NOTE: No summer enrollment required. All credits granted in spring semester 2020
Global Studies 330 carries COR 2, D, and G tags. (Note that you can take the course even if you already fulfilled your COR 2 required with another course.) Our broad focus is on finding the intersections of culture and creativity in a diverse global context. The primary faculty for this course come from English and philosophy, but the course will also include lectures from scholars of art history, Black culture in Europe, and music. Students will have many opportunities for creativity this semester, including designing parts of our Paris tours and collaborating as a class group to create a digital project around our readings and trip.

France has long been a destination for African Americans seeking to escape the Jim Crow racism of the U.S. for a European city that was generally more tolerant and less oppressive (but not a utopia, by any means). While Black Americans had long been attracted to Europe, and to France in particular, from the 1920s to the 1950s a number of important African American artists, thinkers, writers, and musicians spent from several months to many years in Paris or elsewhere in France. This group was generally associated with the U.S.-based Harlem Renaissance: an explosion of creative energy centered around Black culture in Harlem, New York City. In Paris, energetic Harlem Renaissance culture connected to other substantial creative communities built around existentialist philosophy, literary experimentation, an emerging jazz scene, and an emerging movement of Black artists and writers from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. European wealth has long depended on the exploitation of global populations of persons of color. By examining how race and power intersect around ideas of European-ness, American-ness, and race, this course will explore how the convergence of African American, French existentialist, and post-colonial writers of color in Paris cafés, bookstores, salons, and ateliers disrupted the logic of colonialism and developed creative forms of resistance. As part of our COR 2 work, we will study the “Harlem Renaissance in Paris” to find our own inspiration and apply their notions of freedom and justice to contemporary social issues.

At the heart of this course is travel to Paris, where we will explore cultural and historic sites related to prominent Black American, French, Caribbean, and African creative and intellectual communities. We will also visit areas of Paris that are significant for contemporary Black French and diasporic communities.

In Paris, we will explore the neighborhoods that still have connections to African American expat artists, writers, and musicians. We will also get specialized tours from an expert to show us connections to colonialism and race that lie just below the surface throughout the museums, neighborhoods, and city streets. We will have one day trip outside Paris to a Medieval site with the possibility of a second. Like the writers and artists we will be studying, we will take time to sit in cafes and wander and explore the city in a non-rushed way.