ABS 110 - Expressive Black Culture: African American Literary Traditions from Folklore to Rap

• Examine and identify African American cultural traditions as they are expressed through literature, oral tradition, art, and performance.
• Synthesize understanding of the development of African American expressive culture from its origins in Africa through its adaptations and transformations in the United States, to its appropriation and globalization.
• Analyze forms of African American cultural expression and compare with student’s own linguistic, conceptual and normative presuppositions.
• Examine ways in which linguistic, religious, philosophical, and historical circumstances have shaped both Black identity and social construction of African Americans by dominant cultures.
• Develop connections between concepts learned in course and topics that can be delivered to community.
• Analyze the values, perspectives and attitudes of the dominant culture relative to contemporary African American expressive culture as an alternative cultural space where Blacks exercise power and resist institutional “manageability and intelligibility.”
• Identify methods African Americans used historically to advocate for social justice at local, national, and international levels.
• Analyze ways equality and inequality are institutionalized in social, political, economic and organizational structures.
• Connect personal experiences to issues of social justice within African American communities.
• Develop the ability to articulate issues and processes, pertaining to African Americans and the African Diaspora, that cross international boundaries.
• Determine credibility of information sources and understand elements that might temper this credibility.