NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
CORE-UA 532
CULTURES and CONTEXTS:
THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Fall 2014
Professor Michael Gomez
Office: King Juan Carlos I Center 502
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 5:00-7:00pm, or by appt.
Office Phone: 212-998-8624
Email: michael.gomez@nyu.edu
BOOKS FOR PURCHASE
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
Nancy Prince, A Black Woman's Journey through Russia and Jamaica
Irma Watkins-Owens, 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
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
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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 2-3pp in length (double-spaced, normal font) and argumentative.
Assignments will be issued every two to three weeks, and will be graded on an A-F 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
pertinent to the course.
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Lecture Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am-12:15pm
Lecture Location: Silver 401
Recitation Preceptors, Meeting Times, and Locations (all meet on Wednesdays):
002 (Genesys Santana): 8:00-9:15am, Silver 510
003 (Genesys Santana): 9:30-10:45am 194 Mercer St., Room 303
004 (Joan Flores): 12:30-1:45pm, 25 West Fourth St, C-16
005 (Joan Flores): 2:00-3:15pm, 7 East 12th, Tisch LC15
LECTURE SCHEDULE
Sept 2 and 4
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Sept 9 and 11
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Egyptian Dawn/Nubian Ascendancy/Graeco-Roman World
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 1-17
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.
Africans in Judeo-Christian Sacred Writing
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 18-28
Kebra Negast (or The Queen of Sheba)
St. Clair Drake, Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History
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
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Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church.
Documentary:
Wonders of the African World
Sept 16 and 18
Assigned Reading:
The Classical Islamic World and Africa
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 29-45
Alexander Popovi'c, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the
3rd/9th Century (excerpts)
Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali; Jamil Abun-Nasr,
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, 800-1900; Joseph E. Harris, The African
Presence in Asia; Consequences of the East Asian Slave Trade.
North Africa and Egypt; Gnawa
Further Reading:
Music:
Sept 23 and 25
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Africans in the Islamic Imagination and Experience
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 45-55
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 Nineteenth-Century Morocco; Y. Hakan
Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800-1909;
Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle
East.
Documentary:
Saints and Spirits
Sept 30 and Oct 2
Assigned Reading:
Global Slave Trades
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 59-81
Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah Equiano
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks Joseph E.
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 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on
CD-ROM; Joseph E. Inikori, Forced Migration: The Impact of the
Further Reading:
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Oct 7 and 9
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
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, 1730-1830; Guy A. Settipane, Columbus and
the New World: Medical Implications.
Slavery in the Americas
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 82-108
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, 1790-1880; Ira
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery
in North America; Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles
françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles; Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and
Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,
1624-1713; B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British
Caribbean, 1807-1834; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de
Janeiro, 1808-1850; Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave
in Brazil, 1550-1888; Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God:
Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650; Leslie B. Rout, Jr. The African
Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day; Eric
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery.
Film
Sankofa
Oct 14
Fall Break- No Class
Oct 16
Assigned Reading:
Film
Slavery in the Americas (continued)
Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave
Oct 21 and 23
Assigned Reading:
Revolt and Forms of Resistance
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 109-141
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
Jamaica, 1655-1796: 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
Further Reading:
Sankofa
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Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in
Bahia; Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities
in the Americas.
Oct 28 and 30
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Music:
Nov 4 and 6
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Documentary:
Music:
Freedom (?)
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 141-161
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (excerpts)
Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles, eds., Caribbean Freedom,
12-20, 132-140, 192-214, 238-244, 274-283 (excerpts)
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Ada Ferrer, Insurgent
Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898; Aline Helg, Our
Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912;
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, 162-175
Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants of
the Harlem Community
LeRoi Jones, Blues People, (excerpts)
Barbara Bair, “Pan-Africanism 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: Afro-Brazilians in PostAbolition 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,
1868-1960; 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: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in
the Nineteenth Century; Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Raymundo,
Os Africanos no Brasil.
Ilê Aiyê
Early Jazz
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Nov 11 and 13
Assigned Reading:
Further Reading:
Cultural Efflorescence
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 175-192
Irma Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations
Amy Jacques-Garvey, 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 Warner-Lewis, Maureen, Guinea’s Other Suns: The
African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture; David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue.
Documentary:
Music:
Against the Odds
Nov 18 and 20
Assigned Reading:
Post-World War Two Developments
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 193-203
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Penny M. Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black
Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957; Tahar Ben Jelloun,
French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants;
Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement; A History of PanAfricanism 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.
Further Reading:
The Progression of Jazz
Film:
Music:
Daughters of the Dust
Dec 2 and 4
Assigned Reading:
Diaspora as a Broader and More Recent Expanse
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 203-219
Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader:
History and Culture in the United States; Julia Alvarez, How the
Garcia Girls lost Their Accents; Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in
Cuban; Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican; Benedita
da Silva, An Afro-Brazilian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love;
Roberto Santiago, Boricua: Influential Puerto Rican Writings
Further Reading:
Film:
Genres from Latin America and the Caribbean
Chocó
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Music:
Music and Politics
Dec 9
Assigned Reading:
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, 75-100
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/chris-stringer-on-theorigins-and-rise-of-modern-humans.html
Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “Genome-wide 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: 786-91
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2818934/
Hannes Schroeder, et al., “Trans-Atlantic Slavery: Isotopic
Evidence for Forced Migration to Barbados,” American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 139 (2009): 547-57
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: 713-22
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-006-0261-7#page-1
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: 121-44
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0301446080194175
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Carlos D. Bustamante, et al., “Genomic Ancestry of North Africans
Supports Back-to-Africa 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: 611-22
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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: 795-803
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2675968/
Barry Freedman, et al., “A genome-wide association study for
diabetic nephropathy genes in African Americans,” Kidney Int.
79(5) March 2011: 563-572
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056271/
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 Sub-Saharan African
Foraging and Farming Populations,” PloS One 4(7) 2009: e6366
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2712685/
Dec 9
Last Day of Classes
Dec 13 and 14
Reading Days
Dec 15 thru 19
Fall Semester Exams
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