BLST 5005a, Theorizing Racial Formations  Erica Edwards

A required course for all first-year students in the combined Ph.D. program in African American Studies; also open to students in American Studies. This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

BLST 7107a / AFAM 7107 / CPLT 7070a / MHHR 7070a, What Is An Archive?

This graduate seminar seeks to answer the question in the course’s title by looking closely at professional archival descriptive practices and broader, looser uses of the term in cultural and literary studies, art history, history, and beyond. By looking at these distinct but curiously, even suspiciously, concurrent genealogies, we seek to explain why the term “archive” has become so demonstrably popular, in multiple senses of the word, even as archival practice has become more professionalized and specialized. Put differently, many humanistic fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept, perhaps “the archives” as an abstract location where the work begins (e.g., “I’ve been in the archives”), or perhaps “my archive” as the group of texts I interpret and cite. Meanwhile, professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This course hopes to ponder and maybe even find a way toward an answer to the question: What is up with this? We explore archives in theory and practice, as both figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repositories for “primary” inquiry into the past. We consider theories of archives from humanities fields and the archival profession (including the emerging subfield “critical archival studies”), and we discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What is a trace, and how is it made distinct from the great mass of human traces? What does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or discover? In addition to readings, students complete two assignments: a provenance research assignment and a descriptive project in the form of a survey of an existing collection at Yale or a subject guide to a collection or group of collections.
Th 9:25am-11:20am

BLST 7119a / AFAM 7119 / HIST 8900a / HSHM 7710a, Researching and Writing Histories of Health, Medicine, and Science  Carolyn Roberts

This small graduate seminar is for students currently researching and writing histories of health, science, and medicine. Students learn about slow scholarship, the politics of the archive, and research organization and management and explore the craft of writing. Preference is given to graduate students in history, the history of science and medicine, and African American studies.
F 1:30pm-3:25pm

BLST 7197a / AFAM 7197 / AMST 7797a / HIST 8135a, Atlantic Abolitions  Marcela Echeverri Munoz

This readings course explores the historiography on the century of abolition, when the new states of the Americas abolished racial slavery. Beginning with the first abolitions in the U.S. North during the 1780s, we consider the emergence and process of abolition throughout the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Brazil, through the 1880s.
Th 4pm-5:55pm

BLST 7221b / HIST 7221b, Readings in US Urban History  Destin Jenkins

A review of classic and current scholarship in the field of US urban history from the late eighteenth century to the recent past.
HTBA

BLST 7458a / HIST 7458a, Black Economics: History, Methods, Politics  Destin Jenkins and Gerald Jaynes

Two Yale professors meet at 81 Wall Street. One is an economist, the other a historian. They are of two generational cohorts but are equally interested in the study of Black life. Each approaches the work differently. What are those approaches? This course has two objectives. The first is methodological. We seek to introduce students to quantitative economic and qualitative historical methods. How do economists and historians explore and challenge inequality? Where do we meet? Where do we agree to go our separate ways? The second objective is to revisit an underappreciated approach to studying the relationship between race, the state, and the economy. During the late 1960s, scholars and activists such as Robert S. Browne, Norman Girvan, Lloyd Best, Walter Rodney, and others from across the African diaspora formed a number of research initiatives to assist Black people in their attempts to tackle uneven development, neocolonial extraction, the enduring problems of the plantation economy, and racial capitalism more generally in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. They built on the veritable work of Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others who traveled earlier circuits of Black internationalism. Through an eclectic selection of readings, we seek to resituate political economy as an essential approach to the study of race in general, and Black futures in particular; draw out Black political economic thought from its many corners and in its various strands; consider what the “Black” in Black political economy means and has meant; and consider whether Black political economy is indeed compatible with Black studies in the twenty-first century.
W 4pm-5:55pm

BLST 7681a / CPLT 7510a / ER&M 6524 / PORT 7510a, The Portuguese Black Atlantic (1420s–2020s): History, Literature, Film  Pedro Pereira

