This course explores the ways that ideas and discourses about race and ethnicity shape how social policy is debated, adopted and implemented. Identifying the uneven policy effects on different social groups, it seeks a critical understanding of issues of inequity, oppression, and social exclusion from a social policy framework. The course confronts various ethnicity- and […]
This course examines and compares the responses of Africans and their descendants to the experiences of enslavement, racism, colonialism and imperialism. It begins with an examination of sub-Saharan African societies, the sources of enslaved populations transported to the Americas. Major debates around the Atlantic Slave Trade and comparative histories of enslavement in the Caribbean, Brazil, […]
This course begins in the seventeenth century with an examination of free and enslaved Africans in New France and the British colonies. It explores the experiences of Black Loyalists, enslaved and free persons of African descent in British North America and the “passengers” of the Underground Railroad and assesses the structures of African Canadian communities, […]
This course analyzes Black popular cultural forms and expressions in the Americas including music, film, television, style, contemporary visual arts, and as taken up in Black cultural theory. Understood as an analysis and response to the conditions of contemporary Black life, to decolonizing and civil rights struggles, and as a resistant and/or liberatory politics, Black […]
This course is concerned with the study of Black Canada, principally through literature, drama and film. Using the work of film makers Clement Virgo, Martine Chartrand, Dana Inkster, and others; writers Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, Djanet Sears, and Charles Boyd, students consider how African Canadian imaginaries are rendered, how they work to construct a history […]
This course explores the form, function and content of spoken word, in terms of language, rhythm, historical developments, social-political contexts, as well as key artists of poetry, rap, dub, slam, lyricism and spoken word as live and direct purveyors of culture. Students explore the varied modes of oral/aural dissemination—including the stage, the page, audio recording, […]
This course examines the cultures and identities of Caribbean peoples and their influence on the Caribbean Diaspora in Canada. It explores the transformations the Caribbean has undergone and the way this has impacted Canada, focusing on the writings and cultural works of Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian scholars, writers and artists.