HIST 444
The Black Republic--Haiti in History and Imagination Spring 2014
Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed AFR 444
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Class Details

This senior Africana capstone course/History seminar explores the central role of Haiti in the American and the transnational pan-African imaginations. As home to the world’s only successful slave rebellion, Haiti has been a role model of tremendous importance, stimulating slave rebellions in America and throughout the Caribbean, playing an instrumental role in the liberation of South America from the Spaniards, and inspiring decolonization movements in Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th century. Not surprisingly, it has had tumultuous relations with both its colonial occupier, France, and its most powerful neighbor, the United States. From isolation and sanctions, to occupation and U.S. supported dictatorship, this seminar traces the historical silencing suffered by Haiti at the hands of western historians, the vivid images Haitians evoke in the American imagination–from boat people and carriers of Aids, to practitioners of voodoo and creators of a uniquely African-Caribbean art–and the role of the French and American governments in the recent coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Film, dance, literature, music, history, anthropology and religion will be explored in this interdisciplinary course, with an eye towards helping students produce an original work of their own as the final project. By examining Haiti’s fraught racial relations–particularly between Haitian blacks and mulattoes–and her early and unique black power movement–noirisme–this class fulfills the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 15
Class#: 3123
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: evaluation to be based on student participation, a short paper, and the completion of an original research paper or project
Extra Info: all projects will have some written component, but may include a dance performance, spoken word, fieldwork etc.
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: Africana Studies concentrators and History majors
Distributions: Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
HIST 444 Division II AFR 444 Division II
Attributes: HIST Group D Electives - Latin America + Caribbean

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