The Atlantic turn in history and cultural studies often unwittingly reproduced imperial history, studying the impact of European power and forms of knowledge on the Americas. Even postcolonial approaches such as Paul Gilroy’s in The Black Atlantic displayed an implicit Anglophone bias that entirely overlooked historical processes occurring elsewhere in the South Atlantic. On the other hand, scholarly inquiries that focus on Latin America cannot fully account for the specificities that are associated with what we call the Portuguese Black Atlantic, as they still consider 1492 as the watershed moment for Atlantic history. In this seminar we study the emergence of what was known for centuries as the “Ethiopic Ocean,” an imaginary space where important polities, diasporic formations, and cultural creation and confrontations took place around the Portuguese language, beginning in the fifteenth century. We examine a range of materials from early modern Portuguese chronicles, Jesuit sermons, proto-abolitionist dialogues, prose fiction, poetry, journalism, and film, among other textual sources. We also foreground the emergence of Black literary authorship in Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa within a wider cultural process that we can call Portuguese Black modernity between the 1920s and the 1960s. Conducted in English, but reading knowledge of Portuguese required.
W 4pm-5:55pm

BLST 7978a / PSYC 7280a, Research Topics in Racial Justice in Public Safety  Phillip Atiba Solomon

In this seminar, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have a chance to present their research, and undergraduate research assistants learn about how to conduct interdisciplinary quantitative social science research on racial justice in public safety. The course consists of weekly presentations by members and occasional discussions of readings that are handed out in advance. The course is designed to be entirely synchronous. Presenters may request a video recording if they can benefit from seeing themselves present (e.g., for a practice talk). This course is intended for graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates interested in conducting original quantitative social science research about race and public safety. Permission of the instructor is required.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

BLST 8095a, Dissertation Prospectus Workshop  Kaiama Glover

A noncredit, two-term course, which graduate students in their third year of study must satisfactorily complete. This workshop is intended to support preparation of the dissertation proposal.  0 Course cr
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

BLST 9129b / AFAM 9129b / HIST 8950b / HSHM 7750b, The Afterlives of Slavery, Health, and Medicine  Carolyn Roberts

This experiential, workshop-style class explores contemporary approaches to Black/African American healing practices in the ongoing wake of slavery and its afterlives in the African diaspora. We engage with work by physician-activists, artist-theologians, anthropologists, poets, community organizers and others who focus on human flourishing and transformative justice for individuals, bodies, communities, and lands. Topics include studies of rest and joy, somatic mindfulness and breathwork, eco-spirituality, body affirmation, food sovereignty, and anti-racism in medicine and health care.
F 9:25am-11:20am

BLST 9347a / AMST 7791a / ENGL 5847a, Black Existentialisms  Shane Vogel

This course is an introduction to Black existential thought as it developed in the writing of African American and Afro-Caribbean authors. Existentialism typically describes a historical movement in philosophy and culture associated with mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals that asked how individuals constitute themselves within and beyond the given constraints and possibilities of their situation. But a deep tradition of Africana philosophies of existence—Black existentialism—are related to yet distinct from this European tradition. Throughout the course we explore key existential concepts such as freedom, liberation, authenticity, responsibility, action, situation, anguish, dwelling, the gaze, and the Other as they have been imagined in Black diasporic expressive cultures. Questions we will ask include: How have Black writers developed existential ideas in novels, poetry, and drama? How does the mid-century encounter between European and Africana existentialisms animate the literature of Black freedom struggles in the US and across the colonial and postcolonial world? How does Black existentialism understand the (im)possibility of self-making within societies structured in dominance, and what might an existentialist understanding of Black collectivity look like? How can Black existential thought provide productive opportunities to reevaluate some of the dialectics that have shaped conversations in Black studies such as hope/despair, being/nonbeing, humanism/antihumanism, and social life/social death? Readings may include work by Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Lewis R. Gordon, Nathalie Étoke, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Henry Paget, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, Adrienne Kennedy, Jesmyn Ward, Ann Petry, William Melvin Kelley, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Toni Morrison, and others. This is an introductory-level seminar, and no previous knowledge of the course content is expected.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm