African American Studies

493 College, 432.1170
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Paul Gilroy

Director of Graduate Studies
Matthew Jacobson [F] (493 College, matthew.jacobson@yale.edu)
Gerald Jaynes [Sp] (493 College, gjaynes@msn.com)

Professors
Hazel Carby, William Foltz, Glenda Gilmore, Paul Gilroy, Ezra Griffith, Matthew Jacobson, Gerald Jaynes, Serene Jones, Vera Kutzinski, Christopher L. Miller, Joseph Roach, Robert Stepto, John Szwed, Robert Thompson

Associate Professors
Elizabeth Alexander, Jonathan Holloway, David Krasner, Patricia Pessar

Assistant Professors
Jennifer Baszile, Khalilah Brown-Dean, Kamari Clarke, Nadine George-Graves, Ange-Marie Hancock, Kellie Jones, Alondra Nelson, Naomi Pabst, Diana Paulin, Michael Veal

Lecturers
Kathleen Cleaver, Achille Mbembe, Flemming Norcott, Seth Silberman, Gerald Thomas

Fields of Study
African American Studies offers a combined Ph.D. with a number of other departments and programs. Departments and programs which currently offer a combined Ph.D. with African American Studies are: American Studies, Anthropology, English, French, History, History of Art, Political Science, Psychology, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Spanish and Portuguese. Within the field of study, the student will select an area of concentration in consultation with the directors of graduate studies of African American Studies and the joint department or program. An area of concentration in African American Studies may take the form of a single area study or a comparative area study: e.g., Caribbean or African American literature, a comparison of African American literature in a combined degree with the Department of English; an investigation of the significance of the presence of African cultures in the New World, either in the Caribbean or in Latin and/or South America in a combined degree with the Spanish and Portuguese department. An area of concentration may also follow the fields of study already established within a single discipline, e.g., race/minority/ethnic studies in a combined degree with Sociology. An area of concentration must either be a field of study offered by a department or fall within the rubric of such a field. Please refer to the description of fields of study of the prospective joint department or program.

Special Admissions Requirements
Strong undergraduate preparation in a discipline related to African American studies; writing sample; description of the fields of interest to be pursued in a combined degree. This is a combined degree program. To be considered for admission to this program you must indicate both African American Studies and one of the participating departments/programs listed above. Additionally, please indicate both departments on all supporting documents (personal statement, letters of recommendation, transcripts, etc.).

Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
Students will be subject to the combined Ph.D. supervision of the African American Studies department and the relevant participating department or program. The student’s academic program will be decided in consultation with an adviser, the director of graduate studies of African American Studies, and the director of graduate studies of the participating department or program and must be approved by all three. Students are required to take four designated core courses in African American Studies. Core courses are (1) Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century (AFAM 505a), which is a required course for all first-year graduate students in the combined program; (2) Race Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States (AFAM 714b/AMST 713b/HIST 754b); (3) Modernity and Its Others: Self, Subject, and Cultural Differences (AFAM 712b/SOCY 650b); (4) Research Workshop (AFAM 895). After completion of course work, students will be required to attend the one-year research workshop during their third year. This research workshop is intended to support preparation of the dissertation proposal. Each student will be expected to present his or her dissertation prospectus during that year. The research workshop will also feature seminars in which students present chapters of their dissertations-in-progress. The expectation is that this workshop will be voluntarily attended by students even during terms when they are not required to register for it. The workshop will be an important part of each graduate student’s professionalization and will serve as a vital stimulus to intellectual activity.

Qualifying examinations and the dissertation proposal will be administered jointly by the program and participating department and must be passed within the time required by the participating department. The total number of courses required will adhere to the requirements of the participating department or program. For details of these requirements see the special requirements of the combined Ph.D. for the particular department printed in this publication. Students will be required to meet the foreign-language requirements of the participating department (see Policies and Regulations: Degree Requirements in this publication). Students will not be admitted to candidacy until all requirements, including the dissertation prospectus, have been met and approved by the Graduate Studies Executive Committee of the African American Studies department and the participating department. If a student intends to apply for this combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and another department, he or she should contact the prospective department and request a description of all Ph.D. requirements and courses.

