Fall 2008 Courses

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 101 – African American & African Studies I (4)

Instructor: Karen Fields
1230-1345 TR, MIN 125

AAS 101 is a team-taught lecture that explores the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. The class begins by analyzing issues such as the formation of agricultural/sedentary communities, food transformation, and technological innovations in Africa prior to the contacts with European. We will then examine the social and economical dimensions of African contacts with
Europeans during the slave trade era. The class will also cover the African Diaspora in the Americas, emphasizing the African Diaspora to regions outside North America.

AAS 307 -- Africa and Africans in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt
1530-1800 M, COC 115

AAS 357 -- Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla
1530-1800 W, CAU 116

AAS 401 – Independent Study (1-3)

Topic to be determined by the instructor and the student

AAS 405A – Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
1100-1215 TR, CAB 335

This combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride’s The Color of Water, Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to instructor permission. It is designed for advanced undergraduates in English, African American Studies, and American Studies.
Cross-listed as ENAM 481F

AAS 405B – Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross
1530-1800 T, WIL 141A

What does race mean in the late 20th and early 21st century? Given the various ways in which race as a biological “fact” has been discredited, why and how does race continue to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities? How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? Using Winston Napier’s text African American Literary Theory: A Reader, this course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on these movements: the Black Aesthetic, womanism and feminist critique, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theory, hip hop, incarceration, and postcolonial and diaspora studies. Although theoretical writings comprise the heart of the course, discussions will revolve around several artistic works as applicable case studies: Percival Everett’s 2005 novel Wounded, Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1994 The America Play. Requirements include several short critical response essays, one class discussion presentation, and a term research paper.
Cross-listed as ENCR 481

AAS 405C- African American Survey (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell
1400-1515 TR, BRN 328

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon’s Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about “race,” “authorship”, “subjectivity”, “self-mastery”, and “freedom.” We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and “authenticated,” lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown’s Clotelle, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. Restricted to 2nd and 3rd years.
Cross-listed as ENAM 313

AAS 405D Black Power

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
15:30-18:00 R, CAB 242

Tracing black women and men’s quest for political, economic, and cultural power from the Depression Years to the present, this seminar examines African Americans’ collective efforts to eradicate what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Significant attention will be given to black intellectuals and activists’ debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders, cultural artists, and movement organizations. Organizations and activists to be examined include but are not limited to W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and the Council of African Affairs, Ella Baker and SNCC, Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Angela Davis and the American Communist Party, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Toni Cade Bambara, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the more recent Black Radical Congress. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to the research methods and techniques used by historians. We will not only explore historians’ use of oral and written texts, but will also reflect on the ways in which scholars’ theoretical and political viewpoints inform their interpretation of primary sources. Students will have the opportunity to further develop their historical skills through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions; interpreting primary texts; and substantiating arguments with historical evidence.

AAS 451 – Directed Research for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

AAS 452 – Thesis for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

American Studies Program

AMST 201 - The Global South (3)

Instructor: Eric Lott
1400-1515 TR, CAB 324

Following the lead of the “new southern studies,” this course will introduce you to the practice of American Studies by remapping the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We’ll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing political economy (antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South—that low-wage losing player in today’s international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a tall order, and we’ll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I’d like to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the “mind” of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South’s various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the “Spanish-American War,” U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, Faulkner’s influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae’s transformation of American R&B, Derek Walcott’s Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright’s reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965 Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, “Toyotization” in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and cultural influence of Wal-Mart).

AMST 401– The Landscapes of Slavery (3)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis
1300-1530 R, FHL 215

From January to April 2007, a major exhibition, "The Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art," will be at the University of Virginia Art Museum featuring more than 80 works by more than 50 artists spanning 1800 to the present. Artists include: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Hart Benton, William Johnson, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Joyce Scott, Romare Bearden, Juan Logan, and Kara Walker, among others. Working closely with the works in the exhibition, this class will examine the visual depictions of the plantation South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tackle questions of politics, protest, memory, nostalgia, and identity. In addition to examining the work of painters who tackled the subject, this class will also look at how the region was portrayed in the popular press, in novels, and in film. Students will do their research projects on works in the exhibition.This class fulfills the second writing assignment.

