African American Studies

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

Chair
Paul Gilroy

Director of Graduate Studies
Gerald Jaynes (493 College, gerald.jaynes@yale.edu)

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

Associate Professors
Elizabeth Alexander, Kamari Clarke, Jonathan Holloway, David Krasner, Susan Lederer, Patricia Pessar

Assistant Professors
Jennifer Baszile, Khalilah Brown-Dean, Terri Francis, Ange-Marie Hancock, Kellie Jones, Alondra Nelson, Naomi Pabst, Diana Paulin, Lloyd Pratt, Michael Veal

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

Fields of Study
African American Studies offers a combined Ph.D. in conjunction with several 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/AMST 643a/SOCY 644a), which is a required course for all first-year graduate students in the combined program; (2) Readings in African American History to Emancipation (AFAM 758a/AMST 706a/HIST 708a) and/or Readings in Southern History since 1865 (AFAM 721b/AMST 735b/HIST 731b); (3) Intersecting Identities: Nation, Race, and Gender (AFAM 809a/PLSC 813a) and/or 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 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.  Robert Stepto.
W 1.30–3.20
This seminar pursues close readings of Ralph Ellison's essays, short fiction, and novels, Invisible Man and Juneteenth. The “in context” component of the seminar involves working from the Benston and Sundquist volumes on Ellison to discern a portrait of the modernist African America Ellison investigated, with at least Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Romare Bearden also in view. The texts include Ellison, The Collected Essays, Flying Home and Other Stories, Invisible Man, and Juneteenth; K. Benston, Speaking for You; E. Sundquist, Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; A. Nadel, Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon. Also AMST 921a, ENGL 921a.

AFAM 573a, Transnationalism, Modernity, and Diaspora.  Kamari Clarke.
W 3.30–5.20
As anthropologists continue to grapple with changing notions of “the field” from local to global, this course covers recent and emerging scholarship that explores theoretical problems of modernity, transnationalism, and diaspora in specific historical and ethnographic context. Drawing on a range of ideas from world systems theories of globalization and notions of the invention of diasporas, to postmodern ideas of social constructions, the emphasis is on the interrelations between local and global cultural processes. These processes disrupt the once-homogenizing tendencies of ethnography and instead push us to examine different criteria for analyzing and constructing communities. Also AFST 695a, ANTH 595a.

AFAM 588a^u, Autobiography in America.  Robert Stepto.
T 1.30–3.20
At least a dozen North American autobiographies are studied, mostly from the “American Renaissance” to the present. Discussion of various autobiographical forms and strategies as well as of various experiences of American selfhood and citizenship. Slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies, immigrant narratives, autobiographies of childhood or adolescence, relations between autobiography and class, region, or occupation. Also AMST 710au.

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

AFAM 595b, Intersections in American Literature.  Robert Stepto.
T1.30–3.20
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 651b.

AFAM 596au, Twentieth-Century African American Poetry.  Elizabeth Alexander.
T 3.30–5.20
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic, and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden. Also AMST 653au.

[AFAM 657b, Globalization, Religious Nationalism, and Rethinking Human Rights.]

AFAM 687a, Race and Races in American Studies.  Matthew Jacobson.
M1.30–3.20
This reading-intensive seminar examines influential scholarship across the disciplines on “race” and racialized relations in American culture and society. 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”; vicissitudes of “whiteness” in American political culture; and “race” in the realm of popular cultural representation. A lengthy review essay due at the end of the term gives students a chance to explore in depth the themes, periods, and methods which most interest them. Also AMST 701a, HIST 751a.

AFAM 709a, Research in Twentieth-Century American Political and Social History. Glenda Gilmore.
W 10.30–12.20
Projects chosen from the post-Civil War period, with emphasis on twentieth-century social and political history, broadly defined. Research seminar. Also AMST 709a, HIST 736a.

[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 721b, Readings in Southern History since 1865.  Glenda Gilmore.
W 10.30–12.20
Readings in Southern History since 1865 revisits traditional themes in southern historiography, matching classics of southern U.S. history with recent work. The course expands the definition of “southerner”; challenges the narratives and periodization of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement; and brings theories on the construction of gender and race into dialogue with southern history. The readings place the U.S. South in a global discourse of white supremacy, imperialism, Communism, Fascism, and Pan-Africanism. The course requires book reviews and an historiographical paper that reviews an issue in southern history and suggests opportunities for future research on the topic. Also AMST 735b, HIST 731b.

AFAM 722b, Theorizing “Black” and “Asian” Intersectionalities in the United States. Sanda Lwin, Diana Paulin.
Th 3.30–5.20
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, ENGL 942b.

[AFAM 726a, Black Travel and Transnationality.]  

