Black Studies: Course Descriptions, 2013-

Faculty: Anaïs Duplan

“Dark noise,” as Black video artist Lawrence Andrews calls it, is an alternate truth-building system. The idea of dark noise indicates a sort of failed consensual reality, or in Audre Lorde’s terminology, a “chaos of knowledge.” Dark noise is the area outside of the state-sanctioned truth that the justice system, for instance, relies upon. As such, we will use the phrase “dark noise” to describe the works of Black experimental documentarians whose decolonized creative approaches have generated novel spaces of cultural memory. Much of this cultural memory is made up of written documents—from the legal certificates that define us to the collections of creative writings that inspire us. As we will explore, these documents always bear the markers of power. Working within the framework of documentary poetics, creative writers have an ethical obligation to examine and disclose their participation in social systems, creating sites of engaged witness and knowledge production via their creative output. As a class, we will appreciate poetics itself as an integral part of the body politic, tracing the contributions of Black writers, visual artists, and musicians to the field of documentary poetics since the 1960s. Students will work toward the completion of a final interdisciplinary docupoetic work, writing regular critical responses along the way.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

This singing ensemble is dedicated to the preservation and performance of African-American sacred music. The repertoire will include traditional and contemporary gospel music, folk and arranged spirituals, and may also include South or West African sacred songs. Music will be taught and performed with importance placed on the historical and cultural context. No prior experience is required, all are welcome.

Faculty: Keisha Knight

This course explores the ways in which visual culture in the United States has mobilized Blackness and fugitivity for the purposes of both liberation and capture.  Starting in the 19^th century we will trace the abstraction and the materiality of Blackness and fugitivity through print, photography, and film ending in the vortex of the digital. Our inquiry will be broad bringing us in contact with Fugitive Slave Advertisements, abolitionist culture and figures like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, through Blaxploitation films, and into the more contemporary media/art milieu of filmmakers and artists like John Akomfrah, Cauleen Smith, the Otolith Group and American Artist.

Faculty: Özge Savas

Intersectionality has become a buzzword. But, what does it really mean? Where are the roots of intersectional thinking? How do we use it today? In this course, we will trace back the history of Intersectionality as a theory and practice within Black Feminist Thought and Movement, then learn how it traveled into psychology and how it is used in research today. In the first third of the semester we will study original texts by Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists, Third World Women’s Alliance, and Chicana Feminists. Next, we will examine intersectionality as a developing theoretical framework since the 1990s in broader feminist social scientific imagination. And lastly, we will focus on how intersectionality traveled into psychology in the early 2000s and how it is used in research today. We will also touch on a wide range of ways of “doing intersectional scholarship,” including qualitative analysis, visual arts, ethnography, archival research, and quantitative analysis. Our goal in this course is to center Black Feminist Thought in assessing the how intersectionality is used in scientific research, in particular in psychological research. While doing this, we will pay attention to a broad range of multiple social locations we each occupy in categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, nation, language, ability.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

This course will study the African-American Struggle for Freedom and Civil Rights in the United States through the music that emerged, accompanied and embodied this journey. Using the award winning documentary “Eyes on the Prize” series as our primary text, we will focus on the Civil Rights Movement, 1950-1970s, singing the songs, and exploring audio and video recordings, songbook publications, selected readings and more.  Author Reiland Rabaka states,“The mixture of music and politics emerging out of the Civil Rights Movement is an incredibly important site and source of spiritual rejuvenation, social organization, political education, and cultural transformation”. Indeed this journey can both inform and transform us as we look back and move forward.

Faculty: Keisha Knight

In 1976 James Baldwin wrote his short work of film criticism The Devil Finds Work while in self-imposed exile in France. The work presents a personal film historical narrative as well as an intervention into the politics of aesthetics and the politics of visual cultural life from the perspective of a writer grappling with the realities of living as Queer and  Black in the 20^th century. The Devil Finds Work forms the spine of this course.  We will read the text closely cover to cover and engage/watch with the broad spectrum of films it surfaces as a means through which to explore and understand more deeply how cinema shapes experience in general and in particular.

Faculty: Shawtane Bowen

This funny, trenchant, and powerful play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever.

“These are people you can imagine being perfectly agreeable at home with their families. But at work, they become the fierce, feral creatures they need to be, even if they don’t realize it. Rat races, after all, can’t exist without rats…” —New York Times

The approximately 90-minute play will perform the weekend prior to Thanksgiving (Nov. 19-21). This 4-credit course is for the cast, or others assigned production responsibilities, and represents work both in and out of rehearsals necessary to build a successful performance and/or collaboration in production. Rehearsals, tech, and performance constitute each students’ commitment.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

This singing ensemble is dedicated to the preservation and performance of African-American sacred music. The repertoire will consist primarily of gospel and spiritual music as understood in its historical and social context.

Faculty: Phillip B. Williams

In this class you will investigate the many faces that nature bears in the poetry of writers of African-descent. You will read poems from the Antebellum period through the contemporary period, poems that defy the myth that Black poets solely write about an urban experience in predictable ways. For Black poets, nature serves as a catalyst for contemplating freedom, complicating thoughts on injustice, and considering how better to use the earth to sustain a life that “civilization,” as dictated by Western beliefs, has annihilated. This class focuses heavily and mostly on poetry but there will also be a smattering of essays, plays, fiction, and criticism to help us better understand how a “tree” can mean different things in the Black imagination than it does in Eurocentric pondering. Some writers we may read are James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Edward P. Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, Camille T. Dungy, Tracy K. Smith, June Jordan, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Austin, Ed Roberson, Rita Dove, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Ross Gay, and many more.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

Through songs and stories this course will explore the journey for Women’s suffrage in the United States. Spanning the mid 1800s to the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the content will include voices of African American women, who are often underrepresented in these studies.

Faculty: Özge Savas

Intersectionality has become a buzzword. But, what does it really mean? Where are the roots of intersectional thinking? How do we use it today? In this course, we will trace back the history of Intersectionality as a theory and practice within Black Feminist Thought and Movement, then learn how it traveled into psychology and how it is used in research today. In the first third of the semester we will study original texts by Combahee River Collective and Black Feminists, Third World Women’s Alliance, and Chicana Feminists. Next, we will examine intersectionality as a developing theoretical framework since the 1990s in broader feminist social scientific imagination. And lastly, we will focus on how intersectionality traveled into psychology in the early 2000s and how it is used in research today. We will also touch on a wide range of ways of “doing intersectional scholarship,” including qualitative analysis, visual arts, ethnography, archival research, and quantitative analysis. Our goal in this course is to center Black Feminist Thought in assessing the how intersectionality is used in scientific research, in particular in psychological research. While doing this, we will pay attention to a broad range of multiple social locations we each occupy in categories such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, nation, language, ability.

Faculty: Bruce Williamson & Michael Wimberly

This course explores approaches to interlocking patterns within a rhythm section by looking at funk based genres such as Afro-pop performed by artists Fela Kuti, Amadou and Mariam, Youssou N’Dour, Oumou Sangare etc, some Brazilian funk, such as George Duke, and American artists such as James Brown, Sly Stone, P-Funk and Prince.

Composing, arranging, transcribing and notating rhythmic grooves for the rhythm section will help students develop an increased understanding of rhythm while exploring and performing this syncopated music. Interested horn players will be asked to compose horn arrangements.