Cross-listed as ARTH 491

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 319 – Urban Africa and Popular Culture (3)

Instructor: Sasha Newell
1400-1515 MW, MIN 130

In this course, we explore the cultural transformations and continuities produced by the emergence of African cities during and after colonialism. Tracing anthropological debates around African urban centers from the 1940s until the present, we will consider the efflorescence of new cultural forms of music, art, dress, and film in conjunction with new sources of identity such as slang, nationality, religion, ethnicity, consumption, and migration. Attention will be given to local efforts at attaining 'modernity' as well as perceived "loss of culture" and movements to preserve 'tradition'. Theoretical issues to be discussed: mimesis, modernity and 'hybrid' identities; urban social integration and the production of ethnicity; colonialism, class, and resistance; capitalism and economy; transformations in kinship, gender and sexuality.

ANTH 388 African Archaeology (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette
1100-1150 MWF, CAB 338

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent. The emphasis will be on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and the subsequent Iron Age, but will also briefly cover pre-modern humans and the archaeology of the colonial period. The material includes the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent. Throughout the course a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

Department of Art History

ART 264 - African American Art (4)

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham
1100-1215 TR, CAM 160

(No course description available)

Department of Drama

(No courses offered for Fall 2008)

Department of English

ENAM 313- African American Survey (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell
1400-1515 TR, BRN 328

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon’s Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about “race,” “authorship”, “subjectivity”, “self-mastery”, and “freedom.” We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and “authenticated,” lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown’s Clotelle, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. Restricted to 2nd and 3rd years.
Cross-listed as AAS 405C

ENAM 481E – African-American Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Angela Davis
1530-1645 MW, BRN 328

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.

Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and African-American and African Studies.

ENAM 481F – Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
1100-1215 TR, CAB 335

This combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride’s The Color of Water, Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to instructor permission. It is designed for advanced undergraduates in English, African American Studies, and American Studies.
Cross-listed as AAS 405A

ENLT 247 (0001) - Black Writers In America (3)

Instructor: Scott Selisker
1700-1815 TR, BRN 312

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

This course will survey some representative highlights of the rich tradition of African American literature, with an emphasis on the major works, debates, and historical contexts of the twentieth century. We will learn how to read in and around the literary dimensions of these important American works, considering artistic movements, generic conventions, issues of interpretation, and the different formal concerns that confront fiction, poetry, autobiography, oratory, drama, and the essay. Our readings will prompt us to think in sophisticated ways about race, identity, representation, and community. Our work in the course will equip you with tools for reading further, in the African American and other literary traditions. The syllabus will likely include works by: Douglass, Du Bois, Washington, Chesnutt, Hughes, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, King, Malcolm X, Brooks, and Morrison. Course requirements: active engagement with the materials and your peers, occasional response papers, three critical essays (5-7 pp.), an informal presentation, and a final exam.

ENLT 247 (0002) – Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
930-1045 TR, Location: TBA

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

(No course description available.)

ENLT 247 (0003) – Black Migration (3)

Instructor: Sonya Donaldson
1400-1515, BRN 332

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

(No course description available.)

