Building on the hire of five new faculty members including four world-renowned senior scholars, the Africana Studies and Research Center has added 17 new courses -- which range from the politics of hip-hop to black feminists theories. For example, Associate Professor Riché Richardson, a specialist on African-American literature and cultural studies with a focus on Southern studies, who recently returned from Europe where she served as a cultural envoy at the American Embassy in Paris, will be teaching The Harlem Renaissance.

"In this course, we will examine works by James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes [and more]," she said. "We will consider the rise of Josephine Baker as a phenomenon in Paris. We will consider overlapping literary movements that shaped the Harlem Renaissance profoundly, from modernism to Negritude (i.e., in France and the Caribbean). Additionally, we will explore the work of noted photographers, artists and musicians of the period."

Black Feminist Theories will be taught by Professor Carole Boyce Davies, a new faculty member who joined Cornell after building the African Diaspora Program at Florida International University.

"This course examines black feminist theories, placing particular emphasis on the cross-cultural experiences of women as expressed theoretically and creatively," said Davies, whose book on the Marxist feminist Claudia Jones won the 2008 Black Women Historian annual award. "The course follows the chronologies and variations of modern black feminisms, beginning with the U.S. articulations and moving toward how particular feminist positions are constructed and theorized in other locations across the African diaspora such as black British feminism, Caribbean feminism and African feminism."

Marriage and Divorce in the African Context will be taught by Associate Professor Judith Byfield, an authority on gender and labor history in western Africa, who comes to Cornell from Dartmouth College. "Marriage was the widely expected norm within African societies," Byfield said. "The institution was an important marker of adulthood, linking individuals and lineages in a network of mutual cooperation and support. ... marriage and divorce are especially rich terrain for exploring social history, women's agency, discursive constructions of 'woman,' masculinity, and gender relations of power."

The primary focus of Politics of the Hip-Hop Generation, taught by Assistant Professor Travis Lars Gosa, a specialist on African American youth culture and education, who comes to Cornell from Williams College, "will be the major political and economic forces that have shaped the worldview of black and Latino/a youth born between 1965 and 1984," Gosa said. "Students will critically address major topics surrounding hip-hop, including race-ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social class, segregation/mass incarceration, politics and education."

And Professor Grant Farred, a major cultural studies theorist and specialist in African and African Diaspora literature and intellectual history, will teach Literature, Sports and Ideology.

A complete listing of Africana Center courses is available at http://asrc.cornell.edu/courses.html.

Rebecca Snyder is an administrative assistant at the Africana Studies and Research Center.