Course Descriptions: Black Communities Around the World/International Contexts

The story of the oldest and largest black community of the Americas helps explain the trajectory of black experience in all American and Caribbean nations, beginning with the root causes of slavery and how race became structured into society, politics and economies. Understanding this history also provides a comparative context for African American history, and helps explain why the realities of African descendants in the Americas/Caribbean are interlinked today. As you gain a deeper understanding of how black people challenged enslavement you will create a character based upon historical background readings and submit a written description about that character. You’ll then go on to plot your own slave revolt using the characters you have created. The course continues with an examination of how black Brazilians shaped their place in South America’s largest economy, and how they have connected their struggles for social justice to human rights struggles around the world. The course incorporates elements of Afro-Brazilian culture like music, dance, and films to deepen your understanding in a virtual excursion to Brazil.

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“DominicanYork” (Dominican Transnational Cultures) is a course based on a new collaborative research project I am developing which focuses on the diasporic and transnational life of contemporary Dominican New Yorkers. The project and the class is rooted in seeing “DominicanYork” as an aesthetic, life, and identity that is a result of what Sylvia Wynter calls “transplantation.” This class proposes DominicanYork as a result of what Sylvia Wynter calls “transplantation”: the “… creation of a counterculture through the transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its reinvention in new and alien conditions. It was in this transplantation, this metamorphosis of an old culture into a new, that the blacks made themselves indigenous to their new land.”[1]This collaborative course centers DominicanYork as an aesthetic, lifestyle, art, and culture that can be seen across the work of scholars who focus on this population, as well as fashion, sounds, and social life. Throughout the course readings, cultural texts, films, documentaries, and more, students will be able to formulate what is Dominican transnational identity. Moreover, students are encouraged to examine DominicanYork as a cultural concept, identity, and aesthetic that redefines our Caribbean understandings of Latinidad.

[1] Sylvia Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis” (unpublished ms., n.d.), 46-47

“DominicanYork” (Dominican Transnational Cultures) Spring 2025 Flyer

This seminar critically examines how international law helped establish racial regimes in a global order using an approach known as TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law). Topics to be covered include how legal cases involving indigenous peoples laid the foundations for global racial exclusion; the evolution of the principle of self-determination from the League of Nations to the 1970s; abolition and imperialism using Haiti as a primary case study; repressive inclusion in the international order using Ethiopia and Liberia as case studies; Third World revolt featuring the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the American Indian Movement, and the US-based Black Power movement; the neoliberal underbelly of human rights; and laws of war for irregular combat tracing how guerrillas became combatants in the language of law. The class will meet once a week for 3 hours. Grades will be assessed based on class participation, a midterm, and a final paper.

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This course is an introduction to the history of the dispersal of African people to the Americas, and focuses primarily on Latin America and the Caribbean. It traces the origins and development of the Atlantic slave trade, and the creation of new African-based cultures in the Americas. This is a companion course to African Diaspora Cultural History (Africana Studies 014:250).

No prerequisites - open to all levels.

This course covers political initiatives of Black communities ranging from decolonization struggles to Black Lives Matter as local manifestations of reactions to global racism. The course moves from traditional pan-African ideas and institutions as they interacted with Western European colonialism and continental African, African American, Caribbean and Latinx liberation struggles to contemporary issues that simultaneously encourage/challenge the solidarity between African Diaspora communities.