Pan African Studies Minor | Arcadia University

Christopher Allen Varlack and a student listen to a conversation.

Overview

Degree Level: Undergraduate
Degrees Offered: Minor

Department: Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice
school/college: College of Arts and Sciences

Minor in Pan African Studies

A minor in Pan African Studies is designed to educate students about the multi-faceted dimensions of communities of African descent worldwide. The Pan African Studies minor at Arcadia is based on the idea of Arcadia’s attention to graduating well-rounded, intellectually astute students and the university’s focus on global studies. Inasmuch as this minor serves the needs of the students who are interested in various facets of the Africana experience, it will demonstrate Arcadia’s understanding of the relationships between the discipline and other related disciplines (e.g., Business, History, English, Communications, Sociology, Anthropology, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Education, International Studies, etc.). In addition, our students who seek to enter some aspect of African American, African or African Diaspora studies will find that they are adequately prepared for colleges and universities with more extensive programs, including graduate programs in the field.

Pan African Studies Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the Pan African Studies minor, students should be able to:

Describe the history of people of African descent worldwide and utilize critical thinking to analyze and interpret the historical landscape within the context of the Pan African socio-political world.
Describe the history of oppression of peoples of African descent, their contributions to various human conditions, and the development of their identities of resistance.
Identify and contextualize the contributions that people of African descent have made to the development of the African continent and world civilizations within the economic, historical, social, cultural, political, and technological contexts.
Describe and analyze the interconnected nature of national and global movements that have been and continue to be shaped by a direct relationship with or reaction to people of African descent.
Analyze forms and traditions of thought and expression (e.g., music, literature, mass movement, philosophical and religious traditions, community organizing, etc.) in relation to the cultural, historical, political, and social contexts and their global linkages between people of African descent.
Identify and define major theoretical concepts and research methodologies used within the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary field of Africana Studies, drawing connections to other disciplines, models, and paradigms that have informed our understanding of the Pan African world.
Develop cogent critical arguments based on inquiry, exploration, and analysis of major themes in the field (e.g., the social scientific issues of race, racism, and inequality) and place those themes within the historical context 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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