Africans and African Americans: Cultural Entanglements (275-0-20)
Instructors
Oladotun Babatope Ayobade
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-325: 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 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 postcolonial Africa. 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?
Class Attributes
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity