UW Bothell Course Descriptions
UW Tacoma Course Descriptions
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AFRAM 101 Introduction to African American Studies (5) SSc, DIV
History, culture, religion, institutions, politics, economics, arts, and psychology of peoples of African descent as developed from experience in both the old and new worlds. Multidisciplinary analysis of social life from a black perspective as illustrated in selected historical and contemporary writings.
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AFRAM 150 Introduction to African American History (5) SSc
Introductory survey of topics and problems in African American history with some attention to Africa as well as to America. Basic introductory course for sequence of lecture courses and seminars in African American history. Offered: jointly with HSTAA 150.
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AFRAM 214 Introduction African American Literature (5) A&H, DIV
Introduction to various genres of African American literature from its beginnings to the present. Emphasizes the cultural and historical context of African American literary expression and its aesthetics criteria. Explores key issues and debates, such as race and racism, inequality, literary form, and canonical acceptance. Offered: jointly with ENGL 258.
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AFRAM 220 African American Film Studies (5) A&H/SSc, DIV
Examines the history and theory of African American filmmaking, introducing central political and aesthetic debates by way of different cinematic eras, genres, and filmmakers. Focuses primarily on black directors and producers independent and commercial contexts as they confront popular representations of U.S. blackness in their own cinematic practice.
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AFRAM 246 African American Politics (5) SSc, DIV
Survey of African Americans within the U.S. socio-political processes. Situates African Americans within a post-civil rights context where there is debate about race's centrality to an African American politics. Offered: jointly with POL S 246.
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AFRAM 260 African American Family (5) SSc, DIV
Explores the structures and functioning of various types of black families. Single-parent families, two-parent families, extended families, and consensual families are explored. Their consequences for male/female relationships are linked and critiqued. Offered: jointly with SOC 260.
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AFRAM 261 The African American Experience through Literature (5) A&H/SSc
Instructs students in hermeneutical and sociological methods of analyses. Analyzes selected novels, essays, poems, short stories, and plays with the purpose of understanding the structures and functions of both society and personality. Offered: jointly with SOC 261.
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AFRAM 270 The Jazz Age (5) SSc, DIV
Interdisciplinary study of period after World War I to Great Crash. African American and Anglo American currents and impulses that flowed together in the Roaring Twenties. Covers politics of normalcy, economics of margin, literature of indulgence and confusion, transformation of race relations, and cultural influence of jazz. Offered: jointly with HSTAA 270.
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AFRAM 272 History of the South Since the Civil War (5) SSc, DIV
Reconstruction and its aftermath, the Agrarian (Populist) revolt, disfranchisement and segregation, the effects of urbanization and subsequent depression, desegregation, and the struggle for civil rights. Examines the New South, the conflict of ideology with structural and material change, and the place of the South in contemporary America.
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AFRAM 315 Black Identities and Political Power (5) SSc
Relates the deployment of political power within institutions to shifting racial identities. Shows how racial identities both reflect and inflect relations of domination and resistance within and between cultures in the black diaspora. Prerequisite: either AES 150, AFRAM 150, AFRAM 201, or POL S 201. Offered: jointly with POL S 315.
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AFRAM 318 Black Literary Genres (5) A&H, DIV
Considers how generic forms and conventions have been discussed and distributed in the larger context of African American, or other African diasporic literary studies. Links the relationship between generic forms to questions of power within social, cultural, and historical contexts. Offered: jointly with ENGL 318; AWSp.
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AFRAM 320 Black Women in Drama (5) A&H, DIV
Character types of black women as represented in plays by black women. Some black male playwrights are juxtaposed with black female writers for comparative analysis. Playwrights include Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Grimke, Alice Chidress, Lorraine Hansberry, Ira Aldridge, LeRoi Jones.
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AFRAM 321 History of African American Women and the Feminist Movement (5) SSc, DIV
"Feminist Movement" from early nineteenth century to present. Treats relationship between black and white women in their struggle for independence, at times together and at times apart. Discusses the reasons, process, and results of collaboration as well as opposition. Examines recent and contemporary attempts at cooperation. Offered: jointly with GWSS 321.
