African American and Caribbean Architectures: Domestic Space

This course explores domestic landscapes occupied by African-Americans between the earliest years of slavery and the Second World War. We will examine some of the most common housing forms that diasporic Africans inhabited during those years—plantation slave quarters, tenant shacks, and urban tenements, to name a few. Our premise is that study of domestic life can reveal how political, economic, and social forces inform everyday life. The goals of the class are twofold: to improve our understanding of the social history of diasporic Africans and to develop sensitivity to the study of ordinary, everyday landscapes— or “vernacular architecture.” A