Overview
- Degree Level
- Undergraduate
- Degrees Offered
- Minor
- school/college
- College of Arts and Sciences
A minor in Pan African Studies is designed to educate students about the multi-faceted dimensions of communities of African descent worldwide. The Pan African Studies minor at Arcadia is based on the idea of Arcadia’s attention to graduating well-rounded, intellectually astute students and the university’s focus on global studies. Inasmuch as this minor serves the needs of the students who are interested in various facets of the Africana experience, it will demonstrate Arcadia’s understanding of the relationships between the discipline and other related disciplines (e.g., Business, History, English, Communications, Sociology, Anthropology, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Education, International Studies, etc.). In addition, our students who seek to enter some aspect of African American, African or African Diaspora studies will find that they are adequately prepared for colleges and universities with more extensive programs, including graduate programs in the field.
Upon successful completion of the Pan African Studies minor, students should be able to:
Required Course
In this course, you will experience instruction that is transnational in nature and interdisciplinary in delivery. You’ll focus on the interconnected historical, artistic, and political forces of the African and African Diaspora experience. You’ll examine the Afrodiasporic experience through the relationship of peoples, ideas, cultures, and events across geographical boundaries. The course informs and filters that experience through an integrative framework of various subjects of inquiry and methodologies, and introduces students to the content and contours of African Studies as a field of study: its genealogy, development, theoretical orientations, multiple methodological strategies, and future challenges.
Elective Course
Examine how systems of power are established through the imposition and contestation of symbolic practices both within and between cultural groups. You will begin with an examination of how the powerless have historically used deception and feigning deference as a political strategy to confront a sovereign state. The course emphasizes understanding “symbolic violence,” the establishment of a sense of the “natural” to cultural constructions of identity and practice. You’ll investigate how the historical formulations of racial, gender, and class hierarchies were developed as modern classificatory schemas of identity within the colonial context. The course ends with an ethnographic examination of power within a contemporary ethnographic situation of cultural conflict.
Elective Course
This course will explore the histories, cultures, and experiences of African and African-descended peoples as represented in literature across genres. We will also examine landmark works of Black critical theory and aesthetic/cultural philosophy to better understand concepts such as the color line, double consciousness, Black nationalism, Africanfuturism, etc. that heavily shaped social and political thought well into the present day. Through the study of these texts, we will gain insight into significant literary/ideological movements including negritude, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, etc. to establish a foundation for additional study in upper-level literature courses on U.S. and global texts. Potential authors for study may include Harriet E. Wilson, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, August Wilson, and others as we trace the literary contributions of both canonized and underrepresented authors from the seventeenth century to the present.
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