African Diaspora in the Americas

Undergraduate

In much of the world, Black people share a history of dispossession, oppression, and regeneration. This course explores how these diverse groups of Africans and their descendants survived spiritual catastrophe by creating new cultures, making common cause, and struggling together for liberation from slavery in the Americas. This broad survey highlights the politics of spiritual, communal, and political survival, showing how Africans and their descendants forged peoplehood in the crucible of human bondage. We consider the importance of speech, movement, music, image, letters, and religion in the making of the African diaspora by examining how these forms of expressive practice developed distinctly in different places from within a common process of displacement, suffering, struggle, and regeneration. The intricacies of Atlantic creole speech, the movement arts of Brazil, the music of Jamaica, the visual arts of Haiti, Cuba, and the antebellum United States, and the emerging literature of Black America will offer our primary examples of this process. HU 0 Course cr HTBA