The faculty in African American Studies consider teaching to be an essential component of graduate education, and students therefore will teach in their third and fourth years.

Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School requirements.

M.A. (en route to the joint Ph.D.). Students will be awarded a combined M.A. degree in African American Studies and the relevant participating department or program upon successful completion of all course work except the Research Workshop, which is taken in the student's third year of study. See also Graduate School requirements.

Program materials are available upon request to the Director of Graduate Studies, African American Studies, Yale University, PO Box 203388, New Haven CT 06520-3388.

Courses
AFAM 505a, Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Late Twentieth Century. Paul Gilroy. T 9.30–11.20
A designated core course for students in the joint Ph.D. program; also open to students in American Studies and Sociology. The interdisciplinary seminar includes readings from the fields of anthropology, critical legal studies, cultural studies, literary history, history, politics, and sociology. Also AMST 643a, SOCY 644a.

[AFAM 516b, Deconstructing Black Identities: Methods from the Humanities and Social Sciences.]

AFAM 525bu, Psychosocial Study of Black Autobiography. Ezra Griffith. W 2.30–4.20
Autobiographies of black men and women analyzed especially for an understanding of their coping mechanisms, with attention to problems, satisfactions, disappointments, grief, and fulfillments.

AFAM 542au, Comparative Approaches to Recounting Stories of Black Lives. Ezra Griffith. W 2.30–4.20
A comparative analysis of several methodologies used by writers to recount the story of a black life. Systematic attention is given to the framework established by Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson to study single life development. Then this framework is applied to the study of black autobiographies, biographies (e.g., Charles Hamilton’s Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.), and other genres of storytelling as seen, for example, in Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot’s I’ve Known Rivers, James Comer’s Maggie’s American Dream, and James McBride’s The Color of Water. The strengths and weaknesses of these different techniques of black single life study are considered.

[AFAM 557au, Introduction to Jazz Studies.]

[AFAM 562au, Miles Davis.]

[AFAM 563au, Ralph Ellison in Context.]

[AFAM 568a, Race, Nation, and American Modernisms.]

[AFAM 573a, Transnationalism, Modernity, and Diaspora.]

[AFAM 588bu, Autobiography in America.]

[AFAM 590b, Race, Gender, and the Culture Industry in Twentieth-Century America.]

AFAM 595b, Problems in the Study of African American Literature. Robert Stepto. M 1.30–3.20
This seminar examines both nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American literary texts, and while students gain a comprehensive understanding of the breadth of the field, we focus on several key issues or “problems” central to the study of African American literary history. We read variously from slave narratives, autobiographies, poetry, novels, nonfiction essays, and anthologies, joining close readings of literary texts with the interdisciplinary contexts of history, cultural criticism and theory, and other art forms. Also AMST 640b, ENGL 940b.

[AFAM 632b, Race and Memory.]

AFAM 639bu, Yoruba Communities in National and Transnational Perspectives. Kamari Clarke. M 3.30–5.20
This is a survey of the literature on the history and development of Yoruba communities in West Africa and throughout its diaspora. Attention is paid to communities in Nigeria, Benin, Cuba, the United States, Brazil, and Trinidad. Also AFST 670bu, ANTH 670bu.

[AFAM 656bu, Social Change and Popular Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa.]

AFAM 657b, Globalization, Religious Nationalism, and Rethinking Human Rights. Kamari Clarke. M 1.30–3.20
Anthropology has neither traditionally addressed issues related to state formation nor has it paid attention to the growing significance of the post-WWII proliferation of nongovernmental organizations, especially in the third world. However, given that increasing numbers of transnational studies have critiqued the absence of the complex analysis of interrelationships between the local and the global in anthropology, this course is an attempt to critically engage the turn in anthropology. Organized as an overview of anthropological approaches to globalization, the course explores the politics of religious nationalism and the role of state and non-state actors in shaping and changing networks of transnational interaction, in order to provide a theoretical and practical approach to socially significant transformations. Also AFST 511b, ANTH 511b.