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 348 – Literature and Culture of North Africa (3)

Instructor: Majida Bargach
1200-1250 MWF, CAB 330

Prerequisite: French 332

La situation géographique des pays d’Afrique du Nord fait de cet ensemble un carrefour d’influences diverses depuis l’antiquité. Bordé au sud par le Sahara, à l’ouest par l’océan atlantique, au nord par la mer méditerranée, il est rattaché à l’Asie à son extrémité nord-est par l’isthme de Suez.
Les cultures et populations nord-africaines reflètent cette diversité d’influences qui n’ont jamais cessé de les irriguer depuis les premières invasions à la colonisation et jusqu’aux effets récents de la mondialisation.
Nous aborderons les cultures de l’Afrique du Nord à travers des œuvres littéraires francophones qui nous mèneront de l’Egypte au Maroc, de l’histoire coloniale aux données actuelles, des religions à l’art.
Books TBA

FREN 411 - Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame
1530-1645 TR, CAB 225

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally.

In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.

Required reading:

• Diop, Birago. Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba
• Chevrier, J. Anthologie Africaine: Poésie
• Fatou Diome. La Préférence nationale
• Assia Djebar. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (See Toolkit).
• Boudjédra, Rachid. L'Escargot entêté

FREN 443– Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame
1230-1345 TR, CAB 242

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the other and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa’s filmmakers. These filmic inventions are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema.

The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F. Boughedir ), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology supplied with the syllabus.

Required reading list (on reserve, see Toolkit for FREN 443):

• Ferid Boughedir, Le cinéma africain de A a Z
  (Specific selections of the following works will be announced weekly.)
• Kenneth W. Harrow, Matatu- With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema
• Gardies, André, Cinéma d’Afrique Noire Francophone : l’espace-miroir
• Vieyra, P. S, Le cinéma africain
• Sembène Ousmane, Cinéaste
• Ukadike, F. N., Black African Cinema
• Research in African Literatures - Special Issue: African Cinema./ Vol. 26, No.3, Fall 1995.
• Diawara, Manthia, African Cinema

Department of History

HIAF 201 - Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller
930-1045 TR, MRY 104

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 202, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)

HIAF 201 is a introductory lower-division survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly short map quizzes, short written responses to each class, a short paper reacting to assigned readings, and a take-home final exercise. The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, qualifies for the new minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College “non-western perspectives” area requirement.

After an opening consideration of Mistaking Africa (Keim) in modern American culture, readings revolve around weekly assignments in texts of varying perspectives (Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent, and Newman, Peopling of Africa – subject to revision upon availability of a superior alternative). Other chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive (“historiographical”) issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa.

No formula determines final marks for HIAF 201. Students are graded according to their “highest consistent performance” in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with ample allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; options allow students to devise personal combinations of graded work that allow each one to take advantage of specialized abilities and accommodate other academic commitments.

HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. However, consistent application and preparation are expected, particularly early in the term, since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete HIAF 201 with success. Most find it a challenging and rewarding opportunity to discover a once-neglected story of Africa and its place in world history and to examine assumptions that modern Americans – themselves included – make that they did not know they held.
jcm (2/08)

HIAF 302 - History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason
1230-1345 TR, RSH 410

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa. HIAF 302 begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will write two five to seven page essays and write two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 402A - History Colloquium - “Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States” (4)

Instructor: John Mason
1700-1815 TR, BRN 310

HIAF 402 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, film, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 402 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course should have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study in African History (3)

(Topic to be determined by instructor and student)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 201 - Colonial Latin America (3)

Instructor: Brian P. Owensby
930-1045 TR, MRY 115

This course will explore major developments and issues in the study of Latin American history, including Indigenous societies on the eve of Spanish conquest, the struggles over the shape of a conquest society, the emergence of a distinctive world culture up to the 18th century, and the pressures and disputes that led to wars of national independence in the early 19th century. We will seek to understand the dynamics of the colonial relationship in a global historical context.

HILA 311 - Public Life in Latin America (3)

Instructor: Herbert Braun
800-915 TR, CAB 430

How do Latin Americans navigate their ways, collectively and also individually, through their hierarchical social orders? Why is there so often so much stability and order to their societies? Surveys inform us that Latin Americans are among the happiest people in the world? Why might this be? Why do so many Latin Americans across time appear to be so proud of their nations? Why do they look at one another so often? Why is there so little hatred in Latin America? Why do poor people in Latin America seem to know more about rich people than rich people know about them? Why do traditions matter so? Why are there so many good novelists there? These and other questions, answerable and not, about life and the human condition in Latin America are what will be about in this course.