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AFRAM 330 Music, Folklore, and Performance in Black Society (5) A&H
Focuses on cultural expressions created by people of African descent in the Unites States in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on music, folklore, dance, and humor. Offered: WSp.
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AFRAM 334 Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States (5) A&H/SSc, DIV
Examines the politics and culture of the modern African American freedom struggle, which began after WWII and continued into the 1970s. Interrogates political strategies associated with nonviolent direct action, armed self-reliance, and black nationalism, as well as the cultural expression that reflect these political currents. Offered: jointly with HSTAA 334.
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AFRAM 337 Popular Music, Race, Identity, and Social Change (5) SSc/A&H, DIV
Focuses on popular music, shifting formations of race and identity and social change in various cultural, historical, and political contexts. Explores popular music as a tool for social change, a vehicle for community-building and a form of political and aesthetic expression.
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AFRAM 340 The Harlem Renaissance: A Literary Study (5) A&H, DIV
Highlights Harlem Renaissance - 1912 through mid-1930s - as establishing a role for twentieth-century African American writer, encompassing literature, politics, and decolonization of the image of Africa, and solidifying integrationist and nationalist schools of thought. Examines images, themes, and characterizations in creating a literary aesthetic simultaneously American and African American.
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AFRAM 350 Black Aesthetics (5) A&H/SSc
Draws on both multi-media and print sources, including fiction, poetry, prose, films, polemics, historiography and speeches to explore the idea of a black aesthetic in various cultural, historical, and political contexts within the twentieth century.
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AFRAM 358 African American Literature (5) A&H, DIV
Selected writings, novels, short stories, plays, and poems by African American and African-descended writers in or from the United States. Study of the historical, cultural, and intellectual context for the development of literary work by such writers, including attention to identity, power, and inequality. Offered: jointly with ENGL 358.
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AFRAM 360 Black Digital Studies (5) SSc, DIV
Bridges and intersects two interdisciplinary fields - black studies and digital humanities. Attention to knowledge production. Role of archives, collections, research centers, the black press, and digital technology. Ideas related to power, memory, resistance, perspective and respectability politics in storytelling and control of the vehicles used to do so. Recommended: introduction to sociology; and introductory courses in African American studies and communications. Offered: AWSpS.
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AFRAM 370 African American Political Thought (5) SSc
Political ideologies and philosophies of pivotal African American historical figures and the conditions under which these ideologies are developed, rejected, and transformed. How ideologies relate to solution of African American political problems.
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AFRAM 404 Advanced African American Studies in Humanities (5, max. 15) A&H, DIV
Advanced and interdisciplinary engagement with racial formation, Black cultural production, and resistance among people of African descent throughout the Diaspora. Draws upon cultural studies perspectives with an emphasis on literature, film, music, performance, visual and material culture. Topics include art, labor, migration, politics; racial capitalism and political economy; social movements and cultural history; black intellectual traditions. Offered: AWSpS.
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AFRAM 405 Advanced African American Studies in Social Science (5, max. 15) SSc, DIV
Advanced study of racial formation, Black cultural production, and resistance among people of African descent throughout the Diaspora. Social science theories and methods used to examine various topics, including social scientific analysis of political history; social movements; intellectual traditions; theory; and intersections with urban, digital and legal studies; race, science, and biopolitics; public health and environmental studies. Offered: AWSpS.
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AFRAM 437 Blacks in American Law (5) SSc
Historical continuity for changing relationship between American jurisprudence and black Americans, 1640-1986. Statutory and case law which determined role of blacks in American society, and use of law by blacks to gain civil and personal rights.
View course details in MyPlan: AFRAM 437
AFRAM 498 Special Topics in African American Studies (3-5, max. 15) SSc
Topics in which students and faculty have developed an interest as a result of work done in other classes or as a result of the need to investigate in greater depth Afro-American Studies issues. Topics vary.
View course details in MyPlan: AFRAM 498
AFRAM 499 Independent Study and Research (1-5, max. 10)
Identification and investigation of the problems and needs of the black community. Methods and alternatives of approaching these problems and needs. Students designate their areas of interest and subsequently pursue research and problem solving.
View course details in MyPlan: AFRAM 499
