Environmental justice can only occur with rich and complex understandings of the intersections of culture, ecology, politics, history, and community. This course seeks to understand the persistence of environmental racism in an inclusive and historicized landscape, one that considers multiple forms of knowledge and expertise and embodies the idea that imagining a more equitable, sustainable future is not possible without a grounded notion of the past and its present articulations.

This course provides historical understandings alongside the analysis and discussion of contemporary Black popular culture with a focus on its artistic value. Pop culture is authentic, as opposed to commercial culture. African American culture was formed under the reign of white supremacy. A very under-observed component to African American cultural expressions is the artisan work needed to create and perform them.

This course aims to provide a panoramic view of the operations of race and culture in the literature of a racially ethnic community of the Americas, from early oral traditions through the first written and published works. Captivity narratives, autobiographies, poems, prose, and different genres of resistance writing, allow students to examine anew, colonial, emancipatory, anti-colonial, and pivotal modern socio-political and aesthetic movements and eras.

This course provides an examination of intellectual and creative productions, developments, and events that have come to be recognized as the discipline of African American Studies.

African American Studies is interdisciplinary, with focal fields such as history, sociology, communication, political science, psychology, arts, economics, education, and the sciences with a social justice lens.