Probable Texts:

• Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries
• Carlos Fuentes, The Campaign, UVa Printing Services Packet
• Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism
• Daniel Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897
• Carlos Fuentes, The Good Conscience
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
• Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies
• Herbert Braun, Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia, 2nd ediition
• David Goldstein, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia

Grading:

One journal, submitted as a work in progress during any day between November 1 and November 7, worth 30% of the grade, written continuously on Word, and sent as an email attachment. In the subject of the email message write “HILA311 Journal.”

Twenty page final essay on historical patterns in Latin America, worth 40% of the grade. This final essay will emerge organically from the journal. Hard copy.
Class participation, according to a structured format, worth 30% of the grade.

HIST 215 - US-Latin American Relations in the 20th Century (3)

Instructor: Gerald Haines
1600-1650 MW, WIL 301

At the end of the 19th century most of Latin America was controlled by oligarchy elites, was economically poor, illiterate, and suffered from a vast inferiority complex. The United States was a far off secondary power. By the end of the 20th century much had ch9anged, democracy flourished, economic optimism was everywhere, and the United States was a close giant and major economic power. This course will examine US policies toward and relations with Latin America during the 20th century. Although it will incorporate Latin American attitudes and views, it will focus primarily on the role the United States played. The emphasis is on US policy and attitudes and Washington’s response to Latin American developments. It will illustrate how US policymakers perceived Latin America, American security concerns, the expansion of corporate capitalism, economic development programs, and efforts to contain communist expansion and promote democracy in the hemisphere. In addition to detailing the impact of World War I and World war II and the Cold war on inter-American relations, the course will examine the use of US military interventions and CIA covert action programs to further US objectives in the hemisphere, especially in Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Nicaragua. It will also examine cultural efforts and images and changing political ideologies and migration patterns and how these changed over time as Washington policymakers attempted to create and maintain a US dominated hemisphere.

Requirements:

Mid Term Examination 30%; Research Paper 20%; Final Examination 40%; Course Participation 10%

Required Reading:

• Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, eds., Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Palto Alto, CA: Stanford University press, 1999).

HIUS 323 - Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: TBA
1300-1350 MW, RFN G004A

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.

Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 329 - Virginia 1865-Present (3)

Instructor: George Gilliam
1230-1345 TR, GIL 141

History is the study of change over time. This course will examine change in Virginia from about 1861 to the present. The course will especially follow six main topics: (a) the role of Reconstruction in configuring Virginia’s racial and political divisions; (b) changing notions of who should vote, and how much each vote should count; (c) the role of debt and the resolution of the conflict between Funders and Readjusters in constructing Virginia’s “pay-as-you-go” philosophy; (d)Virginia’s struggles with race (e) economic, social and cultural change in post-World War II Virginia; and (f) the shift in control of Virginia from the rural machine politics of Harry F. Byrd to the suburban politics of modern Virginia.

Readings will average approximately 100 pages per week, and will be drawn from both primary documents and secondary material. Among the readings will be selections from: Ronald L. Heinemann et al., Old Dominion/New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-emancipation Virginia; and J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. The class meets twice per week. Approximately half of each class will be spent in lecture and half in a class discussion. There will be a short answer mid-term exam, one 5-7 page paper involving the use of primary source materials, one group project, and a final examination requiring one short and one long essay.

HIUS 347 - American Labor (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
1230-1345 TR, CAB 316

This course examines the cultural lives, labor struggles, and political activities of the American working class from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Students will analyze how working women and men both shaped and were shaped by the nation’s transformation into the world’s largest industrial power, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy. Significant attention will be given to the organizations and political movements workers created to advance their economic interests. How those movements have dealt with the complex racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class will receive significant attention. Since working-class history is about more than the struggle of laboring people to improve their material condition, this course will also focus on other topics, such as workers’ leisure activities, customs and thoughts, and religious beliefs.

