This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process. Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement.

This course is an exploration of the family of musical idioms called jazz. Attention will be given to issues of style development, selective musicians, and to the social and cultural conditions and the scholarly discourses that have informed the creation, dissemination and reception of this dynamic set of styles from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Fulfills Cultural Diversity in the U.S.

This course is an exploration of the family of musical idioms called jazz. Attention will be given to issues of style development, selective musicians, and to the social and cultural conditions and the scholarly discourses that have informed the creation, dissemination and reception of this dynamic set of styles from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Fulfills Cultural Diversity in the U.S.

The history of modern art is closely tied to and largely unfolds from the history of Western Imperialism. While the technologies made possible by colonial resource extraction produced new ways of looking, modern conceptions of the nation and how to represent it, developed in dialogue with racialized notions of the other. This course focuses on encounters between the cultures of Africa and Europe, from 1880 to 1960, and on the artistic practices that emerged on both continents as a result. Topics of special interest will include racial difference and the ramifications of colonialism, colonial masquerade, post-colonial monuments and memorials, the African influence on Dada and surrealism, Negritude and interwar Paris, colonial arts education, and the South African built environment under and after Apartheid.

The numerous traditions of Latin American art have been formed from the historical confluence of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian cultural traditions, each one impacting the others. This lecture course serves as an introduction to these hybrid New World art forms and movements by both providing a large chronological sweep (1492-present) and focusing on several specific countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Argentina.

This course explores an aspect of race and ethnicity intensively. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

In this advanced seminar, students will be introduced to a variety of approaches to African American literatures, and to a wide spectrum of methodologies and ideological postures (for example, The Black Arts Movement). The course will present an assortment of emphases, some of them focused on geography (for example, the Harlem Renaissance), others focused on genre (autobiography, poetry or drama), the politics of gender and class, or a particular grouping of authors. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some of the key texts and debates in Africana Studies concerning the relationship between racial slavery, modernity and politics. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, much of black political thought (thinking and doing politics) has advocated group solidarity and cohesion in the face of often overwhelming conditions of servitude, enslavement and coercion within the political economy of slavery and the moral economy of white supremacy. Ideas and practices of freedom however, articulated by political actors and intellectuals alike, have been as varied as the routes to freedom itself. Thus, ideas and practices of liberty, citizenship and political community within many African and Afro-descendant communities have revealed multiple, often competing forms of political imagination. The multiple and varied forms of political imagination, represented in the writings of thinkers like Eric Williams, Richard Wright, Carole Boyce Davies and others, complicates any understanding of black political thought as having a single origin, genealogy or objective. Students will engage these and other authors in an effort to track black political thought's consonance and dissonance with Western feminisms, Marxism, nationalism and related phenomena and ideologies of the 20th and now 21st century.

This seminar is suitable for graduate students in any discipline in which historical research may be relevant. We will work with both secondary and primary sources, and students will have the opportunity to visit and undertake research in an archive.

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.