ANTH 337 - Black Ecologies in the Americas

Since the era of the Middle Passage, the survival, fates, and fortunes of Black communities throughout the Americas have turned on contested relations to landscapes-both rural and urban. Historical and ongoing legacies of coerced forms of racialized and gendered labor, as well as extractive (e.g., plantations, mines) capitalist political-economic structures too often overshadow co-occurring material and spiritual practices of care that constitute countermanding critical ecologies. This course explores myriad Afro-diasporic cultural forms of land use, land ownership, land occupation, and the significances of the environment in their diverse manifestations across South America and North America, including the Caribbean. Particularly, we will study such elements as contemporary environmentalist social movements, small-scale rural and urban farming, conservation, gastronomy and foodways, and notions of a Black commons, as well as Afro-spiritual conceptions of nature. Primary attention to the interstices of race, gender, sexuality, class, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism frames the course.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): ANTH 201 or ANTH 211
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: This course applies to the department’s SETS concentration. This course meets the department’s area requirement.
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.