Faculty: Joseph Alpar and Brian Michael Murphy

How do various musical traditions seek to carry listeners toward a realm of emotional feeling and even to mystical experience?  From soul in American rhythm and blues, to tarab in Arab music, hüzün in Turkish music, saudade in Brazilian music, and duende in Spanish Flamenco, there are numerous concepts that describe transcendent musical performance. This course will examine various theories of affect, emotion, ritual, and embodiment to explore the ways that music can transport performers and listeners alike to altered states of consciousness. We will also study the role of media technology in these global practices, as sound recordings are employed in sample-based music to conjure collective memory and commodify nostalgia as well as produce specific emotional and political effects in their audiences.

Faculty: J. Vanessa Lyon

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens anchors a course proposing the residual baroqueness in diverse strains of high modernism. Our transdisciplinary project crosses entrenched nationalistic and chronological borders between modern and early modern art and artists including Bacon, Guston, Manet, Newman, Picasso, Reinhardt, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist than even Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed. Both international art stars took on current, highly traumatic events, war and diplomacy, as well as cultural notions of race and gender. Moreover, in the most literal sense, there is a lot of Rubens in Rauschenberg! In this course we will seek to determine how subsequent and peer artists were influenced and/or distanced, in often unacknowledged ways, by individual works of and critical responses to, Rubens and Rauschenberg.

Faculty: Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly

Vive l’Afrance! This film title (Gomis, 2001) summarizes the goal of this course: an exploration of the rich variety of shared and conflicting francophone identities. Constructed within or outside of France, the identities studied in this course will encompass West African, French, and/or Caribbean spaces. The discussion of notions such as « créolisation » and « déterritorialisation/ reterritorialisation » will allow students to develop their linguistic, cultural and critical skills. Each unit will consist of the study of a book and a film, studied in conversation with one another:

Maboula Soumahoro’s Le triangle et l’hexagone (2020) and Alice Diop’s La Mort de Danton (2017); Léonora Miano’s La saison de l’ombre (2013) and Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019); Franz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre (1961) and Manthia Diawara’s Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010); Maryse Condé’s La traversée de la Mangrove (1992) and Cédric Ido’s La vie de château (2017).

Faculty: Joseph Alpar

In this course we will examine the role of music as a vehicle for political and social change in Africa. Our focus will be music-making throughout the continent of Africa during the nationalist struggles that resulted in independent African states and how musicians responded (and continue to respond) to the persistent challenges faced by those post-colonial states. We will tackle issues of identity, nationalism, ritual, gender, democracy, censorship, resistance, violence and conflict, oral history transmission, decolonization, globalization, social struggle, health, environmentalism, and human rights, always considering how music and politics can affect and transform each other. Moreover, we will attempt to disentangle some key assumptions and misunderstandings of music and culture throughout Africa. Course content will consist of readings drawn from ethnomusicology, history, and anthropology, a rich playlist of listening examples, films and music videos, and musical guests. Some specific music styles and genres will include: rumba and soukous (Congo/Zaire), jújù music and Afrobeat (Nigeria), palm-wine, highlife, and hiplife (Ghana) kuduro (Angola), psychedelic Zamrock (Zambia) Swahili taraab music (Zanzibar and Mombasa), isicathamiya and township jazz (South Africa), national dance companies (Zimbabwe) raï song and chaabi (Algeria and Morocco) Francophone salsa (Guinea, Benin) and transSaharan musics (Mali and Mauritania). 

Faculty: Debbie Warnock

In the first half of term, we will examine various definitions of discrimination, and methods of measuring discrimination, identifying advantages and pitfalls of each. We will read studies examining discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and criminal record. Students will research the ways in which Supreme Court cases have contributed to legal and sociological conceptualizations of discrimination. In the second half of the course, students will work in pairs or small groups to design and implement an email-based experimental audit study measuring a form of discrimination of their choice. Each pair or group will produce a final research paper, modeled after an academic journal article, in which they will detail the findings of their audit study and contextualize these within the relevant literature. 

Faculty: Delia Saenz

This course will examine social psychological approaches to promoting inclusivity. Content will include review of basic psychological processes that contribute to, and maintain bias in contemporary society; and on methods that can promote collaboration across difference.  Topics will include:  confirmation bias, tokenism, intergroup dynamics, social justice, and related concepts. Students will be expected to participate actively; examine, understand, and articulate different perspectives; and engage fully with the assigned readings and materials.  Weekly assignments include 1-2 readings and short reflection papers.  Students will also submit a final project that addresses a current area of exclusion at Bennington College.

Faculty: Delia Saenz

Students enrolled in this course will meet weekly with the instructor to design and deliver programming for a spring term diversity conference.  Enrolled students will be expected to familiarize themselves with readings provided by the instructor and will submit weekly updates of proposed conference activities.  The final product will involve independent or collaborative programming activities for the conference and the submission of a written summary for compilation in a conference proceedings.

Faculty: Brian Michael Murphy

Media technologies, such as photography, were instrumental in establishing modern conceptions of race. But the reverse is also true—racial ideas deeply shaped our belief that media technologies have the ability to faithfully represent reality. In this advanced course, we will engage an exciting area of scholarship and artistic practice, located at the intersection of media archeology, race theory, material culture, and visuality. We will pay particular attention to the co-emergence of modern conceptions of race and contemporary media technology. We will expand the category of “media” to include not only print, photography, and sound recording, but also taxidermy, arterial embalming, refrigeration, and digitization. How did race shape popular understandings of media technologies, and even substances, such as coal, gold, and cotton, in the 19th century? How does race continue to influence our conceptions of time-based media in the era of live-streamed violence and political protest? What role do racialized bodies now play in establishing the truth-value of digital media?

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

Faculty: Vanessa Lyon

Recognizing the sheer impossibility of a survey of American art, properly conceived, this micro-historical intermediate course selectively explores the arts, architecture, material, and visual cultures of North and Latin America—from Canada to the continent of South America, dwelling at length in the U.S. Through close looking, field trips, and transdisciplinary reading and research, we’ll seek to re/insert politics, race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the art historical study of indigenous, Colonial, and modern (American) art. Our exploration of painting, photography, and sculpture will be enriched by the originality and variety of ‘decorative arts’ and ‘native crafts.’ 

Faculty: Brian Murphy

Hip hop music producers have long practiced “diggin’ in the crates”—a phrase that denotes searching through record collections to find material to sample. In this course, we will examine the material and technological history of hip hop culture, with particular attention to hip hop’s tendency to sample, remix, mash-up, and repurpose existing media artifacts to create new works or art. We will use a media archaeological approach to examine the precise material conditions that first gave rise to graffiti art, deejaying, rapping, and breakdancing, and to analyze hip hop songs, videos, and films. Hip hop archaeology is a critical and artistic practice that seeks to interpret the layers of significance embedded in the artifacts of hip hop culture. How does hip hop archaeology remix the past, the present, and the future? How do the historical, political, and cultural coding of hip hop artifacts change as they increasingly become part of institutional collections, from newly established hip hop archives at Cornell and Harvard to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture? Books: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America; Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

SUN RA…SPACE IS THE PLACE takes a look at the life of Herman Poole Blount, founder and creator of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Considered a prolific composer of jazz and a pioneer of electronic music, Herman Blount aka Le Sony’r Ra or Sun Ra, was quite controversial for his electronic music and unorthodox lifestyle. He claimed he was of the “Angel Race” and not from Earth, but from Saturn, after experiencing an alien abduction. Sun Ra’s music touched on the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing, bebop to free jazz, electronic music and space music. This course examines Sun Ra’s musical timeline with a greater focus on song lyrics, poetry, and his early beginnings and influences. Students will view landmark and related Sun Ra films for its poetic content, as well as present midterm and final projects inspired from the collection. Books: Space Is The Place, The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra; Sun Ra Interviews and Essays

Faculty: Vanessa Lyon

Westworld, HBO's "science fiction western thriller" television series, drives a broadly-conceived visual culture/cultural studies course in which we identify and analyze various aesthetics and genres, histories and visions, typologies and allegories on screen and off; both inside and outside the show's narrative. Possibilities include: feminism, sexploitation, and the oppositional gaze; artificial intelligence/cyborgs; Afrofuturism; American Indian and indigenous rights and representation; remakes; tv westerns; queerness and speculative fiction; Du Boisian double consciousness, etc.