[AFAM 673a, Roots and Routes: Identity and Travel in African American Political Culture.]

[AFAM 683bu, Recasting Gender: Religion, Science, and the Body.]

AFAM 687a, Race and Races in American Studies. Matthew Jacobson. W 10.30–12.20
This reading-intensive seminar examines influential scholarship across the discipline on “the race concept” and racialized relations in American culture and society. Rather than attempting vainly to cover the field exhaustively, the focus here is upon selected themes, approaches, methods, debates, and problems in a variety of scholarly genres. Major topics include the cultural construction of race; race as both an instrument of oppression and an idiom of resistance in American politics; the centrality of race in literary, anthropological, and legal discourse; the racialization of U.S. foreign policy; “race mixing” and “passing,” vicissitudes of “whiteness” in American politics; the centrality of race in American political culture; and “race” in the realm of popularly cultural representation. Writings under investigation include classic formulations by scholars like Winthrop Jordan and Ronald Takaki, as well as more recent efforts by Cheryl Harris, Kevin Gaines, Tomas Almaguer, and Louise Newman. Seminar papers give students an opportunity to explore in depth the themes, periods, and methods which most interest them. Also AMST 701a, HIST 751a.

AFAM 689a, Race, Gender, and Power in British Culture. Hazel Carby. T 1.30–3.20
This seminar draws on a variety of material from history, literature, and the social sciences to consider the consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism for the formation of racial selves in British culture. A research paper is required.

[AFAM 706b, Readings in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History.]

[AFAM 709b, Research in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History.]

[AFAM 710a, Readings in African American History since 1865.]

AFAM 712b, Modernity and Its Others: Self, Subject, and Cultural Differences. Paul Gilroy. T 9.30–11.20
This social theory course explores aspects of the political, philosophical, and sociological debates that have emerged around the concept of modernity. It looks particularly at articulations of modernity and “race” following four interlinked lines of inquiry: how has the subject of modernity been imagined and articulated; what attributes and experiences have qualified that subject as properly human and rational; where has identity been recognized as coming from, culturally and materially; and where has cosmopolitan loyalty emerged as a demand to see and act beyond the boundaries of immediate particularity? Also SOCY 650b.

AFAM 714b, Race Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States. Jonathan Holloway, Stephen Pitti. Th 10.30–12.20
This course examines a range of civil rights movements as they have been developed and articulated since 1919. Readings in the course pay particular attention to the contested nature of such movements, their multifaceted nature, and the deep social fissures they reveal along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Primary and secondary sources cover a range of methodological perspectives. Readings and discussion. Also AMST 713b, HIST 754b.

AFAM 722b, Theorizing “Black” and “Asian” Intersectionalities in the United States. Diana Paulin. W 1.30–3.20
This graduate seminar approaches racial formation and racial representation through the lens of Asian American and African American literary and cultural production. We read theoretical and primary texts from various fields, including performance studies, literary studies, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, in order to construct a critical apparatus for understanding race relationally rather than as strictly defined categories of identity that have, traditionally, been studied in segregated disciplines (such as black studies, whiteness studies, Asian and Asian American studies). We address the following topics: performance of identity, racial/sexual minorities and the politics of inclusion/exclusion, alliances across racial and national boundaries, diasporic identities, history and memory. We consider how a comparative approach might produce new methodologies for thinking about Asian American and African American representation comparatively. In doing so, we interrogate conventional black/white paradigms of race by looking at intersectionalities that unsettle binaries. Along these lines, we also account for the way in which race intersects with other categories of identity, such as sexuality, gender, nation, and class. We study works by authors/artists such as Judith Butler, David Eng, Claudia Tate, Vijah Prashad, Jose Muñoz, Franz Fanon, Homi Bhaba, Kobena Mercer, Mira Nair, and Anna Deveare Smith. Also AMST 673b.