Film, music, books, and articles will be the texts for this course. Students’ grades will be based on class participation, two exams, three quizzes, and two book reviews.

HIUS 365 - African American History through Reconstruction (3)

Instructor: Reginald Butler
1300-1350 MWF , CAB 325

This lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the African American experience in British Colonial North America and the United States. This segment (HIUS 365) covers the period from the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through Reconstruction. It will relate the African American experience to the broader experience of Africans in the Diaspora, as well as larger themes and concepts (the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, European expansion, slavery and the slave trade in Africa, the development of racial ideologies, etc.) in world history. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. Discussion sections will devote considerable attention to primary sources, with a focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." In addition, we will explore the relevance of the African American past to contemporary social and political debates, such as immigration, affirmative action, and reparations.

HIUS 367 – The History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond
1530-1730 T, WIL 402

This course examines the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required:

• Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing;
• Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press;
• Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

Viewing Required:

• “Eyes on the Prize”, America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, # 1-6;
  America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, # 1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston.
• “The Road to Brown”, William Elwood, California Newsreel.

HIUS 401B / AAS 401 - History Seminar, Black Power (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
1530-1800 R, CAB 242

Tracing black women and men’s quest for political, economic, and cultural power from the 1960s to the present, this seminar examines African Americans’ collective efforts to eradicate what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Significant attention will be given to black intellectuals and activists’ debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders, cultural artists, and movement organizations. Organizations and activists to be examined include but are not limited to W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Angela Davis and the American Communist Party, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Toni Cade Bambara, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the more recent Black Radical Congress. Toward the end of the course, we will examine the question of whether economic, political, and cultural empowerment is a reality or possibility for blacks in 21st century America.

Film, music, books, and articles will be the texts for this course. Students’ grades will be based on class participation, three quizzes, two book reviews, and a final paper.
Cross-listed as AAS 405D

HIUS 401H - History Seminar, Black Leadership and Oral History (4)

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler
1300-1530 W, WIL 141A

This research seminar will use the website for the Explorations in Black Leadership project (www.virginia.edu/publichistory/bl) as a springboard for analysis of the utility of oral history as a meaningful source of historical information. Each student will select one or more people from the website, and will evaluate individual responses to questions asked against other sources of information. This will require substantial research into biographical and autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, newspaper articles, policy initiatives in the public or private sector, and relevant contextual secondary source literature. The final research paper will place the individuals studied in regional and historical context, in an effort to explore the major factors that gave rise to leadership.

Group readings include selected materials from:

• Adetayo Alabi, Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies
• Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement
• Lea Williams, Servants of the People: The 1960s Legacy of African American Leadership
• Ronald Walters and Robert Smith, African American Leadership
• Jacob Gordon, Black Leadership for Social Change
• Adam Faircough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000
• Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality

This seminar will require regular submissions of materials during the course of the term, including a project design, bibliography, secondary source paper, and first and second drafts. Grades will be based on individual components of the paper, submitted sequentially, as well as on the final draft

HIUS 403A - African American Culture to 1865 (4)

Instructor: Reginald Butler
1530-1800 T, CAB 130

This reading seminar examines how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice; and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Readings may include selections from: Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market; and Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

HIUS 824 - Topics in Modern Southern History (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale
1300-1530 T, RFN 227A

This research seminar focuses on the history of the US South from 1890 to the present through readings, discussions, and completing article-length research papers. Topics of emphasis include the transnational US South, the cultural history of the US South, the intersection of African American history and Southern history, and the new Southern labor history.

Media Studies

MDST 412 – Cyberspace, Race, Ethnicity (3)

Instructor: David Golumbia
930-1045 TR, CLM 322A

(No course description available.)