Faculty: Benjamin Anastas

All novels are about certain minorities," Ralph Ellison insisted in a 1955 interview with The Paris Review. "The individual is a minority. The universal in the novel--and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?--is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance." If this is true, then the enduring power of Ellison's Invisible Man (1953) lies in both the specifics of its depiction of African-American life in America and the literary and philosophical traditions that Ellison embraced in order to tell this story. We'll read Ellison's only complete novel slowly and carefully for the full seven weeks of this class, alongside influences like Dostoevsky, Richard Wright, James Joyce, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and T.S. Eliot. We'll also explore the vernacular traditions (Jazz and Blues) that help animate the novel's language and ideas.

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

Frank Zappa, (1940-1993) was one of the most innovative musicians of the 20th century. He led the sixties California psychedelic music scene and then went on to compose mind bending jazz and classical compositions. He was a prolific composer and also a hero of free speech by speaking out against proposed censorship laws in the ’80’s. George Clinton, (1941 - ), was the principal architect of the genre of music that has come to be known as P-Funk, via his ensembles Parliament and Funkadelic. He is cited as one of a triad of most influential innovators in funk music alongside James Brown and Sly Stone. His music fused diverse genres such as Motown, The Beatles, Soul, Psychedelia, Classical and many more. Clinton has influenced several generations of musicians since such as The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Prince, Primal Scream, LL Cool J, Digital Underground and Primus. He is widely cited as a major influence on the development of hip hop music ranking 2nd on the list of most widely sampled artists. Students will work through deep listening, reading, viewing of images, creative writing, scores and paraphernalia.

Faculty: Phillip Williams

Toni Morrison is one of America’s most cherished, studied, and criticized writers. Using antebellum and contemporary American history as her thematic and temporal foundation, Morrison has written about race, gender, class, and sexuality with a keen eye on mythology and fable. In this class, we will read through many of her novels, including but not limited to Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and A Mercy, in search for how history and craft form her timeless stories. To supplement the novels we will read several essays by leading Morrison scholars; essays that explicate traditional Afro-Diasporic spiritual traditions such as Yoruba, Santeria, and Ba Kongo; as well as short stories that invite a deeper understanding of how Afro-Diasporic spirituality and Black American fables inform Morrison’s considerations.

Faculty: Maya Cantu

In 1959, the resounding success of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun transformed the “Great White Way,” kicking open Broadway’s doors to the generations of African American playwrights that followed. Yet, as Hansberry herself acknowledged, she was only part of a larger wave of Black playwrights who, responding to the progress and protests of the Civil Rights Movement, created vital American drama. Hansberry reflected on Raisin’s resonance: “I think what it reflects in this moment, and at this particular moment in our country, is a new mood, and a feeling like…make new sounds. And I’m glad I was here to make a few.” In this remote, synchronous course, we will study the work of some of the Black playwrights who made these new sounds. The class will offer a particular focus on the plays of Hansberry, Alice Childress, William B. Branch, and James Baldwin, as we explore their theatrical voices and styles, their conversations with each other, and their dialogue with their times. The course will demonstrate how Black dramatists, from the late-1940s through the mid-1960s, combatted systemic racism and the cultural repressions of the Cold War era, while exploring such themes as the tension between individual identity and collective politics; racial stereotypes in show business; the complexities of interracial marriage; and the expression of queer desire. In a multitude of ways, these playwrights blended theatrical innovation with the envisioning of what Hansberry called “a true and genuine equality.”

Faculty: Brian Chase

Using the classic Miles Davis track as a reference point, this performance based course will focus on the jazz tradition as establishing the foundation for contemporary drumming styles, particularly that of rock, as well as rhythm-and-blues and modern jazz. Class time will be organized into two main emphases, that of drumming technique and method, and that of drumming history and stylistic trends. Students are required to spend significant individual practice time on the instrument in order to integrate the material into his/her playing. In addition, exercises in writing about music (i.e. music criticism) will be assigned to develop a language for discussing the technical and conceptual aspects of artistry. The material presented in this class is aimed to be universally applicable to drummers both advanced and beginner, and is geared toward developing each student’s individual ability while learning in a group setting.

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

In the early 70s Bennington music faculty members Bill Dixon and Milford Graves guided Bennington students through the black esthetic lens with music, words and deeds. Their compositions, teachings, and innovative approaches to creative music boldly addressed a multitude of issues inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. This 7 week course explores social, political and cultural content by artists such as Nina Simone, Erykah Badu, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, The Last Poets, Public Enemy, Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper. Students will investigate how the movement instigated an awakening in the artistic community through researching various Bennington archives, documentaries, photos and performances. Students are strongly encouraged to take as many of the three Black Studies courses as possible (Karthik Pandian’s Black Studies: Black Film Division and Black Studies: Black Video Division)

Faculty: Phillip B. Williams

Faculty: Laura Nussbaum-Barberena

This course will explore feminisms from Latin America through theoretical, analytical, methodological, testimonial and ethnographic literature. The course will weave contemporary writing from Latin America and the Caribbean with decolonized/global South/women of color feminist theory and critique. Specifically, we will explore the growing recognition of localized, yet interconnected feminisms throughout the region. Through the written work of these communities, we will explore how these diverse feminisms emerge with regard to a community’s race, culture, class, nationality, sexuality and spatial locations, throughout the region. Course readings will also explore how feminists respond the dominance of Western feminisms. We will examine the seminal theoretical work which informs them. As an anthropology course, we will approach feminist perspective through examinations of the historical construction of the hierarchies and structural forces to which contemporary feminisms respond.

Faculty: Karthik Pandian

This film history course examines the Black American independent cinema of the 1960s-80s. We will screen landmark works by filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Kathleen Collins and Julie Dash along with videos by contemporary artists. Screenings will be followed by discussions exploring the key thematic and formal preoccupations of black filmmakers of the era as well as their relevance to the experience of race today.

“Is it not also a fact that some can see the inclusion of Black music as a division as a possible precedent for a black art division, a black drama division, a black dance division, etc.?” – Bill Dixon, Bennington College Faculty Member in his 1974 Statement of Intent for the Black Music Division”

Faculty: Mohammad Moeini Feizabadi

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” —Edmund Burke
“Institutions are the rules of the game.” —Douglass C. North

In this course, first we will try to answer several questions: why is our society so polarized, and what are the roots of social conflict? Why do social groups confront each other at all, and how? Can we understand what causes violence? As Marxists have long argued, is  ‘class’ the only explanatory factor? What about race and gender? By focusing on 3-dimensional matrix of class, gender, and race (including ethnicity) we will explore how social structures that nurture social conflict, polarization, and violence are shaped, how they function, and why they are sustained. Our focus will be on the intersectional nexus of class, race, and gender, as we cannot understand the issues tackled in this class if these three factors are studied in isolation from each other. In addition to the relationship between violence and conflict and these various social identities, we will also study how social ills such as inequality, unemployment, segregation, and discrimination reinforce the very same social structures that have produced them in the first place and engage the question of a dialectical reproduction of social structures.

