NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MAP­UA 532 CULTURES and CONTEXTS:
THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Fall 2015
Professor Michael Gomez
Office: King Juan Carlos I Center 502
Office Hours: Tuesday, 3­4:55pm, or by appt. Office Phone: 212­998­8624
Email: michael.gomez@nyu.edu
BOOKS FOR PURCHASE
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail
Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave
Irma Watkins­Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants of the Harlem Community
OVERVIEW
This course is an introduction to the history of the African diaspora, a working definition of which is the history of the dispersal of Africans and their descendants throughout much of the world. From antiquity, such populations and communities have made their way through the realms of the Mediterranean and Europe, the central Islamic lands, Asia, and the Americas. At times their movement has been voluntary; often it was compelled. Throughout their long history, Africans have been both conqueror and conquered, slaveholder and enslaved. In all circumstances, they have made significant and lasting contributions to the economies and cultures of the societies into which they were introduced. We will attempt to follow the progression of this diaspora, in effect a series of diasporas, both temporally and thematically. Our queries are multiple: What were the conditions that led to their dispersals? What were the circumstances under which Africans were received? If introduced 1
under conditions of inequality, what are the legacies of those inequalities? How was the fabric of the society in question altered? What have been the cultural manifestations of the African presence? How have technologies and industries been impacted by their contributions? How have notions of collective identity changed over time? To what extent have the experiences throughout the African diaspora converged/diverged? All assigned readings should be prepared prior to class to fully engage the learning experience. However, assigned readings are designed to complement the weekly lectures and recitations, providing continuity, context, and interaction. Student attendance is therefore expected.
All books for purchase are also on reserve in Bobst. All assigned readings not available for purchase will be made available electronically.
Grade Criteria
Response Papers
Final Exam Attendance/Participation
­ 60% of final grade
­ 30% of final grade
­ 10% of final grade
Response papers are to be 3­4pp in length (double­spaced, normal font) and argumentative. Assignments will be issued every two to three weeks, and will be graded on an A­F scale. All assignments must be completed to pass the course.
Policies
Recording and Transcription: Audiotaping and other methods of mechanized recording are not permitted unless authorized by the professor.
Late Work: Any work submitted after the particular due date will suffer the loss of one whole grade. Late work will not be accepted once the Final Exam Period begins. Probity: Violations of academic probity will meet with a response in conformity with official university policy. See attached addenda on academic guidelines and integrity.
Objectives
As a result of completing History V55.0532, each student will have:
­ demonstrated a familiarity with the historical development of the African Diaspora.
­ critically read primary texts.
­ successfully written analytical response papers.
­ successfully completed a final examination.
NYU Classes
Please regularly consult NYU Classes for syllabi, addenda, assignments, and all information 2
pertinent to the course.
Lecture Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30­10:45am
Lecture Location: 12 Waverly, Room G08
Recitation Preceptors, Meeting Times, and Locations (all meet on Wednesdays):
002 (Allison Korinek): 003 (Allison Korinek): 004 (Wendi Muse):
005 (Wendi Muse): 006 (Alison Okuda): 007 (Alison Okuda): 8:00­9:15am, Silver 506
9:30­10:45am 25 West 4th, C3 12:30­1:45pm, Tisch Hall LC1
2:00­3:15pm, Tisch Hall LC5
12:30­1:45pm, Tisch Hall LC4
2:00­3:15pm, Tisch Hall LC2 LECTURE SCHEDULE
Sept 2 (Wed)
Classes Begin at NYU
Sept 3
Assigned Reading:
Egyptian Dawn/Nubian Ascendancy/Graeco­Roman World
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 1­17
William Leo Hansberry, African and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers (excerpts)
Philip D. Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, Jan Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times to Independence, 2nd ed.; J. Fage and R. Oliver, The Cambridge History of Africa; Zahi A. Hawass, Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt; Lynn Meskell, Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Et Cetera in Ancient Egypt; Stephen Quirke, Stephen and Jeffrey Spencer, The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt; John Romer, People of the Nile: Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt; P.L. Shinnie, Ancient Nubia; Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols.; Frank Snowden, excerpts from Before Color Prejudice; Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco­
Roman Experience.
