AFRICAN-AMERICAN
STUDIES
Enrollees
interested in African-American Area Studies or the African-American
Career Studies Certificate will take a series of core courses
in African-American culture; they will also elect courses
from a rich variety of offerings which will allow them to
study, for instance, the often overlooked or undervalued
influence of African-American culture on science and technology;
the strong poetic tradition, from field chants through Langston
Hughes to Gwendolyn Brooks; the resistance movements of,
among others, Nat Turner, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the
participants in the Seminole Wars; the rich prose tradition,
from the slave narratives through Zora Neale Hurston to
Ralph Ellison; the musical influence from, again, the field
chants through such singers as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly,
and Paul Robeson to the articulate trumpet of Wynton Marsalis;
the writings and actions of such disparate figures as Rita
Dove, former poet laureate of the USA, and Jack Johnson,
first boxing champion African-American heavyweight division.