AFAM 726a, Black Travel and Transnationality. Naomi Pabst.
Th 1.30–3.20
This course examines literary and critical writings on African American and black diasporic travel and transnational movement. Emphasizing issues of representation and narrative strategy, we explore the history of black transnational border-crossing and its influence on the cultural, political, and ideological parameters of black identity. The course establishes the forms, varieties, conflicts, and dilemmas of black transnational movement, travel, and tourism trans-historically. Also AMST 674a.

AFAM 727a, Biopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Right to Kill. Achille Mbembe. W 10.30–12.20
The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. This interdisciplinary seminar examines long-standing philosophical traditions that identify the essence of sovereignty with the state’s right to the death of its enemies and its citizens. The types of questions (legal, political, philosophical, ethical, literary) addressed include the following: Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of “biopolitics” sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, resistance, or the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?

AFAM 728bu, From West Africa to the Black Americas. Robert Thompson. TTh 11.30–12.45
Art, music, and dance in the history of key classical civilizations south of the Sahara—Mali, Asante, Dahomey, Yoruba, Ejagham, Kongon—and their impact on the rise of New World art and music. Also AFST 778bu, HSAR 778bu.

AFAM 729au, New York Mambo: Microcosm of Black Creativity. Robert Thompson. TTh 11.30–12.45
Rise, development, and philosophic achievement of the world of New York mambo and salsa. Emphasis on Palmieri, Cortijo, Roena, Harlow, and Colon. Examination of parallel traditions, e.g., New York Haitian art, Dominican merengue, reggae and rastas of Jamaican Brooklyn, and the New York school of Brazilian capoeira. Also HSAR 779au.

[AFAM 730b, The Face of the Gods: Icons and Architecture of the Black Atlantic World.]

AFAM 739a,b, Problem and Theory in Afro-Atlantic Architecture. Robert Thompson. Th 3.30–5.20
The seminar addresses a new frontier—rebuilding the inner cities. This refers to Latino and mainland black cities within the cities of America. Accordingly, the course focuses on major roots of Latino and black traditional architecture—Ituri Forest and Namibian spatial solutions, Berber casbah architecture and its interactions with the Jews on Djerba isle and in Morocco, the concept of the Muslim assatayah creolized into the Iberia azotea and the spread of this terrace-roof style throughout Latin America. Topics include the architecture of Djenne, Berber art and architecture, Mauritanian sites, the monumental stone architecture of Zimbabwe, the sacred architecture of Ethiopia, and Muslim-influenced architecture from Rabat to Zanzibar. Then comes a case-by-case examination of some of the sites of African influence on the architecture of the Americas—the Puerto Rican casita; the southern verandah; the round-houses of New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia; Ganvie, the Venice of West Africa, and its mirror image among the tidal stilt architectures of blacks of the Choco area in Pacific Colombia. The seminar ends with the shrine architecture of New World adherents of the classical religions of Dahomey. Also AFST 781a,b, HSAR 781a,b.

[AFAM 746a, Race and Representation in U.S. Literature and Culture.]

AFAM 749b, The Global Imaginary. Hazel Carby. T 1.30–3.20
This interdisciplinary seminar discusses what is meant by globalization and the new world order. If globalization is a process currently dominated by the United States as empire, how do critical and dissenting intellectuals imagine alternative structures of citizenship and belonging? Final paper. Also AMST 648b.

AFAM 751a, Reading Black Queer Literatures of the United States and the Caribbean. Seth Silberman. HTBA
Close study of both the racial underpinnings of psychoanalytic method and psychoanalytic discourse in fiction by black Americans Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, LeRoi Jones, Nella Larsen, Charles Perry; Jamaican Andrew Salkey; Martiniquan Joseph Zobel; Guyanan Edgar Mittelholzer. Exploration of race and sexuality in psychoanalytic criticism by W. E. B. Du Bois, Daniel Boyarin, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Tate. Our aim is twofold: first, to examine psychoanalytic discourse in literary metaphors of black liberation; and second, to ameliorate psychoanalysis anxiety in African American Studies scholarship. Also WGST 740a.

