Africana Studies

What You Will Learn

1. An understanding and appreciation of the multi- and interdisciplinary nature of Africana Studies. 
2. How to demonstrate your understanding of the major issues, questions, and debates surrounding theory and research through writing and discussion.
3. Race’s central role and its intersectional relationship to other socially constructed ideas, such as gender, class, and sexual orientation, in the histories and lived experience of people of African descent.
4. How to employ acceptable methods of conducting research.
5. How to evaluate and analyze existing scholarship on the subject.   

Major requirements ensure that students are thoroughly exposed to the broad range of research and scholarship in the discipline. Africana Studies majors must complete at least 11 courses from the following list, plus a senior exercise (project, thesis, or comprehensive examination). While six of these courses are expected to be at the upper-division level, credit will be given, where appropriate, to courses numbered lower than 100. Students elect to focus on one of the following areas of concentration: Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences.

• AFRI 010A AF; & AFRI 010B AF. Introduction to Africana Studies; two courses. This is a two-semester course that should be completed by the end of the student’s sophomore year.
• Literature (African, African American, or Caribbean); one course.
• History (African, African American, or Caribbean); one course.
• Social Science (e.g., Economics, Politics, Psychology, or Sociology); one course from the list of approved Africana Studies courses.
• Art, Music, Philosophy or Religion: one course from the list of approved Africana Studies courses.
• 4 courses which represent Africa and its Diaspora in the student’s area of concentration within the major, e.g., Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences.
• Senior Seminar. Required of all majors; and AFRI 191 AF -Senior Thesis, AFRI 192 AF -Senior Project, or AFRI 193 AF -Senior Comprehensive Examination.

Upon approval by the Pitzer advisors or the Intercollegiate department Chair, substitutions in the major requirements can be made to respond to an individual student’s interests and needs.

Students majoring in Africana Studies are strongly encouraged to spend a semester or a year abroad, preferably in countries in Africa or the Caribbean or Brazil.

In addition, the department strongly recommends that students take 4 semesters of a language spoken in the African Diaspora (e.g., Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish, or an African language).

For the Africana Studies minor, students are required to complete seven courses in Africana Studies, two of which must be the two-semester AFRI 010A AF & AFRI 010B AF course, and five other Africana Studies courses that represent at least three disciplines.

For the Pitzer College (only) Combined Major in Africana Studies, students are required to complete seven courses in Africana Studies: 

• Two of which must be the two-semester AFRI 010A and AFRI 010B sequence
• Four other approved Africana Studies courses that represent at least three disciplines: Literature (African, African American, or Caribbean); History (African, African American, or Caribbean); Social Science (e.g., Anthropology; Economics, Politics, Psychology, or Sociology); Art History, Music, Philosophy or Religion)
• the Africana Studies Senior Seminar.

B(L)ack to Nature: Poetry and Theory
AFRI 120 PZ

This course centers Blackness, nature, and gender in 20thC African American poetry. Through the study of poets Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan, and Claudia Rankine, students explore aesthetic strategies of and practice writing free verse, vignette, haiku, choreopoem, and blues. Coupled with readings in Black feminist geographies, earth histories, and ecologies studies, students engage with critical questions of representation, space, and embodiment in 20th century African American poetry.   

Octavia E. Butler: Wild Seed to Earth Seed
AFRI 110 AF

Octavia E. Butler invites readers to consider critical questions about ecologies, communities, hierarchies, love, sexuality, race, gender, colonization, slavery, home, displacement, immigration, imprisonment, self-reliance, trans-species cooperation, and hybridity, to name a few. Butler raises questions about the power of narrative and the parameters of Black feminist and African diaspora literatures as she innovates sci-fi genres, often blending the African diaspora historical with the Afrofuturistic. 

Wokeness: African American Social Theory
SOC 109 PZ

How have African Americans contributed to sociology? This course seeks to provide an overview of early 20th century and more contemporary African American contributors to the discipline such as St. Clair Drake, Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, and Robert Staples. Moreover, students will become familiar with how race, sex, and class shaped these theoretical writings and expanded socio-cultural understanding of African Americans in the U.S.