Further Reading:
Sept 7
Labor Day – No Classes
Sept 8 and 10
Assigned Reading:
Africans in Judeo­Christian Sacred Writing
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 18­28
Kebra Negast (or The Queen of Sheba) St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History Further Reading:
3
Documentary:
Sept 15 and 17
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Music:
Sept 22 and 24
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Documentary:
Sept 29 and Oct 1
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
and Anthropology, 2 vols.; Steven Kaplan, The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century; Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270; Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society; Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family; Charles B. Copher, Black Biblical Studies: An Anthology of Charles B. Copher; James Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church.
Wonders of the African World
The Classical Islamic World and Africa
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 29­45
Alexander Popovi'c, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century (excerpts)
Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali; Jamil Abun­Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period; J.F.A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, History of West Africa, 3rd ed.; E.W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors; Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa; Randle L. Pouwels, Horn and Crescent: Cultural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800­1900; Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in Asia; Consequences of the East Asian Slave Trade.
North Africa and Egypt; Gnawa
Africans in the Islamic Imagination and Experience
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 45­55
John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (excerpts)
R. Brunschvig, “Abd.” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed.; Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam; B. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East Émile Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans l’islam maghrébin; Mohammed Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth­Century Morocco; Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800­1909; Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East.
Saints and Spirits
Global Slave Trades
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 59­81
Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks Joseph E. 4
Harris, The African Diaspora; Joseph E. Harris, Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 2nd ed.; Ralph Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency; David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein, The Trans­Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD­ROM; Joseph E. Inikori, Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades;
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730­1830; Guy A. Settipane, Columbus and the New World: Medical Implications. Oct 6 and 8
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Slavery and Resistance in the Americas
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 82­108
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México: estudio ethnohistórico, 2nd ed.; Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790­1880; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America; Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles françaises, XVIIe­XVIIIe siècles; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624­1713; B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807­1834; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808­1850; Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550­1888; Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570­1650; Leslie B. Rout, Jr. The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. Oct 13
Legislative Day­ No Class
Oct 15
Assigned Reading:
Slavery and Resistance in the Americas (cont.)
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 109­141
Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave
The Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, excerpts
Nancy Prince, A Black Woman's Journey through Russia and Jamaica; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution; Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, Caribbean Freedom: Society and Economy from Emancipation to the Present; Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Further Reading:
5
Film
Oct 20 and 22
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Music:
Oct 27 and 29
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Jamaica, 1655­1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal; Darlene Clark Hine and David Barry Gaspar. More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas; João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia; Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas.
Sankofa
Freedom (?)
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 141­161
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (excerpts)
Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean Freedom, 12­20, 132­140, 192­214, 238­244, 274­283 (excerpts)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868­1898; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro­Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886­1912; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South.
Negro Spirituals, Blues, and Gospel Reconnecting: Movement and Belief
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 162­175
Irma Watkins­Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants of
the Harlem Community
LeRoi Jones, Blues People, (excerpts)
Barbara Bair, “Pan­Africanism as Process: Adelaide Casely Hayford, Garveyism, and the Cultural Roots of Nationalism,” in Sidney Lemelle and Robin Kelley, editors, Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora; Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro­Brazilians in Post­
Abolition São Paulo and Salvador; Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Claude Andrew Clegg III. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad; Adelaide M. Cromwell, An African Victorian Feminist: The Life and Times of Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford, 1868­1960; W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History; Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 2 vols; Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, 9 vols.; Philip A. Howard, Changing History: Afro­Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century; Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo, Os Africanos no Brasil.
