The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. Because this course is part of a broader project, we will travel as a class to Jamaica during the summer of 2022 and students will participate in a range of projects there, working with partners in the arts, community engagement, and legal advocacy. The question motivating our project is: What are the personal, psychic, spiritual, and economic costs and benefits associated with Black girls fully exercising their humanity?

This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of
whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism.
The course will be organized around the following objectives:
1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the
study of social movements;
2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora;
3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions,
insurgencies, and rebellions;
4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.

Led by composer, vocalist, librettist, experimental ethnographer and conceptual artist Imani Uzuri (she/they), this course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. During the semester, we will discuss practitioners of these modalities – both emerging and established, well-known and obscured –including artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Adrian Piper, Spider Woman Theater, Tehchieng Hsieh, Lorraine O' Grady, Marsha P. Johnson, Gladys Bentley, Ben Patterson, Aida Overton Walker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Juliana Huxtable, Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Robert Ashley, Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Hammons, and Carrie Mae Weems. Students will also engage Uzuri’s own ritual performances, sound art and interdisciplinary works, which often deal with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape (including her/their projects Wild Cotton, Come On In The Prayer Room, Hush Arbor: Wade (1, 2 &3), The Haunting of Cambridge, I Am Here (Black Madonna) and Conjure Woman).
The semester will culminate in students creating their own short ritual performances and/or experimental works using aspects of the various methodologies, healing modalities, research modes, multivalent texts and performance praxis explored throughout the semester. No performance experience is necessary.

Led by composer, vocalist, librettist, experimental ethnographer and conceptual artist Imani Uzuri (she/they), this course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. During the semester, we will discuss practitioners of these modalities - both emerging and established, well-known and obscured - including artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Adrian Piper, Spider Woman Theater, Tehchieng Hsieh, Lorraine O' Grady, Marsha P. Johnson, Gladys Bentley, Ben Patterson, Aida Overton Walker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Juliana Huxtable, Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Robert Ashley, Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Hammons, and Carrie Mae Weems. Students will also engage Uzuri's own ritual performances, sound art and interdisciplinary works, which often deal with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape (including her/their projects Wild Cotton, Come On In The Prayer Room, Hush Arbor: Wade (1, 2 &3), The Haunting of Cambridge, I Am Here (Black Madonna) and Conjure Woman).
The semester will culminate in students creating their own short ritual performances and/or experimental works using aspects of the various methodologies, healing modalities, research modes, multivalent texts and performance praxis explored throughout the semester. No performance experience is necessary.

This course introduces students to two systems of inequity, caste in South Asia, particularly in India, and race in the United States. It’s main objective is to demonstrate how these modes of inequity, sometimes dismissed as outdated or irrelevant, continue to shape social and state institutions like family, law, and bureaucracy. The course will explore sociological literature on caste and race and examine how these systems existed in a range of historical contexts. It will examine how certain groups were recipients of economic, political, and social privilege, and how these groups othered communities such as Afro-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India. We will consider how privileged groups continue to represent modern institutions like state and law that fail to protect disadvantaged communities in both India and the United States. The course will also explore how privileged communities employ the tool of gendered violence of different kinds like physical violence against men and sexual violence against women of Afro-American communities and Dalit communities to maintain forms of social power and control. The final unit of the course will deal with the emerging and imagined solidarities between Afro-American social and political movements in the United States and Dalit movements in India.

This course will explore the different dimensions of everyday life in Africa. Everyday life has been described by Agnes Heller (1978) as “the secret yeast of history.” What constitutes this “yeast of history” in contemporary Africa? In exploring everyday life, we will examine the existing (in)capacities in the structures of state and society in Africa for human well-being in relation to the differences between political life (bios) and bare life (zoe). The course engages with the everyday life in terms of how social, economic, and political lives are constituted and the implications of this process for whether Africans live well or not, how they die, and their struggles for alternative lives. With (ethnographic) accounts and perspectives from different countries in Africa, the course focuses deeply on how to understand and explain the conditions under which everyday social needs and economic necessities are turned into political/existential struggles as well as the conditions under which political exigencies can transform into economic, social and bodily fatalities. The overarching questions that will animate this course include these: What are the prevalent conditions of everyday life in Africa? What and who determines (in)eligibility regarding the everyday tools of good life and human survival? How are these determinations related to the differential distribution of potential and/or actual injury, harm, and damage to human life and the conditions of its survival? What can ethnographic insight contribute to our understanding of everydayness in Africa? The roles of sexualities, gender, generation, humor, identities, racism, hate, memory, memorial, transactions, etc., in the construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of daily life – and death – in the continent will be examined. Audio-visual materials will be used to analyze important themes about quotidian life in Africa.

The history of the women and men of African Descent who have studied, taught, researched, and worked at the University of Pennsylvania provides a powerful window into the complex history of Blacks not only in America but throughout the Diaspora. This class will unpack, uncover, and present this history through close studies of texts and archived records on and at the university, as well as through first hand accounts by alumni and past and present faculty and staff members. These stories of the trials and triumphs of individuals on and around this campus demonstrate the amazing and absurd experience that Blacks have endured both at Penn and globally. Emphasis will be placed on the research process with the intent of creating a democratic classroom where all are students and all are instructors. Students will become familiar with archival historical research (and historical criticism) as well as with ethnographic research. Far more than just a survey of historical moments on campus and in the community, students will meet face to face with those who have lived and are presently living history and they will be faced with the challenge of discerning the most effective ways of documenting, protecting, and representing that history for future generations of Penn students.

This course proposes an examination of race with a two-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach and also simultaneously situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia, home to the University. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. For example, students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Urban Studies and through Latin American & Latinx Studies. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, and communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans historically and presently. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan but guest instructors with varied disciplinary backgrounds and guest speakers from local community organizations. Each instructor not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience.

A transnational and interdisciplinary examination of the black experience in Latin America and the Spanish, French and English-speaking Caribbean, since slavery to the present. Combining cultural analysis with the study of fundamental theoretical works on race and racialization, students will gain a thorough comprehension of historical, political and sociocultural processes shaping the existence of Afro-descendants in the Americas. The scrutiny of systemic racial exclusion and marginalization will allow the understanding of how these dividing practices condition cultural production.