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 729a^u, 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 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 753a, American Queer Studies: Theorizing Race, Gender, Sexuality. Seth Silberman.
M 1.30–3.20
Study of interdisciplinary methodologies shaping the field of lesbian/gay studies and its attendant queer theory. Focus on key works in the field's discourse and sociological studies. Authors include Boyarin, Butler, de Lauretis, Foucault, Harper, Martin, Mercer, Rubin, Sedgwick. Also AMST 681a, WGSS 746a.

AFAM 758a, Readings in African American History to Emancipation.  Jennifer Baszile.
Th 1.30–3.20
This seminar surveys classic and recent scholarship on the African diaspora in North America. Topics include regional and temporal varieties of slavery and freedom, gender, religion, race, work, resistance, and emancipation. Attention is given to urban and rural communities. Also AMST 706a, HIST 708a.

AFAM 761b, Readings in Nineteenth-Century American History, 1820–1877. David Blight.
W 1.30–3.20
This course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century: sectionalism; expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas. Also AMST 715b, HIST 715b.

AFAM 768a, Issues in Performance Art.  Kellie Jones.
W 1.30–3.20
Wedged between the rudiments of theater and the gestures of visual art, performance art came to prominence at the end of the twentieth century. Our concentration in this course is on artists and practices after 1960. However, we also consider the roots of this form in the first part of the twentieth century as well as in earlier periods. Central to our investigations are discussions surrounding performance as catalytic process, as temporal art, and issues of the body as form. Feminist performance art is the focus for this term. Also HSAR 696a.

AFAM 792au, The Jazz Avant-Garde, 1955–1980.  John Szwed.
Th 1.30–3.20
The new forms of jazz that emerged shortly after the middle of the twentieth century (Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, et al.). Discussions include the economics and politics of the period, the achievements of the music, and the problems it raised for musical performance and criticism. Also ANTH 630au.

AFAM 807b, Interraciality and Hybridity.  Naomi Pabst.
T 1.30–3.20
Examination of interracial and black subjectivity as represented within a variety of postemancipation literary and critical tests. Topics include interracial genealogies, the emerging rubric of “critical mixed race studies,” and theories of difference and hybridity. Identification and analysis of long-standing debates on race mixing in the realms of legal classification, census taking, grassroots movements, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular. Also AMST 745b.

AFAM 809a, Intersecting Identities: Nation, Race, and Gender.  Ange-Marie Hancock.
T 1.30–3.20
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 813a.

[AFAM 814b, Race and Ethnicity.]  

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 841b, Black British Art and Theory.]  

AFAM 843a, Theory and Practice of Ethnomusicology.  Michael Veal.
T 1.30–3.20
A reading-based survey of the historical development of the field of ethnomusicology and the major issues with which it has been concerned. Also MUSI 710a.

AFAM 846a, Postcolonial Theory and Its Literature.  Christopher L. Miller.
Th 10:30–12:20
A survey of theories relevant to colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. The course focuses on theoretical models (Orientalism, hybridity, métissage, créolité, “minor literature”), but also gives attention to the literary texts from which they are derived (francophone and Anglophone). Readings from Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Mbembe, Amselle, Glissant, Deleuze, Guattari. Taught in English. Also AFST 746a, CPLT 725au, FREN 946au.

AFAM 848b, African American Studies Graduate Research Seminar in Diasporic Cultural Studies.  Hazel Carby.
F 10.30–12.20
This seminar is intended for second-term second-year students in a Ph.D. program who wish to undertake a research project and write a research paper. Enrollment is limited to six to eight graduate students. In order to be considered for the seminar each student needs to submit a two-page description of the intended project by Wednesday, January 5, 2005. Please include names and e-mail addresses. I will notify students of their acceptance before the first class. Prospective students who wish to talk to me about the seminar should do so at the end of the 2004 fall term. Those admitted to the course prepare a packet of readings. These essays (maximum 100 pages) should act as an introduction to your field of research. During the first three or four weeks of the term, two members of the seminar make a one-hour presentation and lead a discussion of their selection of essays each week. This presentation schedule is organized during the first class. Those who cannot make the first organizational meeting cannot take the seminar. After these presentations are completed, the seminar does not meet for the six weeks while the research is undertaken but each student continues to meet with me individually. Toward the end of the semester we all read each of the research papers and schedule a series of morning and afternoon meetings for presentations and discussions of the final research project. Also WGSS 848b.

AFAM 854b, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Christopher L. Miller.
Th 10:30–12:20
An analysis of the Atlantic world that was created by the slave trade, in its French version, as seen through history, philosophy, and literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Readings from Voltaire, the journal of a slave-trading sailor, Rousseau, Madame de Duras, Baron Roger, Mérimée, Sue, Césaire, Sembene, T. Mandeleau. Taught in English. Also AFST 739b, CPLT 723b, FREN 939b.

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.

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