Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-21)

Topic

Africans and African Americans: Cultural Entanglem

Instructors

Oladotun Babatope Ayobade

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 213: Tues, Thurs 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

The push for African Independence in the mid-twentieth century overlapped with the Civil Rights Movement to underscore the galvanizing power of Pan-African solidarity. The social and economic transformations in the U.S. and on the African continent since the 1960s have produced a less coherent political project. In this course, students will explore how the afterlives of colonialism and slavery has shaped the contemporary relationships between Africans and African Americans. A host of cultural forms and expressions offer a lens for reading the political zeitgeist, alliances, contact zones, exchanges, tensions, dissonances, and modes of solidarity between Africans and African Americans. Students will explore how writers, musicians, performers, and scholars excavate the ongoing intimacies between the continent and the African diaspora, in a post-Civil Rights U.S. and in Africa after colonialism. We will pose broad questions such as: How do migration patterns, racialized economics, global geopolitics, community activism, and technologies of culture redefine these diasporic encounters? What role does the arts play in achieving social change for our communities?

Learning Objectives

• Understand the historical stakes around cultural exchanges between Africans and African Americans
• Engage with iconic figures and central ideas in the linkages and exchanges between the United States and Africa
• Develop critical questions about key texts, persons, and historical moments in African/African diasporic cultural production
• Understand how creative sources critically engage African/diasporic linkages
• Curate scholarly sources around an original topic on the theme of African/African American entanglements