Fall 2023 Class Descriptions
Fall 2023 course descriptions
101-7-20– "The Craft of Description: Thing, Event, Text"
Skilled writers paint vivid images with their words, as do compelling thinkers. Description is a practice of carefully evoking the observable properties of a thing, event, text, or cultural phenomena for a reader that may not share said experience. This course introduces students to the craft of thick description of cultural artefacts and happenings that would serve them in a plethora of academic and creative pursuits at and beyond the university. Students will also learn to mobilize description as evidence in academic writing and as a means for forging persuasive arguments. Course exercises will include in a combination of ethnography assignments; close reading of objects, events and ephemera, classroom readings; peer feedback; and, crucially, the patient art of revising one’s writing. The craft of description should prepare students for work in a multitude of disciplines and intellectual curiosities.
101-7-21– "A Dark Rock Surged Upon’: Navigating Race, Cass, and Gender in College"
Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote the following about her time at Barnard College in the 1920s: "Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overcome by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself." A first-year seminar gives students the tools to manage the "surge" of college, both socioemotionally and academically. All of you have left the familiarity of your families, neighborhoods, and high schools to enter a new context, one with new forms of diversity, hierarchy, division, and opportunity for connections. Even though she was in college and writing nearly 100 years ago, Hurston is still an awesome guide as you navigate issues of race, gender, class, and academic belonging at Northwestern. Some topics we will explore include: privilege, politics, love, friendship, curiosity, perseverance, grades, work, and community. Hurston's vast body of work will be the basis for your own analysis, reflections and writing.
101-6-25 – Kaplan Humanities Seminar “A Place Called Home: Great Migrations, Folk Life and Chicago Renaissance"
“By the time the Great Migration was over,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in the epilogue to her sprawling “epic story” The Warmth of Other Suns, “few Americans had not been touched by it.” From World War I through the end of the Vietnam War, African Americans kept coming out of the American South, to the North and West, mostly to cities like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Tulsa, Cleveland, Detroit, Wichita, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Like many other migrants and immigrants, they were often obstructed, misrepresented, and rebuked on the beginnings and ends (not to mention in the middles) of their trips. Yet they kept coming, and their movement, as well as its aftermath, culturally redefined the United States, along with the migrants themselves.
This seminar will be an intensive, interdisciplinary study of literature, music, film, and visual art produced during and about the first and second waves of the Great Migration, from roughly 1917 until 1970. We will explore the Chicago Renaissance as a cultural flowering of the Migration’s first wave, and consider the philosophical and cultural critiques offered by the African American intelligentsia of the period. In addition, we will examine the migration of Black Folklife—faith practices, music, foodways, and vernacular iterations—and chart its impacts across and beyond the US. Finally, the class will explore what some sociologists and urban studies scholars have called a “reverse migration,” citing a statistical exodus of African Americans out of the Great Migration’s destination cities in numbers that now rival or exceed the movement itself. We will also focus on themes of home, community, and physical place and space, ideas that we imagine will be especially resonant for first-year students.
236-0-20 – Introduction to African-American Studies
Introduction to the discipline of black studies using key historical and theoretical texts.
315-0-20 – Religion in the Black Atlantic
The Caribbean constitutes a unique space to understand the history of resistance and social change in the Black Atlantic world. Going beyond the tropes of reggae, Rastafari, and tourism--this course provides an introduction to the diversity of religious traditions in the region, with particular focus on Afro-Caribbean religious practices and spiritual technologies. Students will explore the cosmological features and embodied expressions that characterize these traditions. Through presentations, discussions, and writing assignments students will reflect on concepts such as belonging, migration, colonialism, race, class, and gender to understand the political and cultural implications of religion in the region. The course counts towards Religion, Law, and Politics (RLP) religious studies major concentration.
380-0-20 – Topics: Black Political Thought
Advanced work on social, cultural, or historical topics. May be repeated for credit with different topic. Prerequisite: Advanced student or senior standing.
380-0-22 – Topics: Black Feminist Worldmaking
What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment.
380-0-23 – Topics: Black Dance
This course explores the discursive foundations, political motivations, and aesthetic strategies of artists and writers whose works have enabled the category of Black Dance. The course offers us the urgent opportunity to explore the aesthetic foundations of contemporary dance as they have been created and framed by African American aesthetic structures and practices. As with American music, which has been largely influenced by the articulation of jazz, contemporary dance performance has been enabled by participation in structures of Black Dance. The course includes historical overview of key figures, performance venues, and events that have defined the form, as well as important works of art created in this mode. To take on the question of how Black Dance exists, we will attempt to articulate structures of composition and performance that are commonly described as Black. Working with cultural criticism contemporary with emergent modes of Black Dance, we will assess the political motivations and aesthetic strategies of artists and writers working explicitly in this idiom. We will also look closely at current Africanist scholarship that assumes the possibility of Black dance performed by people of First World, European, Latinx, and Asian descent. While this is not a course of dancing, we will dance together at times in the semester. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, we will come to understand aesthetic structures of Black performance; genealogies of modes of Black dance; and particular histories of several artists and dancers that every educated person might encounter.
401-0-1 – Research Methods in Black Studies
Introduction to central debates in Black Studies on a graduate level. Emphasizes critical thinking, research design and method, forms of argumentation, and theory building. Readings highlight a range of methods -- historiographic, literary, ethnographic, social scientific etc. Assignments focused on developing student independent research projects.
480-0-20 – Topics: Black Conceptual Methodologies
The aim of this course is to introduce graduate students to the importance of analysing, appropriating and formulating concepts in historically and theoretically oriented Black Studies research. This intellectual approach is described as Black Conceptual Methodologies. Through this course we will explore techniques and ideas through various critiques of western critical theory and elaborations of Black conceptualizations in relation to modern questions of history, power, hegemony, ideology, resistance and narrativity. In order to build towards this methodological exposition students will be introduced to techniques for evaluating and formulating concepts, as well as identifying the methods of Black conceptualizations. With reference to theoretical or ethnographic aspects of research, students will be required to undertake applied conceptual work in their assessed papers. In addition, each student will be required to innovate and develop their own formulation of Black methodological concept. Overall, the course will challenge students to think more analytically, critically and methodologically about the explanatory impact, role, applications and developments of concepts in Black studies research and theorizing. Classes will comprise presentations by the professor and student-led discussions based on pre-selected weekly readings.
480-0-21 – Topics: African American History - 1865
African American History is currently centered in several conversations about its production and meaning. This fall course returns to the work of academic historians who have and continue to transform what we know about the history of African Americans and the United States. Open to historians and non-historians, this course will center works that use historical methods to uncover US histories of enslaved and free people of African descent and their experiences and shaping of institutions such as slavery, freedom, the US legal system, structures and ideologies of gender and sexuality, political activism against slavery and for the development of racial equality; and others, between the Revolutionary Era (inclusive of the “American” Revolution but also the revolutions in human equality in the Atlantic World); and the American Civil War.