In the second part of the course, we will examine the ways we can attempt to rewrite the rules of the game, and how we might conceivably transform social engagement on a macro as well as micro level by challenging and confronting the predominant quotidian norms that govern social interaction, cooperation, and competition.

Faculty: Brando Skyhorse

In this class, students will confront the idea of “passing,” which is what happens when someone tries to get something tangible to improve their daily quality of life by occupying a space meant for someone else. Passing can happen in any context (you can pass for another gender, social class, or sexual orientation), but most often occurs in the context of race. This course will explore the idea of racial passing by studying the books of Allyson Hobbs, Nella Larsen, Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, as well as numerous articles and essays. Students will be expected to write three short papers, one final paper, and participate in one oral presentation over the course of the semester.

Faculty: Bruce Williamson, Michael Wimberly

This course explores approaches to interlocking patterns within a rhythm section by looking at funk based genres such as Afro-pop performed by artists Fela Kuti, Amadou & Mariam, Youssou N’Dour, Oumou Sangare etc, some Brazilian funk + American artists such as James Brown, Sly Stone, P-Funk and Prince, etc.

Composing, notating and arranging rhythmic grooves for the rhythm section will give the student a valuable experience while exploring and performing this syncopated music. Interested horn players will be asked to also play a rhythm-section instrument and compose horn arrangements.

Faculty: Maboula Soumahoro

What is Africa? This is a significant intellectual question that this course will seek to explore. Can the continent be confined to its physical and geographical materiality? Is the African continent a discourse, a project, a memory, or a desire? Each developed, envisioned or expressed by its inhabitants as well as the members of its diaspora? Surveying both specific historical periods and contemporary times, students attending this course will be invited to examine, journey through, and interpret the various historical, political, and cultural elements, figures, and movements that have contributed to shaping global visions and understandings of the African continent. Drawing from a variety of sources (books, scholarly articles, music and films), this survey will cover the Americas through systematic comparative analyses. Students will be encouraged to reflect on a variety of articulations of blackness and africanness among people of African descent through different historical periods and locations.

Faculty: Lydia Brassard

2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as well as the U.S. National Park Service Centennial. Over the last half-century, the effects of the NHPA and the expansion of the National Park Service have radically reshaped urban cities and communities across the nation. An outcome of the accelerated preservation projects and policies in the late 1960s and 1970s was that previously ignored and marginalized locales became potential candidates for local, state, and federal registries. This course will be an anthropological investigation into the productive tensions that emerge from the unstable, but useful category of heritage preservation, through which individual, community, and national attachments and imaginaries – economic, cultural, political – are produced, undermined, reproduced, and resisted.

Given that representations and interpretations of history are political and have longstanding consequences with regard to both perpetuating, and undoing social inequality, the course’s guiding question is: How have race, class, and gender intersected in the field of historic preservation in the United States over time? This question will be considered at the local and national level as it relates to historiography, funding, grassroots organization, legislation, and the labor market, and will be complemented by similar inquiries in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Readings for this course are at intersection of anthropological literature on cultural heritage production, gender, and place, with a particular focus on the urban context. 

Faculty: Paul Voice

This class examines the South African system of Apartheid, seeking to understand its origins, practice, and consequences. We will read from a wide range of sources including scholarly and political texts to understand how race and class structured South African society and how the transition to a post-Apartheid society has confronted the past. We will frame this discussion by engaging with South African literature, art, film, and music.

Faculty: Wesley Brown

This course will focus on the history and practice of the black aesthetic, as it has been defined by African Americans from three incarnations: slave narratives, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and 30’s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s and its evolution thru the end of the 20th Century. There will be assigned readings from various literary critics, scholars and artists on the concept of the ‘black aesthetic’ and how their work has helped to define the complexities of black life.

The goal of the class is to introduce students to the ‘black aesthetic’ tradition and its crucial role in the continuing conversation of race in the 21st Century. Texts will include New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Lisa Collins & Margo Crawford, and Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic by Houston Baker. Additional readings (e.g., excerpts from books and articles) will be assigned and handed out as the semester progresses.

Hip-Hop Dance in Context is a dynamic multi-dimensional mind body training experience that actively explores the genealogy of African American social dance formations from authentic Jazz to Hip-Hop.

Students will gain a contextual/historical knowledge of American social dance formations; investigate personal voice; explore embodied pluralisms and tonal fluidity; and engage in the rich complexities and depth in both physical and intellectual realms.

Come experience this intense, amazing, thought provoking journey…learn first-hand the rhythms, moods, character, dynamics, creative expression and improvisation of an American dance continuum. Prepare to be exhausted, challenged, enlightened, opened, exhilarated and transformed by experiencing Hip-Hop dance in a way never before explored.

The class will explore the cultural contexts of hip-hop dance and its related forms through reading, discussions, film screenings, and experiential learning in the dance studio.

Faculty: Lydia Brassard

What makes a neighborhood “sketchy”? This interdisciplinary course will consider the social processes through which contemporary spatial imaginaries are produced, reproduced, and reconfigured in the context of the contemporary United States. Broadly linked to questions of power, knowledge, and representation, this course will critically examine the spatial dimensions of citizenship and social identities, focusing on the way in which language and discourse become material through global and domestic policies. Understanding that spaces and places are embedded with coded assumptions about belonging and desirability that are nationally and historically specific will provide students with a foundation for understanding and critiquing practices of U.S. imperialism and other issues relating to global inequality. 

Drawing on history, geography, anthropology, and philosophy, the semester’s readings will include an array of topics including settler colonialism, various forms of migration, and the politics of military bases abroad. Students with an interest in social inequality, education, and public history will find this course of interest. 

Books:  An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States ; How Racism Takes Place; Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia; Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place

Faculty: Benjamin Anastas

"It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his epitaph to the Jazz Age. It was something else too: a social and literary revolution, fueled by new communications technology, music, popular entertainment, the end of racial segregation, and a creative renaissance in a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan called Harlem. Modernism, the Bohemians of Greenwich Village and Montparnasse, the lawlessness of the Prohibition era are all a part of the cultural backdrop. We'll read the leading lights of the literary scene in New York and in Paris (Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes) and their counterparts in booming Harlem: Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen.

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

Exploring Ideas About Race: Beyond Black and White aims to develop a personal and group exploration of the burgeoning field of the philosophy of race. The course will explore three primary questions about race—What is race? What is racism? And what should we do about both?—while engaging in a critical discourse, a discourse that requires respect, self reflection, and a willingness to challenge firmly held beliefs.

Faculty: Souleymane Badolo

Students will begin working with materials and images from Souleymane Badolo's own movement style, working both inside and outside the Burkina Faso tradition. We will then develop new materials based on more recent research ranging from divination practices to "The Godfather of Soul," James Brown. This project will encompass different ways of thinking about movement. We will work collaboratively to develop six sections of movement material that can be randomly ordered for each performance.

Faculty: William Parker

This seminar will involve listening, discussing, and responding to the great music creators who contributed to the 1960’s free jazz movement. Many of these icons have lectured, performed, and walked the grounds of Bennington College. Students will examine the history, structures, and techniques developed during this creative period, including personal anecdotes about the music innovators Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, and many other musicians in this genre that I have performed and recorded with during my musical career. Responding to readings, listenings/viewings, and end of course paper is expected. Readings include: Black Music, By Amiri Baraka, Four lives in the Bebop Business by AB Spellman.

