Minor in Pan-African Studies

The Pan-African Studies minor at Arcadia University helps students learn about the histories, cultures, and experiences of people of African descent around the world. The program is a part of CASAA and supports Arcadia’s focus on global learning and developing well-rounded students.

This minor is open to students with many academic interests and connects well with majors such as History, Sociology, Anthropology, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Education, Business, Communications, and International Studies. Students who plan to continue their studies in African American, African, or African Diaspora studies will gain a strong foundation for graduate-level programs.

Pan-African Studies Learning Outcomes

After completing the Pan-African Studies minor, students will be able to:

Explain the history of people of African descent around the world and use critical thinking to understand major social and political issues.
Describe systems of oppression faced by people of African descent, their contributions to society, and the ways they have resisted injustice.
Identify the economic, cultural, political, and technological contributions of people of African descent to Africa and global civilizations.
Explain how national and global movements have been shaped by the experiences and struggles of people of African descent.
Analyze forms of cultural expression such as music, literature, religion, social movements, and community organizing within their historical and social contexts.
Identify key ideas, theories, and research methods used in Africana Studies and explain how they connect to other academic fields.
Develop clear arguments based on research and analysis of topics such as race, racism, and inequality within the history of the African Diaspora.

STUDENT OUTCOMES

Featured Courses

Introduction to Africana Studies

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.

Cultures, Conflict, and Power

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.

Literature of the African Diaspora

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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