[AFAM 758b, Readings in African American History to Emancipation.]

[AFAM 759b, Magic Realism in the Americas.]

AFAM 760b, American Legal History, 1880–1980. Robert Gordon. MW 2.10–3.25
Selected topics in the modern history of American law, legal thought, legal institutions, and the legal profession. Examination, with an option (open to a limited number of students) to write a research paper based on primary sources. Also AMST 780b, HIST 760b, Law 21063.

[AFAM 768b, Issues in Performance Art.]

[AFAM 772a, African, Oceanic, and Native American Perceptions of “Primitivist Modernism”: Challenging the West as Arbiter of Art.]

[AFAM 789a, Music of Sub-Saharan Africa.]

AFAM 809b, Intersecting Identities: Nation, Race, and Gender. Ange-Marie Hancock.t 3.30–5.20
This seminar explores the value of approaching political identity from an intersectional perspective, primarily using the political philosophies of Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and democratic theory. Also PLSC 813b.

AFAM 814b, Race and Ethnicity. Khalilah Brown-Dean. HTBA
This course is an introduction to research on race and ethnicity in American politics. Topics include the social construction of race; intersections between race and gender; black, Latino, and Asian American public opinion and political participation; minority representation; the relationship between race, racism, and public policy; immigration and citizenship; state politics; the psychology of racial politics; and the role of race in campaigns. We discuss and debate the empirical contributions of this literature, as well as questions of theory, methodology, and research design. Also PLSC 823b.

AFAM 815b, American Legal History: The Law of Slavery and Anti-Slavery. Kathleen Cleaver. Th 2.30–4.20
This seminar focuses on the way legal institutions adapted to the institution of human slavery in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and prompted the evolution of legal support for resistance to slavery. Students investigate the tension slavery generated in a republican society by examining federal and state statutes, proclamations, constitutions, and judicial opinions, as well as historical scholarship and autobiographical writings by slaves. Topics examined include the African slave trade, the colonial rejection of slavery in Georgia, the catalyst of slavery in New England’s economy, women in the abolitionist movement, fugitives and maroon communities, gradual emancipation, and the impact of territorial expansion on the law of slavery, with particular emphasis on the 1856 Dred Scott decision in the U.S. Supreme Court. Course requires a journal and a research paper.

[AFAM 839b, Postcolonial Drama: From Shaw to Soyinka.]

AFAM 841b, Black British Art and Theory. Kellie Jones. W 2.30–4.20
This course considers the development of visual culture in this European outpost of the African diaspora. Of interest is the way the discipline of cultural studies, which evolved in postwar Birmingham, intersected with the rise of black consciousness throughout Britain in the 1980s. How did the interactions of intellectuals and artists at this moment in the late twentieth century lead to the creation of strong postcolonial theory and practice? Readings include works by Bhabha, Carby, Gilroy, Hall, Maharaj, and Mercer. We look at visual production by Bhimji, D-Max, Fani-Kayode, Gupta, Julien, Kempadoo, Kureshi, Piper, Pollard, and Sulter among others. We also discuss selected exhibitions and publications that supported this movement. Also HSAR 770b.

[AFAM 846a, Postcolonial Theory and Its Literature.]

[AFAM 854b, The French Atlantic Triangle and the Literature of the Slave Trade.]

AFAM 880a or b, Directed Reading.
By arrangement with faculty.

AFAM 895, Research Workshop. Faculty.
A noncredit, yearlong course required of all third-year students. Fall term consists of biweekly work-in-progress talks by Yale faculty, advanced graduate students, and outside speakers. Spring term has biweekly workshops that focus on the dissertation prospectus.

For course offerings in African languages, see African Studies.

Next: African Studies