Faculty: Phillip B. Williams

This class serves an introduction to Black queer writing and the theories that feed into and are inspired from said writing. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays by writers who revolutionized and made possible Black queer expression in the United States. What is the necessary vocabulary for Black writers left out of white academic and creative circles? When white gender and sexuality theory has no interest in Blackness or the Black experience, who stepped to the plate and gave voice to those often ignored and vilified for their unique experiences? Authors such as Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, E. Patrick Johnson, Loraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd, Thomas Glave, L Lamar Wilson, R Erica Doyle, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs are just a handful of writers we will read together in class. 

Faculty: Terry Boddie

Photography was used for scientific purposes and a tool of imperial colonialization during the early years of its invention. These two things have helped shaped its history of representation of the body. Marginal groups of individuals when they were represented in photography were often presented in a stereotypical manner. This course will offer students an opportunity to confront this history but also to reimagine and reconstruct it through both text and images.

Faculty: William Parker

In this course of Deep Listening students will become familiar with recordings outlining the trajectory of the recording career of bassist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist William Parker as a sideman and leader of select ensembles. William Parker’s recordings document some of free jazz’s most prominent innovators including, Cecil Taylor, Peter Brötzmann, David Ware, and William Parker and the Little Huey Creative Orchestra, amongst many others. Parker is a prominent musician in the New York City experimental jazz scene, where he leads a number of groups and is associated with the Vision Festival, organized by his wife, dancer Patricia Nicholson; he is also frequently noted for his community dedication, mentorship, and status as “free-jazz caretaker” and “unofficial mayor of the New York improvisational scene”.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

This will be an intermediate level voice class, for students interested in learning about and singing music in The Black Singing style as found in various traditions in the U.S.  The class will listen to, analyze and explore the fundamental concepts of the Black Singing Style, including aspects of rhythmic and melodic patterns, improvisation, and timbre. Students will sing selected songs from genres that incorporate this style, such as: R&B, Pop, Soul, Spirituals, Blues, Jazz, and Gospel. Additionally, students will select and work on singing individual songs that incorporate the style(s). Vocal production will be discussed and group warm-ups and vocalizations will incorporate exercises to develop breath control, resonance, projection, range, color, and agility in these styles of singing.

Faculty: Kathy Bullock

This course will survey African-American music tracing its development from African origins to more contemporary forms. Studying the genres in order of chronological development, the course will cover both secular and religious music forms of African-American culture, identifying the characteristics that clearly delineate and define the African American music-culture. Study of selected African-American composers and performers in European classical traditions is included. In sum, this course is designed to provide a deeper understanding and appreciation of African-American culture through study and experience of its music.

Faculty: Rotimi Suberu

In this wide-ranging introduction to the study of international politics, we will be exploring how states and non-state actors negotiate their interactions in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent and globalized world. Core themes will include: contending theoretical approaches to international relations (realism, liberalism/idealism, constructivism, structuralism, Marxism, feminism and post-colonialism); historical evolution of the international system; foreign policies of major global and regional powers; the growing international influence of non-state transnational actors such as terrorist networks and humanitarian non-governmental organizations; multilateral organizations and other institutional architectures of global governance; alternative global futures; and case studies of policy responses and solutions to major global issues, including economic inequality, environmental challenges, armed conflicts, and other forms of humanitarian crises.

Faculty: Vivan Nixon

In the throes of a global increase of identity-based hatred and anti-democratic sentiment, this course will explore a concept present in virtually every world religion. Agape love (unconditional compassionate kindness) as a necessary value in movements for social justice. Agape requires action and sacrificial service in addition to the theoretical discourse of diversity, equity and inclusion. Activities that bring about positive social change share characteristics that imbue the psycho-social perspective of love. We will discuss ways that the principles of Agape, independent of religious belief, shape the practice of social change. We will rely on thinkers from a variety of disciplines including philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology and political science.

Topics will include: The definition of Agape love and its key differences from romantic love and friendship; forms of radical non-violence in practice; the psychological impact of Agape on individuals and society; agape love as a basic tenet of ethical beliefs (Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Gandhian); the functions of Agape love in action; and expressions of Agape in movements.

This course will encourage students to consider the critical role of Agape love in establishing community wellbeing. The curriculum and materials will be comprised of text, visual art, music, and film/video, from diverse sources, including the Classics.

Faculty: Phillip B. Williams

Toni Morrison is one of America’s most cherished, studied, and criticized writers. Using antebellum and contemporary American history as her thematic and temporal foundation, Morrison has written about race, gender, class, and sexuality with a keen eye on mythology and fable. In this class, we will read through many of her novels, including but not limited to Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and A Mercy, in search for how history and craft form her timeless stories. To supplement the novels we will read several essays by leading Morrison scholars; essays that explicate traditional Afro-Diasporic spiritual traditions such as Yoruba, Santeria, and Ba Kongo; as well as short stories that invite a deeper understanding of how Afro-Diasporic spirituality and Black American fables inform Morrison’s considerations.

Faculty: Anaïs Duplan

The violence enacted on marginalized people is met with a poetry of resistance: art and literature as a political tool accessible to the masses. What service do poetics and artists’ practices offer to liberation, memory, and grief? Through a critical analysis of documentary poetic practices within a Black feminist framework, this course seeks to identify a common thread across visual and textual mediums. Through ongoing readings, class discussions, research, and critical writing responses, we will aim to theorize contemporary visual arts and documentary poetics as tools for documenting the liberation struggles and the marginalized experience. We will consider texts like adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, analyzing poetry, art, and cultural theory.

Faculty: J. Vanessa Lyon

From the advent of photography to the start of the second World War, American art, the cultural product of a former British colony younger than many of its foreign-born citizens, had what many perceived as “otherness” to contend with. Immigrants, enslaved and later freed, blacks, women of all sorts, sexual “deviants,” religious outsiders, the disabled, among other and overlapping subcultures and groups—were deemed both unworthy of representation and useful to represent. This course investigates canonical and lesser-known artists and artistic and critical approaches to situating “otherness” in American Art. Artists we will (likely) consider: Thomas Eakins; Edmonia Lewis; Harriet Hosmer; James Van der Zee; Georgia O’Keeffe; Arthur Dove; Diego Rivera; Marie Cassatt; John Singer Sargent; Augusta Savage; Grant Wood; Jacob Lawrence; Arthur Rothstein; cartoons and caricatures; minstrelsy; lynching photographs; Brer Rabbit; Gees Bend quilters, etc. No previous study of art history is required for this intermediate course. But students must be willing to undertake the skills required: attentive reading, annotating, and close looking—as well as participation in class discussions and short screen-shared presentations. In addition to the readings, films, weird TV shows, and youtube videos may be assigned.

Faculty: Michael Wimberly

SUN RA…SPACE IS THE PLACE takes a look at the life of Herman Poole Blount, (May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993) founder and creator of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Considered a prolific composer of jazz and a pioneer of electronic music, Herman Blount aka Le Sony’r Ra better known as Sun Ra, was quite controversial for his electronic music and unorthodox lifestyle. He claimed he was of the “Angel Race” and not from Earth, but from Saturn after experiencing an alien abduction. Sun Ra’s music touched on the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing, bebop to free jazz, electronic music and space music. This course examines Sun Ra’s musical timeline with a greater focus on song lyrics, poetry, and his early beginnings and influences. Students will view landmark and related Sun Ra films for its poetic content, as well as present midterm and final projects inspired from the collection. Readings from the book; “Space Is The Place, The Lives And Times Of Sun Ra”, written by John F. Szwed, and “SUN RA Interviews and Essays”, Ed. by John Sinclair, are essential for class discussions.

