ANCH-317-301
Classicism in the Black Atlantic, 1776-1968
R 10-11:15a
Christopher Parmenter

During the eighteenth century, Britain, France, and the other imperial powers embraced the classical aesthetic to broadcast their genealogical connections with ancient Greece and Rome. As they expanded across the Atlantic, they brought with them an aesthetic of white marble, symmetry, restraint, and cultivated ‘taste’ that served to aestheticize the dependence of the imperial system on enslaved labor. This course explores how freed slaves and their descendants negotiated with the ideology of classicism during the long battle for civil rights in the Atlantic world. Beginning with the work of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano, we will investigate how participants in the world of what Paul Gilroy called “the Black Atlantic” embraced, questioned, or rejected the classical aesthetic up to the final collapse of the colonial system in the late 1960s. Along the way, we will ask important questions including: who ‘owns’ ancient Greece and Rome? Can an aesthetic be inherently political? And was the Black classicism of the 18th-20th centuries effective in fulfilling an agenda of liberation?

COML 125.401 / NELC 180 / SAST 124 / THAR 105
Narrative Across Cultures: Food and Literature
TR 1:45-3:15p
Harry Kashdan

Are we what we eat? How does what we eat matter? What about when, where, and with whom? This course will focus on the role of food in literature. After beginning with foundational descriptions of food in literature, we will move through a range of contemporary texts from around the world in a variety of forms and genres. We will explore the ways food is linked with memory and identity and analyze how the experience of eating is translated into written work. Our readings will be supplemented with several films which address similar themes while highlighting the visual element of consumption. In addition to literary sources, we will use theoretical readings by scholars from a range of disciplines to contextualize our study of food as a literary object. Some of the questions we will address are: How do people demonstrate a sense of ownership over their culinary traditions? Is cooking an art, and is a cuisine a kind of language? What tools do we need to study food as a cultural product?

ENGL 284
The (Un)documented in Black Feminist Thought
MW 12:00- 1:30p
Esmeralda Arrizon-Palomera

This course examines narratives of migration and migrants produced by Black feminist thinkers and organizers in order to understand the significance of migration in the development of Black Feminist Thought. We will read a variety of texts by and about writers such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Lucy Parsons, Ida B. Wells, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Saidiya Hartman, and Ariana Brown alongside canonical texts in Black Feminist Studies in an effort to locate and trace a strand in Black Feminist Thought that is largely unexplored. In centering migration in the study of Black Feminist Thought, this course aims to interrogate how migration is experienced and understood by Black feminist thinkers and organizers, and how Black feminist migration narratives informed the development of a Black feminist consciousness and political agenda.

HIST 232-403/ NELC 282-403
Migration in the Medieval Mediterranean
MW 12:00 PM-01:30p
Joel Pattison

Historians have often defined the Mediterranean basin by its "connectivity": that is, the relative ease with which people, objects, and ideas moved back and forth between the islands and coastlines of the sea, from prehistory to the present. This course looks at the medieval period from the perspective of migration, or the movement of people as individuals and groups. As we discuss the very different circumstances that brought people across the sea, we will examine several sub-groups: enslaved people taken far from their homes, merchants living in far-flung diasporas, missionaries and religious scholars seeking converts or knowledge, and mercenary adventurers, all of whom contributed to a distinctly Mediterranean medieval history that often blurs the distinctions drawn between "European," "Islamic," or "Byzantine" history. We will read travel narratives, commercial documents, political histories, and excerpts from medieval literature revealing how these migrants changed and were changed by the societies who lived around the Mediterranean, and we will learn how the experiences of migrants in the medieval period shaped later developments in international law, slavery, race, and capitalism.

SAST 315
Across Land and Sea: Asian Migration
Tuesday 1:45-4:45
Neelam Khoja

In this course we will explore how migration shaped and connected Asia by land and transoceanic routes from the seventh to eighteenth centuries. In this course we will trace people moving across long spans of space, which includes merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, laborers, pirates, spies, and travelers. We will examine how cultural, religious, economic, and political institutions enabled and benefited from migration; how towns, ports, and cities developed and supported migration; how individuals and communities understood and documented their experiences about what it meant to be mobile and/or foreign; and theories of migration that help us make sense of a premodern global Asia.