Department of Music

MUSI 212 – History of Jazz Music (4)

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux
1100-1150 MWF, MRY 209

Survey of jazz music from before 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century; important instrumental performers, composers, arrangers, and vocalists.
No previous knowledge of music required.

MUEN 369 – African Music and Dance Ensemble (2)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk
1715-1915 TR, OCH 107

Practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies). No previous experience with music or dance is necessary. Special attention is given to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. (S)

Prerequisite: Instructor permission by audition.

Note: Because the subject matter changes each semester, courses numbered MUEN 360-369 may be repeated for credit, but no more than eight performance credits may be applied toward the baccalaureate degree in the College.

Department of Politics

PLAP 324 - Race, Gender American Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders
1100-1215 TR, Location: TBA

Examines the process of communicating politics from multiple angles, including the rhetoric of political leaders, campaign communications, political discussion with friends and acquaintances, political representation in the mass media, and growing forms of alternative personal media.

PLAP 424A – Race, Ethnic and Immigration (3)

Instructor: Vesla Weaver
930-1045 TR, CAB 241

(No course description available.)

PLAP 524A – Race Gender Amer Pol (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders
1400-1630 W, WIL 215

(No course description available.)

PLCP 212 – Politics Of Developing Areas (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton
900-950 MW, WIL 402

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 – The Minority Family (3)

Instructor: Melvin Wilson
9-11:30 T, GIL 225

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing “deficit” and “strength” research paradigms.
Enrollment Restrictions: 4th-year Psychology majors/minors
If course is full through ISIS: Please use the online waiting. Do not email the professor.
Format: Seminar.
No. and type of exams: TBA
Papers or projects: TBA

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 389 - Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
1200-1250 MW, CAB 311

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghrib in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.” We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent. We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.
Cross-listed as RELC 389

RELC 318 - American Evangelicalism (3)

Instructor: Pam Cochran
1100-1215 TR, HAL 123

Evangelical Protestantism has played a vital role in shaping American history, culture and religion. It is estimated that some 25-35% of the American population (c. 70-100 million) today identifies with this movement. Far from being a monolithic entity, however, the religious, ideological, and social allegiances of evangelicalism are quite diverse. In addition, evangelicals maintain a somewhat paradoxical relationship with American society, functioning simultaneously as a politically powerful interest group (insiders) and as cultural antagonists (outsiders). This course is designed to introduce students to the history of evangelicalism, its characteristic religious patterns, and its ongoing negotiations with contemporary American culture.

RELG 270 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt
1230-1345 TR, PV8 103

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious synthesis and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion, and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

RELG 320 - Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley
1400-1450 MWF, HAL 123

An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various forms of social criticism. The course requirements include engaged participation, three short essays, a mid-term and a final examination.

Department of Sociology

SOC 306 – Critical Perspect On Whiteness (3)

Instructor: Matthew Hughey
930-1045 TR, CAB 338

(No course description available.)

SOC 487 – Immigration (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman
1400-1515 MW, CAB B029

Examines contemporary immigration into the United States from the point of view of key theoretical debates and historical circumstances that have shaped current American attitudes toward immigration.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 236—Women’s Rights in America (3)

Instructor: Cori Field
11-11:50 MWF, MIN 130

We will examine the philosophy and strategy of women’s rights activists in the United States from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the winning of woman suffrage in 1920. We will explore how the American ideals of freedom and equality were complicated by sexual/gender differences.  We will ask how activists imagined sexual equality and what reforms—political, legal, economic, cultural, or psychological—they proposed.  Finally, by focusing on differences among women, we will debate whether there ever was—or could be—a woman’s rights movement that spoke to all women.

Most of the assigned readings are primary documents. While I will provide short lectures introducing these documents, the majority of our class-time will be spent discussing and interpreting primary sources as a group.  

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

(No courses offered for Fall 2008)