Black Studies

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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

20th Century Afrocaribbean Writers — LIT2537.01) (day/time updated as of 10/9/2023

Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
To date, the Afrocaribbean world has produced some of the most essential poetry, fiction, and scholarship of the Americas. Poets like the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite also double as social scientists, as Brathwaite’s Development of Creole Society in Jamaica illuminates a picture of the linguistic development of Jamaica under British colonial rule. Similarly, Glissant’s idea of

African Conflict Resolution — POL4254.01

Instructor: Rotimi Suberu
Credits: 2
The prevention, management and resolution of African conflicts is a major challenge for the international community and the continent’s peoples. Africa accounts for the largest and highest number of United Nations’ peacekeeping operations, but these “stabilization” missions have mostly failed to stabilize the continent, and  large segments of the African population

Banjo — MIN2215.01

Instructor: John Kirk
Days & Time: W 11:00AM-11:50AM
Credits: 2

Beginning, intermediate, or advanced group lessons on the 5-string banjo in the claw-hammer/frailing style. Students will learn to play using simple song sheets with chords, tablature, and standard notation. Using chord theory and scale work, personal music-making skills will be enhanced. History of the African origins of banjo and its introduction to the western world will

Bebop, Rock, and Beyond (Advanced Fundamentals) — MPF4223.01

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Credits: 2
Bebop, Rock and Beyond surveys numerous drum set innovators, architects, and developers of the American drum set. Students will investigate multiple music genres from Swing, Bebop, Funk, Fusion, and Rock from drummers such as, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Ed Blackwell, John Bonham, Steve Jordan, and Cindy Blackman, to global approaches on drum set by artists, Alex Acuna, Terry Lynn

Black Music: Black Music Division (a 50 year retrospective) — MHI2238.01

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Credits: 2
Beginning in the Fall of 1974 through the spring of 1984, Bill Dixon, a Bennington music faculty member, American composer, and visual artist who was a seminal figure in free jazz, implemented a curriculum entitled Black Music: Black Music Division. This menu of courses introduced innovative pioneers of music who contributed to the lexicon and history of the black experience in

Cinéma-monde — FRE4154.01

Instructor: Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly
Days & Time: MO,TH 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 4

In this course, films are used as textbooks to learn the French language and explore the French-speaking world. In order to hone their language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), students will listen to selected film dialogues to improve their listening comprehension, read and analyze excerpts from scenarios and reviews to

Contemporary African Literature — LIT2564.01

Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 4
This course serves as an introduction to the vital stories and voices of contemporary African literature. We will devote ourselves to closely reading novels, short stories, poems, and plays that explore modern African lives, both as they exist in relation to and imagine futures beyond the cruel legacies of genocide, apartheid, and (neo)colonialism. In the pages we read, you

Critical Theory in Qualitative Research — SCT4112.01

Instructor: Audrey Devost
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Qualitative inquiry seeks to discover and to describe in narrative reporting what particular people do in their everyday lives and what the actions mean to them. This course is intended for students who wish to learn more about the impact of theoretical frameworks on their ongoing knowledge projects at Bennington College. A critical theoretical lens in

Drumming: An Extension of Language — MIN2120.01, section 1

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Credits: 2
This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, chants, and musical practices from Africa, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the African Diaspora. Using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories, students will use their hands, mallets, and sticks to learn and play traditional folkloric rhythms and melodies. Additional conversations reveal history, culture, language, and

Drumming: An Extension of Language — MIN2120.02, section 2

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Credits: 2
This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, chants, and musical practices from Africa, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the African Diaspora. Using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories, students will use their hands, mallets, and sticks to learn and play traditional folkloric rhythms and melodies. Additional conversations reveal history, culture, language, and

Drumming: An Extension of Language — MIN2120.01, section 1

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Days & Time: WE 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 2

This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, songs, and musical practices from Africa and the African Diaspora, including Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Students will learn these traditional folkloric rhythms using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories and provinces. Class discussions will convey history, culture,

Drumming: An Extension of Language — MIN2120.02, section 2

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Days & Time: TU 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 2

This course serves as an introduction to rhythms, songs, and musical practices from Africa and the African Diaspora, including Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Students will learn these traditional folkloric rhythms using indigenous percussion instruments from these territories and provinces. Class discussions will convey history, culture,

Echoes of Africa: Subjectivities, Dreams and Impressions — HIS4112.01

Instructor: Maboula Soumahoro
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4

