The Americas: Caribbean and Afro-Latin Education Studies

Catalog description

What does it mean to enter an archive where the histories of a people are preserved, contested, and reimagined? In this course, students travel to Harlem, New York, to conduct original research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as part of a semester-long project. Home to one of the largest and most significant collections documenting Black life and culture, the Schomburg serves not only as a repository of history, but as a living site of diasporic memory and intellectual production. The course surveys the histories and social worlds of Africans and their descendants across North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South America, including Afro-Latin and other African diasporic communities. Foregrounding both informal and formal education and higher learning, we examine how Black communities have created, sustained, and transformed spaces of learning across generations. Centering migration narratives, we explore how these communities have navigated and resisted educational oppression while building their own intellectual, cultural, and institutional worlds. Students engage deeply with oral histories, archival materials, and primary and secondary sources to analyze how diaspora knowledge is documented, narrated, and lived.