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| Week 1: | Monday, 20 September: Introduction to Black Studies: History. The history of the field and the central figure of W. E. B. Du Bois. The role of Black Power. The development of the field in the 1990s: new source materials. No precept meetings. Reading assignment in course packet: Selection 5, Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933). Wednesday, 22 September: Introduction to Black Studies: Concepts. Diaspora, Black Atlantic, Black Pacific. Representation, Authenticity, Unity. Symbols and Stereotypes. Black Ethnicity. History and Memory. |
| Week 2: | Monday, 27 September: Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade. African-Americans trace their origins to the continent of Africa, and Africa as a symbol plays a central part in black American cultural memory. Reading assignment: Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. In packet: Selection 1, "Ali Eisami Gazirmabe of Bornu." Wednesday, 29 September: Slavery North and South and the Domestic Slave Trade. Slavery in the North American colonies and the United States was a national—not simply a southern—phenomenon. After the outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade, a domestic slave trade disrupted one out of every three enslaved families. |
| Week 3: | Monday, 4 October: Frederick Douglass as Fugitive Slave and Representative Colored Man Reading assignment: Houston A. Baker, Jr., ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. In packet: Selection 2, Maria Diedrich, Love Across Color Lines. Wednesday, 6 October: Slavery North and South as Lived Experience |
| Week 4: | Monday, 11 October: Civil War and Reconstruction. A watershed in African-American life, history, and culture, the Civil War and Reconstruction era made black Americans into citizens—people with a political standing and history. Reading assignment: James A. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War. In packet: Selection 6, Ralph J. Bunche, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR. Wednesday, 13 October: Race, Gender, and the State after the Civil War Amendments to the US Constitution. Critical race theory. |
| Week 5: | rs a gendered as well as a racial dimension. Reading assignment: Ida B. Wells, Jacqueline Jones Royster, A Red Record. In packet: Selections 8 and 9, James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son and Paul Robeson, Here I Stand. Wednesday, 20 October: The Iconography of Lynching Lynching has played so central a part in African-American history and memory that it has inspired artistic production across the genres. |
| Week 6: | Monday, 25 October: Black Cultural Production in the Era of Freedom Emancipation meant more than the end of enslavement (thought that, in itself, was enormously important). Freedom, no matter how limited, allowed black people to express themselves artistically in forms that celebrated African-American life and history and influenced American culture generally. Midterm week; no precept meetings, no reading assignment. |
| Week 7: | Monday, 8 November: Booker T. Washington and Black Conservatism. Even though African Americans have long been the poorest people in the United States, the tradition of black conservatism dates back at least to the turn of the twentieth century, when Booker T. Washington, the founder and head of Tuskegee Institute, championed economic development in an era of segregation and disfranchisement. Reading assignment: William L. Andrews, ed., Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery. Wednesday, 10 November: Black Capitalism, Segregation, and Economic Development |
| Week 8: | Monday, 15 November: The New Negro of the 1920s and the Radical Negro of the Great Depression. During the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans migrated out of the South and expressed themselves in the North, particularly in the "Negro Mecca" of Harlem. The founding document of the "New Negro" was W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic, which still inspires black intellectuals in our own turn of the century. Reading assignment: Donald Gibson, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk. In packet: Selections 3 and 4, Hazel Carby, Race Men, and Zora Neale Hurston: "Characteristics of Negro Expression" et al. Wednesday, 17 November: New Negro Cultural Production. |
| Week 9: | Monday, 22 November: Omni-Americans of the 1950s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The most famous piece of black writing of the 1950s inserted African Americans into the post-war intellectual scene. But the Civil Rights movement of the decade that followed outmoded many of Ellison’s figures and assumptions. That outmoding proved to be only temporary. A Princeton professor questions the gender conventions of the classic novel. Reading assignment: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. In packet: Selection 7, Claudia Tate, "Notes on the Invisible Women." Wednesday, 24 November: Race in the Cold War Era |
| Week 10: | Monday, 29 November: Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, and Black Nationalism/Black Power During the 1960s, black nationalism (an ideology) competed with non-violent direct action (a strategy) for the allegiance of African Americans. Thirty-five years after his assassination, however, the ideology’s most famous symbol exerts tremendous appeal. Reading assignment: Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In packet: Selections 10 and 11, Gerald Early, "Notes on the Invention of Malcolm X" and James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Wednesday, 1 December: Postwar Post-Colonial Intellectuals: Decolonization and Independence in the Third World. Post-Colonial Studies. |
| Week 11: | Monday, 6 December: Black Popular Culture at Century’s End. Thanks to entertainment industry’s means of production and distribution, black popular culture at the end of the twentieth century quickly permeates the whole world. Given the immediate dispersal of black arts, can we still speak of "black" popular culture? What is it, and how is it produced and distributed? Assignment: [To Come] Wednesday, 8 December: Black Culture in the Era of Multicultural Marketing. The invention and elaboration of Kwanzaa. |
| Week 12: | Due today: a one-paragraph description of your paper topic, an analysis of the work on one of our authors or artists. Monday, 13 December: New African America Over the course of the twentieth century, immigrants of African descent—mainly from the West Indies and Africa—have altered black America’s composition and made ethnic differences apparent in what had been a (seemingly) homogeneous, southern based racial-ethnicity. To complicate matters further, bi- and multi-racial people who used to be categorized as "Negro" now claim the full complexity of their racial inheritance. Reading assignment in packet: Selections 12, 13, and 14, Stuart Hall, "The After-life of Frantz Fanon," Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House. Wednesday, 15 December: What is Authentic Blackness? |
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http://www.princeton.edu/~painter/pucourse/aas201/syllabus.shtml |