Faculty: Terrie Boddie

Photography was used for scientific purposes and a tool of imperial colonialization during the early years of its invention. These two things have helped shaped its history of representation of the body. Marginal groups of individuals when they were represented in photography were often presented in a stereotypical manner. This course will offer students an opportunity to confront this history but also to reimagine and reconstruct it through both text and images.

Faculty: Benjamin Anastas

“All novels are about certain minorities,” Ralph Ellison insisted in a 1955 interview with The Paris Review. “The individual is a minority,” he went on. “The universal in the novel–and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?–is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.” If this assertion is still to be believed, then the the enduring power of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1953) lies in both the specific features of its depiction of African-American life in the 20th Century and the literary and philosophical traditions that Ellison embraced in order to tell this story. We’ll read Ellison’s only complete novel slowly and carefully over the full fourteen weeks of the term, alongside influences like Dostoevsky, Richard Wright, James Joyce, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and T.S. Eliot, as well as more contemporary writers on race in America. We’ll also explore the Black musical traditions (Jazz and Blues) that help animate the novel’s language and ideas.

Faculty: Vivian Nixon

The course will expand on  the initial ideas presented in the Fall workshop, Blood, Sweat, and Tears which focused on the work of contemporary justice artist Russell Craig.  Through work that is both confrontational and contemplative, Craig’s pieces create a platform to help unify all who have struggled through trauma and advocate for positive change. Russell often describes his art as his expression of the trauma he feels under the weight of white supremacy and the structural violence it supports. Others Black artist throughout American history have done the same things. We will look at others artists who have developed art in or post-release from prison during the era of Mass Incarceration, compare it with the art of Black people in each of four eras that precede Mass Incarceration: Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Ghettoization. The goal is to encourage students to view issues of race and justice through the multidisciplinary prism of humanities, social sciences and history.

Faculty: Vanessa Lyon

The first and only season of Watchmen, HBO’s “alternate history” (based on the graphic novel that posited a real-life global crisis that, what?, perversely unites humanity) drives a broadly-conceived visual culture/cultural studies course in which we identify and analyze various themes, tropes, genres, histories, prophecies, and allegories on screen and off; both inside and outside the show’s narrative. Possibilities include: feminism, white supremacy, the Vietnam war; Afrofuturism; indigenous rights and representation; musicals; biopolitics, histories of psychological testing; queerness and homophobia; state ideologies; blueness, etc.

Faculty: Vivian Nixon

This course is a primer that serves to lay the backdrop for more specialized studies in American Justice systems. It is not a criminology course. It is a cultural exploration of the growth of incarceration in the United States and its peculiar connection to racial identity. With 2 million incarcerated people, the United States has had the highest rate of incarceration for more than 25 years. How did this happen? Why did it happen? What has it changed? Who has been harmed by this phenomenon? Marc Mauer’s seminal volume, Race to Incarcerate has recently been reimagined as a graphic true story. The easy to follow, but extraordinarily thorough, text will be the guide for this introductory course.

Faculty: Phillip B. Williams

Students will read various poetry collections that deal with different forms of trauma: homophobia, lynching, war, sexual abuse, colonization, and the overall idea of how to define “violence.” There will be time to discuss prosodic interests of our poets as well as discuss how content and form work together to create a seamless work. We will then turn to our own work and analyze the how and why of our choices. As trauma is our backdrop, students are expected to come to class prepared to speak with maturity and open-mindedness about many uncomfortable topics. Though student work does not have to explore the theme of the class, I do encourage students to take risks in their own poetry and critical analyses.

Students will read an average of one collection of poetry a week, write a weekly poem, write several critical response papers using Maggie Nelson’s text The Art of Cruelty to interpret how violence operates in the poetry collections read, and prepare a final portfolio of poems and self-reflections of one’s own work as it relates to the critical essays found in The Art of Cruelty.

Faculty: Brian Michael Murphy

Hip hop music producers have long practiced “diggin’ in the crates”—a phrase that denotes searching through record collections to find material to sample. In this course, we will examine the material and technological history of hip hop culture, with particular attention to hip hop’s tendency to sample, remix, mash-up, and repurpose existing media artifacts to create new works of art. We will use a media archaeological approach to examine the precise material conditions that first gave rise to graffiti art, deejaying, rapping, and breakdancing, and to analyze hip hop songs, videos, and films. Hip hop archaeology is a critical and artistic practice that seeks to interpret the layers of significance embedded in the artifacts of hip hop culture. How does hip hop archaeology remix the past, the present, and the future? How do the historical, political, and cultural coding of hip hop artifacts change as they increasingly become part of institutional collections, from newly established hip hop archives at Cornell and Harvard to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture?

Faculty: Kenneth Bailey, MFA Teaching Fellow

Spatial Justice is concerned with how space produces and is a product of power. All social movements deal with some aspect of spatial injustice which makes it a useful way for movements to find possibilities for solidarity. There is also a growing constituency of artists—from socially engaged artists, to sculptors, scenographers, musicians, etc.—who are incorporating ideas from the concerns of spatial justice into their artistic practices. How do artists and makers work ideas like these? In this course we will both learn about the origins and thinkers behind spatial justice and learn how artists are influenced by and work with these ideas as well. Students will be expected to produce writings, performances or works of art that are somehow in response to the concerns surfaced within spatial justice as a body of thought.

Faculty: Phillip Williams

Defining experimental poetry can be mystifying inasmuch as all writing can be considered experimenting with language. The notion of experimentation, however, has often been denied writers of African descent across the globe.  Often relegated to the margins in discussions of innovative and avant garde poetics, Black women have throughout time lead the charge of excavating from language once-unknown possibilities that lean into care and transgression as needed for survival and expression. In this class, students will explore how the ideas of experimental, innovative, and radical have been applied by Black women poets who, in their work, subvert notions of womanhood as domestic and tame, and disrupt notions of Blackness as commonplace and unimaginative. We will poetry and critical works by essential Black women poets such as M. Nourbese Philip, Harryette Mullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Evie Shockley, Robin Coste Lewis, Duriel Harris, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Lillian Yvonne Bertram and others. 

Faculty: Souleymane Badolo

In this course, we will focus on the specific dance in many areas of Africa including: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ghana, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire. We will study the movement history and meaning behind these different cultural styles and work to understand the many different stories that inform them. Students will be expected to research the use of costume and instruments. Furthermore, through movement, we will explore the different traditional and modern practices.

Faculty: Phillip Williams

This class serves an introduction to Black queer writing and the theories that feed into and are inspired from said writing. We will read poetry, fiction, and essays by writers who revolutionized and made possible Black queer expression in the United States. What is the necessary vocabulary for Black writers left out of white academic and creative circles? When white gender and sexuality theory has no interest in Blackness or the Black experience, who stepped to the plate and gave voice to those often ignored and vilified for their unique experiences? Authors such as Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, E. Patrick Johnson, Loraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd, Thomas Glave, L Lamar Wilson, R Erica Doyle, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs are just a handful of writers we will read together in class.