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

Faculty Performance Production: Sweat by Lynn Nottage — DRA4383.01

Instructor: Shawtane Bowen
Credits: 4
Filled with warm humor and tremendous heart, Sweat tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets, and laughs while working together on the factory floor. But the post Y2K economy is changing, NAFTA is a new reality and rumors fly about layoffs. Promotions and pride inevitably collide, forming cracks in decades-old friendships that

Feminist Writing by Women of Color, 1970s-80s — LIT2543.01

Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
1970 was a watershed year for Black feminism, with the publication of several monumental books including The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara. How did women writers of color contend with race, class, gender, and sexuality in the decades leading up to the coining of the term “intersectionality?” What works from this period were foundational for

Gospel Music; Share the Joy — MUS2256.02

Instructor: Kathy Bullock
Days & Time: M/Th 7:00PM-8:50PM
Credits: 2

This singing ensemble is dedicated to the performance of African American spirituals, gospel music, protest songs, and South African songs as understood in their historical, spiritual, and social contexts. Messages of hope, faith, healing, of striving for justice and peace and of celebrating life will be the focuses for this singing experience. The course will culminate in a

Gospel Music; Share the Joy — MUS2256.01

Instructor: Virginia Kelsey
Credits: 2
This singing ensemble is dedicated to the performance of African American spirituals, gospel music, protest songs, and South African songs as understood in their historical, spiritual, and social contexts. Messages of hope, faith, healing, of striving for justice and peace and of celebrating life will be the focuses for this singing experience. The course will culminate in a

History, Race, and Survivor — HIS2217.01

Instructor: Alexander Jin
Days & Time: WE 4:10pm-6:00pm & TH 3:40pm-5:30pm
Credits: 4

In 2006, the long-running reality television show Survivor decided to do something novel for its thirteenth season: they split contestants into tribes based on race. Controversy immediately followed. Advertisers pulled out and elected officials lobbied CBS not to air the season. But CBS stuck to their guns and released

Horror Writing and the (Postcolonial) Afterlife — LIT2538.01

Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
It’s one thing to feel scared when we watch scary movies, and it’s another to feel that same fear as we read books. After all, in books, there’s no eerie music, nor the possibility of being jolted by a sudden jump scare. Yet still, horror writing abounds and writers throughout history have found ways of communicating dread, terror, paranoia, and anguish through the written word

Intro to Afropessimism — LIT2547.01

Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Afropessimists believe our world is basically hopeless. White supremacy is written into every layer of life, an escapable aspect of the modern condition. This hopelessness, though, is just the beginning for the Afropessimist, who nonetheless plots out a radical course forward–– Could pessimism be the real path to freedom? Through a deep reading of Frank B. Wilderson III,

Intro to U.S. History: Gender, Sexuality, and Nonconformity — HIS2218.01

Instructor: Alexander Jin
Days & Time: WE 10:00am-11:50am & WE 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 4

This course is an introductory survey course of U.S. history that pays particular attention to changing norms around gender and sexuality, and how people contested or subverted those norms. Topics include: same-sex intimacy in Early America, turn of the century panics around miscegenation and white slavery, the invention of hetero and homosexuality, cross

Latin American Ensemble — MPF4113.01

Instructor: Michael Wimberly
Days & Time: WE 10:00am-11:50am & WE 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 4

This course will focus on the performance of Latin American music from all over the Americas, including South, Central, and North America, the Caribbean, and beyond. The ensemble will combine hands-on learning of diverse vocal and instrumental repertoire, traditional instruments (particularly percussion), and performance practices. Students will receive a thorough background

Le cinéma-monde d’Alice Diop — FRE4723.01) (day/time updated 5/2/2023

Instructor: Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly
Credits: 4
Alice Diop has offered, for decades now, a deep and powerful cinematographic representation of France and the world. In this course, students will refine their linguistic, cultural, and critical skills while studying Alice Diop’s films, from “Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise” (2007) until “Nous” (2020). Students will also closely examine the composition of her literary and

Magical Realism and Black Speculative Fiction: On Radical Cosmogony — LIT4603.01) (course description title updated as of 11/11/2024

Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
Writers like Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and Samuel Delany have helped define the field of Black speculative fiction. Fantasy, sci-fi, and horror seem to all meld together in this field, allowing writers to combine the supernatural with the technological. Likewise, writers of Central and South America like Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Elena Garro have largely

Movement Practice: Sénémali I- Drumming & Dancing — DAN2423.01

Instructor: Kaolack Ndiaye
Days & Time: TU,FR 8:30am-10:20am
Credits: 4

This course provides a vibrant introduction to the traditional West African rhythms and movements of the Mandingo and Wolof communities. Students will embark on a journey through both drumming and dancing disciplines, mastering intricate rhythms that will expand their musical vocabulary and enhance their dance techniques.