CSIH 3220 - The African Diaspora: African American Cultural History and Psychology

This first in a sequence of courses on the African Diaspora will focus on the definition, constituents, and historiography of the African Diaspora and greater comprehension of the cultural history and psychology of persons with African ancestry, through the lens of African and African-American psychology. Selected texts for the course have been written by African, African-Caribbean, and African-American scholars. The methodological approach to the study of the African Diaspora is interdisciplinary and draws to the foreground historiography, depth psychology, economics of capitalism, law, mythology, religion, art history, and anthropology for construction of an ancestral ethno-cultural narrative of the African Diaspora against the background of world cultural history. The course content and approach should open and cultivate, through critical thinking, a worldview and means to deconstruct, analyze, comprehend, and reconstruct complex sets of human relations in the African Diaspora from global, regional, national, and personal perspectives. It should allow us to see how the archetype of culture is actualized within institutions, living micro-systems, and psychodynamics of the Diaspora. The specific focus of this course is on African-American cultural history, psychology, and experience from origins in Africa, the Middle Passage, bondage, civil and psychological reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement, Pan-Africanism, and Negritude in America, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, Affirmative Action, African-American family life, demographics, health/mental health, illness, spirituality, resilience, and optimal development. 3 credit(s)

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