Faculty: John Hultgren

What is the relationship between racism, economic inequality, and environmental degradation? Are these modes of injustice the consequence of a single overarching structure (e.g. capitalism or colonialism) against which resistance should be aimed? Are they formed by overlapping, but relatively autonomous, structures that nonetheless form a Gordian knot of oppression? Or are they the result of cross-cutting social processes and institutions that must be grappled with in historically contingent ways? The goal of this class is to equip students with the theoretical and conceptual tools through which to critically examine the empirical relationship between race, class, and the environment. To do so, we'll engage with a broad and eclectic body of literature, including: critical race theory, labor history, Marxist and post-Marxist theory, whiteness studies, post-colonialism, environmental political theory, and environmental justice studies. 

The course will be divided into three units. We will begin by exploring race, class, and the environment individually, focusing on each concept's origin, its historical permutations, and its intersection with a range of social forces. We will then turn to several sites that can help us think through the complex relationships that exist between race, class, and the environment in our current world: home, work, wilderness, food, water, and climate. The final third of the class will give students the opportunity to pursue a research project of their own choosing.

Faculty: Phillip Williams

In this class you will investigate the many faces that nature bears in the poetry of writers of African-descent. You will read poems from the Antebellum period through the contemporary period, poems that defy the myth that Black poets solely write about an urban experience in predictable ways. For Black poets, nature serves as a catalyst for contemplating freedom, complicating thoughts on injustice, and considering how better to use the earth to sustain a life that "civilization," as dictated by Western beliefs, has annihilated. This class focuses heavily and mostly on poetry but there will also be a smattering of essays and fiction to help us better understand how a "tree" means different things in the Black imagination than it does in Eurocentric pondering. Some writers we may read are James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Edward P. Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Jericho Brown, Camille T. Dungy, Tracy K. Smith, June Jordan, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Austin, Ed Roberson, Rita Dove, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Ross Gay, and many more.

Faculty: Shawtane Bowen

Examining racial and minority representation (gender, sexual orientation, age, etc.) in the media and entertainment. From Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer", Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", and Matt Damon in "The Great Wall" to Zoe Saldana in "Nina", Zoe Saldana in "Avatar", or Zoe Saldana in "Guardians of the Galaxy", this class explores how people of diverse backgrounds are portrayed in mainstream Hollywood and asks the question, what is appropriate, what is right, and does it matter? In addition to analyzing established works, we will also create our own pieces in an effort to determine best practices for improving representation in TV and Film.

Faculty: Souleymane Badolo

Students are guided through a series of isolations, progressions, and concepts that demonstrate neo-traditional African dance styles combined with Solo Badolo’s own movement approach. Cultural, philosophical and aesthetic concepts are shared to assist in understanding and embodying the technique. With emphasis placed on grounded movement, articulation (head, torso, legs, arms) and polyrhythms, students experience fast moving, high impact, cardiovascular dance. In addition to learning fundamental movement vocabulary, each student will develop a practice that facilitates whole body awareness, attention to breathing, and an acknowledgment of self as a citizen of the world.

Faculty: Michael Wimberly, Heather Vermeulen

It’s estimated that over 10.5 million Africans were enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean from the 16th to the 19th C., the majority to South America and the West Indies. How did enslaved peoples and their descendants maintain or re-forge a sense of identity in the wake of this foundational violence and the erasures of names, religious traditions, languages, and kinship ties that the slave trade sought to enact? This seminar examines the Caribbean as a geographic space and place conditioned by diaspora, as well as an ever-changing imaginary, or even, a practice. Focusing on African Diasporic cultural production emerging from the Caribbean, we will also explore Caribbean Latinidad. Attention to the imbrications of race, gender, sexuality, class, and empire will be central to our interpretive endeavors. Other key questions include: What is “the Caribbean”? Where is “the Caribbean”? When is “the Caribbean”? In what ways does the region’s history of colonization and slavery shape or haunt its contemporary visual art, literature, and music? Potential artists, theorists, and authors include: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Édouard Glissant, Thomas Glave, M. NourbeSe Philip, Félix González-Torres, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jamaica Kincaid, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ana-Maurine Lara, José Muñoz, Stuart Hall, Shani Mootoo, Grace Jones, Dionne Brand, Ebony Patterson, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Jafari Allen, Bob Marley, Krudas Cubensi, and Firelei Báez. Books: Cereus Blooms at Night; In Another Place, Not Here; In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art; My Garden; Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; Texaco

Faculty: Phillip Williams

In this class we will read stories, novels, and essays that interrogate the execution and historicity of Black horror and and the Afro-future, using Black horror as the foundation for deeper intellectual and aesthetic delving into Afro-futuristic texts. We will engage with the question: How does Black horror reflect and shatter historical notions of horrific acts against Black people and does Afro-futurism imagine Black people in a safer world or a world that is differently horrific? We will read texts by Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, Nnedi Okorafor, Walter Mosely, Samuel Delany and others. If time permits we will also watch snippets from films that deal with horror and the future to discuss what difference if any exists across genres exploring similar themes of the monstrous, the inhuman, the hopeful, and the unknown.  Books: Beloved; The Devil in Silver: A Novel; The Man in My Basement: A Novel; The Prey of Gods; Wild Seed

Faculty: Bruce Williamson

This course will study the 40-year career of legendary jazz trumpeter and innovative band leader Miles Davis. We will examine his beginnings in the Be-Bop movement as a sideman with Charlie Parker, his two famous quintets (one with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, the other with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock), his collaborations with arranger Gil Evans, and his fusion recordings (jazz with rock, funk and world music) of the 70s and 80s (from the Bitches Brew recording to bands with guitarists Mike Stern and John Scofield). We will study how his playing style and ever-changing conceptual vision of jazz influenced countless musicians to follow. There will be listening, reading, and writing assignments pertaining to the various musical eras and their social context in American Culture. 

Faculty: Benjamin Anastas

As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possibly be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and sometimes rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that both writers have been canonized, we can read their major works together, side by side, and identify the resonances and irreconcilable differences that make Black Boy and Go Tell it On the Mountain, Another Country and Native Son, just as memorable for readers in our time as they were when they were published. We’ll survey the careers of both American masters as they quarreled with history and found their own principled solutions to America’s race problem. Books: Another Country; Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth; Giovanni's Room; Go Tell It on the Mountain (Vintage International); Native Son (Perennial Classics); Notes of a Native Son; The Fire Next Time; Uncle Tom's Children (P.S.)

Faculty: Lydia Brassard

This course will engage the socio-historical processes and technologies through which the gendered and racialized black body circulates in the public realm. Toggling between the present, past and future, students will engage with specific visual and material representations of black bodies and their attendant consumption, including “runaway slave” listings; the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings; RuPaul’s Drag Race; and Jim Crow-era memorabilia among others in order to consider the multitude of societal frameworks that render certain bodies as both spectacle and invisible.

This interdisciplinary course will utilize visual art; cultural criticism; performance studies; and anthropological texts and exhibits in order “… to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers” (James Baldwin). Curator and artist, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, will be in residency in May 2017, and will be a guest lecturer for two class meetings.

Faculty: Maboula Soumahoro

Because of its location in the Atlantic world, Paris occupies a specific place within the African Diaspora and Africana studies. The course is an invitation to reflect upon the widely accepted imagination developed around the City of Lights: a space of ancient and refined cultural, intellectual, artistic, and culinary traditions. However, seeking to go beyond the myths and the idealized past and present, this course offers a journey through Black Paris from the 18th century to nowadays.

