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

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

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

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

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,

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: 2

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.

Other People’s Worlds — ANT4129.01

Instructor: Miroslava Prazak
Credits: 4
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century a European based world-economy came into existence. Fueled by the philosophy of mercantilism, traders followed, and sometimes were, explorers seeking riches in the lands discovered in the search for trade routes. The resulting contact between cultures led to fundamental transformations of all the societies and cultures involved.

Popular Culture and Music in Post-Colonial Africa — MET2140.01

Instructor: Joseph Alpar
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 2

In this course we will examine the role of music as a vehicle for political and social change in Africa. Our focus will be music-making throughout the continent of Africa during the nationalist struggles that resulted in independent African states and how musicians responded (and continue to respond) to the persistent challenges faced by those post-colonial states. We will

Race in Publishing — LIT2574.01

Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: TU,FR 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 4

That writers of color earn less than their white peers in advances and fees is anecdotally well known. But we lack exhaustive data. Gearing up for such data collection the next few years in a faculty-driven project at Bennington, this course provides an overview of the broader ethical and social landscape around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in

Reading & Writing Fiction: Writing the Body — LIT4604.01

Instructor: Mariam Rahmani
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This Reading & Writing Fiction course focuses on the novel, and in particular on reading and writing the body, with an emphasis on femininity. We will look at both the construction of and conspicuous erasure of the femme/feminine body. We will treat gender as a construct, discussing gender normativity, ciswomanhood, transness, and other related subjects and

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Archival Work — LIT4601.01

Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
The archive––and using archival materials as the generative basis for creative output––is having a moment. The visionary scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman has popularized once unknown terms like “critical fabulation” and “documentary poetics” through genre bending works like Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and erasure projects like poet Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: an

Richard Wright and James Baldwin — LIT2193.01

Instructor: Ben Anastas
Credits: 4
“As writers we were about as unlike as any two writers could possible be,” James Baldwin wrote of his early mentor and later rival Richard Wright. “We were linked together, really, because both of us were black.” Now that the two writers have been found new relevance--and controversy--in a post-Black Lives Matter world, we can read their major works together, side by side, and