This seminar critically examines the causes and consequences of persistent racial/ethnic disparities in the post-civil rights era in American society, with particular emphasis on the plight of African Americans. We will explore the merits and limitations of various paradigms that aim to explain racial disparities and the concomitant social policies that have been implemented and/or proposed (e.g., public housing, affirmative action, reparations, etc.). Major topics include: residential segregation, wealth inequality, educational achievement, employment outcomes, crime & punishment, and culture.

From the arrival of enslaved Africans to the recent election of President Barack Obama, black people have been central the story of the United States, and the Americas, more broadly. African Americans have been both contributors to, and victims of, this "New World" democratic experiment. To capture the complexities of this ongoing saga, this course offers an inter-disciplinary exploration of the development of African American cultural and political life in the U.S., but also in relationship to the different African diasporic outposts of the Atlantic world. The course will be organized both chronologically and thematically, moving from the "middle passage" to the present so-called "post-racial" moment-drawing on a range of classical texts, primary sources, and more recent secondary literature-to grapple with key questions, concerns and problems (i.e. agency, resistance, culture, structure, etc.) that have preoccupied scholars of African American history, culture and politics. Students will be introduced to range of disciplinary methods and theoretical approaches (spanning the humanities and social sciences), while also attending to the critical tension between intellectual work and everyday life, which are central to the formation of African-American Studies as an academic field. This course will engage specific social formations (i.e. migration, urbanization, globalization, diaspora, etc), significant cultural/political developments (i.e. uplift ideologies, nationalism, feminism, pan-Africanism, religion/spirituality, etc), and hallmark moments/movements (i.e. Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, Black Power, etc). By the end of the semester students will be expected to possess a working knowledge of major themes/figures/traditions, alongside a range of cultural/political practices and institutional arrangements, in African American Studies.Discussion Section Required.

This course studies the various ethnic groups which comprise the population of the United States their accommodations and assimilation, their changing attitudes and impact on one another. In addition, the course examines the ways that interracial and inter ethnic conflict influence social organization and power structure in American life. The course is designed to help the student critically evaluate "racial" and ethnic relations from a sociological perspective. In the first section of the course, students will be presented with a theoretical and conceptual base to study race and ethnicity in American life. From this base, students will move to the second part of the course exploring the various experiences of racial, ethnic, national and religious minority groups in American society. Experiences of these groups include basic social organizational structures of power and inequality.

This seminar brings together readings from a variety of scholarly fields to explore the wide spectrum of twentieth-century social and political movements organized by African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean people. The overall purpose of the course is to rethink the terms of politics and political engagement that have been available in what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "darker parts of the world" through an examination of the history of diverse struggles against racism, colonialism, capitalism, and other forms of the structural inequality. The seminar will frame the inquiry in basic questions; how and why political regimes and ideologies are established and legitimated, how and why political movements arise to challenge, usurp, and collaborate with said regimes, as well as when and where movements succeed, collapse, transform, and revitalize.

In this course we will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of race and politics in the Caribbean, focusing on Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. We will begin by locating the Caribbean in relation to Latin America and the international system, and we will briefly cover the role of slavery, colonialism, and the plantation economy in shaping the modern Caribbean. We will explore trends of revolution, socialism, and neoliberalism in the twentieth century, focusing on the opportunities and dangers of new political and economic strategies such as tourism, state-centered populism, and nationalism. The course has a dual thematic focus. First, we will look at various cycles of revolutionary activity in the Caribbean, beginning with the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, through to the Cuban revolution of 1959 and contemporary revolutionary and national-populist movements in Venezuela and Haiti. We will counterpose this to authoritarian rule and political transitions in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Second, the course examines the repercussions of the Haitian slave revolt and anti-colonial revolutions for configurations and experiences of race throughout the Caribbean. We will look at racial politics in revolutionary, cultural nationalist, and authoritarian settings. We will explore racial divisions in the current period of crisis and polarization, and the expressions of race politics in the media, rap music, and reggaeton.

This course will examine the relationship between popular music and popular movements. We will be taking a historical as well as a thematic approach to our inverstigation as a way to trace various legacies within popular music that fall under the rubric of "protest music" as well as to think about the ways in which popular music has assisted various communities to speak truth to power. We will also consider the ways in which the impact of the music industryhas either lessened or enhanced popular music's ability to articulate "protest" or "resistance" to hegemonic power.

This course examines the modern business landscape to understand how representations of social life are developed, created, and contested. Particular emphasis will be given to representations of race, ethnicity, and social difference. The principal empirical focus will be on the profession of modern advertising, which has become a polyglot institutional field consisting of not only traditional advertising agencies, but also digital companies specializing in new media communications, and social media firms using crowdsourcing and viral marketing. We will consider the ways that corporations and those in their service produce and consume information and image, in an effort to shape individual and collective identities. A production of cultural perspective will be tied together with semiotic analysis and research into organizational dynamics. The overall objective will be to understand both the production and consumption of images of social difference.Discussion Section Required.

This seminar critically examines the causes and consequences of persistent racial/ethnic disparities in the post-civil rights era in American society, with particular emphasis on the plight of African Americans. We will explore the merits and limitations of various paradigms that aim to explain racial disparities and the concomitant social policies that have been implemented and/or proposed (e.g., public housing, affirmative action, reparations, etc.). Major topics include: residential segregation, wealth inequality, educational achievement, employment outcomes, crime & punishment, and culture.