6
Documentary:
Music:
Ilê Aiyê
Negro Spirituals, Blues, and Gospel Nov 3 and 5
Assigned Reading:
Cultural Efflorescence
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 175­192
Irma Watkins­Owens, Blood Relations
Amy Jacques­Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (excerpts)
Literary, Visual, and Musical Samples (to be provided)
Arna Bontemps, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light; Maureen Warner­Lewis, Maureen, Guinea’s Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture; David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue. Against the Odds
The Progression of Jazz Further Reading:
Documentary: Music:
Nov 10 and 12
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Film:
Music:
Nov 17
Assigned Reading:
Post­World War Two Developments
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 193­203
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Penny M. Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937­1957; Tahar Ben Jelloun, French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants; Immanuel Geiss, The Pan­African Movement; A History of Pan­
Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa; LeRoi Jones (Baraka, Imamu Amiri), Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed.; Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora.
Daughters of the Dust
Genres from Latin America and the Caribbean
Diaspora, DNA, and the Intersection of History and Science
Fatimah C. Jackson, “How Genetics Can Provide Detail to the Transatlantic African Diaspora,” in J. Sweet and T. Olaniyan, eds., The African Diaspora and the Disciplines, 75­100
Chris Stringer, “A Bone Here, a Bead There: On the Trail of Human Origins,” New York Times 16 July 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/science/chris­stringer­on­the­
origins­and­rise­of­modern­humans.html
7
Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “Genome­wide patterns of populations structure and admixture in West Africans and African Americans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(2) 12 January 2010: 786­91 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818934/
Hannes Schroeder, et al., “Trans­Atlantic Slavery: Isotopic Evidence for Forced Migration to Barbados,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 547­57 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21019/abstract
Sarah Tishkoff, et al., “Elevated male European and female African contributions to the genomes of African American individuals,” Human Genetics 129(5) 2007: 713­22 http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439­006­0261­7#page­1
Further Reading: Chris Stringer, Lone Survivors: How We Came to be the Only Humans on Earth (Times Books, 2012)
Fatimah Jackson, “Ethnogenetic Layering (EL): an alternative to the traditional race model in human variation and health disparity studies,” Annals of Human Biology 35(2) 2008: 121­44 http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0301446080194175
2
Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back­to­Africa Migrations,” PLoS Genetics 8(1) January 2012: e1002397 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257290/
Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “The Effect of Recent Admixture on Inference of Ancient Human Population History,” Genetics 185(2) June 2010: 611­22 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20382834?dopt=Abstract&o
tool=stanford
Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “Global distribution of genomic diversity underscores rich complex history of continental human populations,” Genome Research 19(5) May 2009: 795­803 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675968/
Barry Freedman, et al., “A genome­wide association study for diabetic nephropathy genes in African Americans,” Kidney Int. 79(5) March 2011: 563­572 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056271/
8
Robert A. Waterland, et al., “Season of Conception in Rural Gambia affects DNA Methylation at Putative Human Metastbale Epialleles,” PLoS Genetics 6(12): e1001252 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3009670/
Michael Hammer, “Autosomal Resequence Data Reveal Late Stone Age Signals of Population Expansion in Sub­Saharan African Foraging and Farming Populations,” PloS One 4(7) 2009: e6366 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712685/
Nov 19, Dec 1 and 3
Assigned Reading:
Documentary:
Music:
Dec 8 and 10
Assigned Reading:
Media:
Dec 15
Assigned Reading:
Diaspora and the Politics of North America
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 203­219
Alexander, The New Jim Crow
TBA
Music and Politics
Diaspora as a More Recent Phenomenon
Adichie, Americanah
Isidore Okpewho, “Introduction: Can We ‘Go Home Again’,” in The New African Diaspora, ed. Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu (2009), 3­30.
An African City
Film:
Diaspora as a More Recent Phenomenon (cont.)
Adichie, Americanah
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, The Afro­Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, excerpts
Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban; Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican; Benedita da Silva, An Afro­Brazilian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love; Roberto Santiago, Boricua: Influential Puerto Rican Writings; Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets (1997).
Negrita (o Chocó o Blacks in Latin America)
Dec 16
Reading Day
Dec 17 thru 23
Fall Semester Exams
Further Reading: 9