Teaching
"Professors who embrace the challenge of self-actualization will be better able to create pedagogical practices that engage students, providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply."
--bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Introduction to Africana Studies
This course introduces students to the academic discipline of Africana Studies which emerged in the 1960s and centers the subjectivity and humanity of people within the African Diaspora and continental Africa. Several key areas, such as Black history, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, religion, and creative production, are under exploration via an Africana Studies lens. The course conveys the significance of studying and understanding such areas from this perspective in classrooms and the broader global society.
Africana Urban Woman
This course introduces students to literature by African American, Caribbean, and African women writers. The literary works detail the lives of protagonists who learn to adjust to family, educational, economic, and other social changes while navigating urban spaces. Using critical perspectives within Africana Studies, the course teaches students to examine and understand the cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts surrounding the literary works and to identify and assess the use of real-life themes in the narratives.
Contemporary Caribbean Literature
This course introduces students to several of the major writers in the Anglophone Caribbean literary canon with inclusion of some writers from the Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. Consisting of popular literary works from the late twentieth century to today, the course addresses a range of themes such as community, migration, language, identity, religion, and class. Students examine cultural, historical, and theoretical contexts surrounding the works to better explore insight into Caribbean life and thought.
African American Literature
This survey course includes the study of representative works from the nineteenth century to the present, including the works of such writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison. The major thematic focus of this course is “life writing,” which encompasses writings such as autobiographies, memoirs, and slave narratives. The examination of various works allows a vibrant discussion about the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.
Introduction to African Literature
This course explores writers from several countries across the continent of Africa and invokes various social, political, historical, and theoretical particularities associated with the region and its literature. Students become familiar with several of the major authors in the African literary canon. The course seeks to answer: what role does literature play in the postcolonial period of Africa or how does this art form associate with the politics of everyday life in modern African societies?
Man/Woman Literature
This course examines the various ways African American, Caribbean, and African men and women authors frame gender in their writing. The literary and theoretical works interrogate practices, beliefs, debates and sociopolitical struggles around issues of gender. Aside from examining the intersectionality of race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identity, the course explores the social construction of gender and cultural assumptions about gender concerning topics such as masculinity/femininity, romantic relationships, girlhood/boyhood, sexual violence, gender equality, and parenthood.