Faculty: Vanessa Lyon

 For elite early modern sitters, portraits were a valued means of constructing a public image, securing a spouse, memorializing the dead, and emphasizing political and dynastic relationships. Taking as our point of departure period notions of likeness, otherness, and verisimilitude, we will investigate the problems of portrayal through various thematic subgenres as they alter and re-imagine themselves over the course of five centuries. Inasmuch as the idealized presentation of conventional, Petrarchan, i.e. white, feminine beauty is one of portraiture’s tacit tropes, we will ask how contemporary notions of gender and race—of sexual difference, physiognomy, performance, self-display, and skin-color, among other variables—inflect representation, identity, and artistic choice. Independent research will culminate in a scholarly paper and short presentation.

Faculty: Karathik Pandian

This intermediate video production course imagines the past, present and future of black lives at Bennington College. Through archival work on the history of the Black Music Division, research into contemporary issues of race on campus and speculative explorations of the future of these issues and the aesthetic problems they pose, students will work collaboratively to realize a substantial video project by the end of the term. Historical, theoretical and experiential research will inform our formal explorations of blackness in lighting, cinematography, performance and duration. Our work in moving image will intersect with black music, black dance and other forms of creative expression. Together we will explore the history of black collectivity, use this history to put pressure on the present and to imagine possible futures. The collaborative work from this course will be featured in an exhibition in the Usdan Gallery in the Spring of 2017,  contextualized by the research that we undertake.

Black Studies: Black Film Division (First 7 Wednesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm) is a 2-credit corequisite and students are also strongly encouraged to take Michael Wimberly’s Black Studies: Black Music Division (Second 7 Wednesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm) as well.

“Is it not also a fact that some can see the inclusion of Black music as a division as a possible precedent for a black art division, a black drama division, a black dance division, etc.?” – Bill Dixon, Bennington College Faculty Member in his 1974 Statement of Intent for the Black Music Division

Faculty: Rotimi Suberu

US foreign policy toward Africa has been characterized variously as one of indifference, neglect, selective/constructive engagement, disengagement, reengagement, and so on. This course probes the US‐Africa relationship in the light of the seeming reprioritization of that interaction by the United States since 9/11. Topics, readings, assignments, and presentations will explore alternative paradigms for analyzing US‐Africa relations, the historical evolution of the relationships, the strengths and weaknesses of specific US Africa‐oriented policies and programs (including the Africa Command, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Power Africa), US interventions in African conflicts, and US relations with selected African states, including the anchor states of South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Kenya.

Faculty: Bruce Williamson

This will be a performance-oriented ensemble that will focus on the songs of jazz composer and pianist Horace Silver (1928-2014). As a young musician, Silver played with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. He formed his own hard-bop group in the 1950s and from then on he was a mentor to talented up-and-coming jazz artists such as trumpeters Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw & Randy Brecker plus saxophonists Benny Golson, Junior Cook, Joe Henderson & Michael Brecker. We will select examples from his long and productive career, including Song For My Father, Sister Sadie, Doodlin’, Filthy McNasty, Nica’s Dream and Senor Blues.

Faculty: Annabel Davis-Goff

7 million Americans are under correctional supervision. The United States of America has the highest documented rate of incarceration in the world. Too many people are in prison, and in many cases the current system doesn’t work. It is inefficient, inhumane, and does not accomplish rehabilitation. It also costs too much – financially as well as in terms of human suffering – the current $74 billion spent each year does not include either other incalculable associated costs or the far greater future resulting social and financial consequences.

There are alternatives and they work better and cost less. We will listen to experts on several aspects of incarceration, and will explore and discuss such questions as alternatives to incarceration programs, race and incarceration, drugs and incarceration, incarceration and the mentally ill, collateral consequences, probation, and children of incarcerated parents.

Faculty: Michael Dumanis

This Honors Seminar will intensively explore the work of established and emerging African American poets of the past forty years. We will begin with a brief overview of African American poetry from the eighteenth century to the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, then proceed to discuss a different poet each week. Along the way we will consider whether a distinctive "Black Aesthetic" exists in American poetry; the role jazz and blues motifs play in African American literature; the ways different African American poets treat themes of legacy, history, culture, and community; and the effects of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class on constructions of African American identity. Poets to be discussed could include Ai, Kamau Brathwaite, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Terrance Hayes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey, Dawn Lundy Martin, Shane McCrae, Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young. There will be two major papers.

Faculty: Crina Archer

In August of 2014, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. According to a recent study, Brown's race rendered him 21 times more likely to be killed by a police officer's bullet than had he been a young, white man. Broad public criticism of the shooting and of a grand jury's failure to indict the officer intensified at the local and national levels, prompting the Department of Justice to launch an investigation of the policing practices in Ferguson. 

In this course, we will read the resulting report, released in March 2015, which details the mechanisms and motivations of "unlawful law enforcement" and the impact of predatory and racially discriminatory policing practices on the Ferguson community. Our challenge will be to read this document as a report focused on one American city, but also to place it within a larger context of racial injustice and the use of force. Students will be working with annotation tools to contribute their own supporting materials and context (such as text comments, videos, or links to online sources), in the hopes of collectively creating a living version of the Ferguson Report.

Faculty: Michael Winberly

African Music Ensemble explores the music, drumming and songs of West Africa and Mozambique. This performance ensemble will explore traditional bala (West African xylophone), djembe, dundunba, kpanlogo, n'todje, shakere, and songs in Wolof, Manding, Yoruba. 

Faculty: Souleymane Badolo

Rooted in Contemporary African dance; dancing over/under/inside and outside the tradition. This is a course in Souleymane Badolo's own movement style. We always begin class with a warm-up that involves both physical and mental preparation. We listen to internal rhythms and the beat of the music, learn about how to use the body in the space it occupies, and find ways of physically incorporating new information - answering questions the body may have.

Faculty: Rotimi Suberu

Among regions of the world, Africa is more or less unique for its large number of fragile and unstable states, poor governance, explosive social and demographic pressures, and recent hopeful economic and political transitions. This course surveys the big questions, enduring challenges, and leading theories of contemporary African politics and governance. Themes to be explored include contending scholarly perspectives on Africas developmental puzzle, the impacts of Western colonialism and major international actors and institutions, neo-patrimonial personalized rule and the criminalization of state authority, current patterns of state-society relations, the resource curse, the drivers of warfare and political violence, ongoing struggles for good democratic governance, and illustrative country case studies.

Faculty: Bruce Williamson

This will be a performance-oriented ensemble that will focus on the songs of jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock. We will select examples from the various styles he explored during his long and productive career: soul-jazz songs such as "Watermelon Man" & "Cantaloupe Island", modal-jazz songs such as "Maiden Voyage" (and others he wrote while playing with Miles Davis in the mid-60s), songs written for larger ensembles (from albums "Speak Like A Child", "The Prisoner" & "Mwandishi"), funk-jazz classics such as "Chameleon" plus songs from his numerous Grammy-winning recordings (such as "River: The Joni Letters"). 

Faculty: Clint Bruce

This course examines literary and cultural expressions of Creole identities in several regions of the French-speaking world, especially the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Louisiana. Forged primarily in former slave societies, where populations of diverse origins created new identities and languages, Creole cultures resist easy categorization. Theorist Édouard Glissant argues that the process of creolization provides a vital, intercultural paradigm for our globalized world. In that spirit, we will explore (1) how larger cultural issues are treated in French depictions of "Creoleness" and, conversely, (2) how texts from Creole cultures challenge dominant assumptions about identity and language itself. The texts studied in the class span from the colonial era to the twenty-first century; they include two novels, short fiction, historical documents, poetry, theater, folktales, songs, and film.