Dr. Faye Harrison
Professor, African American Studies and Department of Anthropology
Faye V. Harrison is Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in the study of racial, gender, and class inequalities and the politics that emerge in response to them. She is also interested in the history of ideas, with a particular focus on the scholarly contributions of African Americans and other African diaspora intellectuals. She has done research in the U.S., the U.K. and the Caribbean. In her current research she is examining African American women activists within a transnational coalition organizing against race- and gender-related human rights violations in both the U.S. South and the Global South. She is also interested in the human rights implications of poverty and political clientelism in Jamaica, where political violence and an underground economy generate a volatile cycle of crime and punishment. In this work, she is exploring the everyday experiences of “outlaws” and “sufferers.”Dr. Harrison’s scholarship has been published widely in books and journals in the U.S., the Netherlands, India, and China. She has edited several books, including Decolonizing Anthropology, African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (with Ira Harrison), and Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights. She is also the author of Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology for the Global Age, nominated for an outstanding book award from the Gustavus Myer’s Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.
A past president of the Association of Black Anthropologists, she chaired the Commission on the Anthropology of Women, a unit of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (1993-2009). She also served as a key advisor for the American Anthropological Association’s award-winning traveling exhibit, “Race: Are We So Different?”
Dr. Harrison has recently delivered the keynote address at an international conference: Click here for story.
Courses for Spring 2012
Black Feminist & Womanist Theory:
This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African-descendant women‟s contributions to feminist theory as a heterogeneous field of knowledge encompassing multiple streams of gender- and race-cognizant articulation and praxis. Among these are the interventions and projects known as "multiracial feminism," "critical race feminism," "transnational black feminism," and "womanism." Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, and Black European feminisms are also included when we map feminist consciousness and practice across the Black Atlantic and African Diaspora. The central concerns of diverse Black feminists and womanists include: the "intersectionality" of race, gender, sexuality, class, and national or transnational identity; reproductive health; sexual violence; homophobia and heteronormativity; the historicity and cultural specificity of the subordination Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black communities. We will examine these concerns through a critical reading of a wide range of texts—from memoir to cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. While Black feminism‟s historical development will be sketched, our focus will be on contributions of the past 25-30 years. In other words, we will concentrate on the period since the height of the civil rights and second-wave women‟s movements, and the time since the early decolonization period in the Caribbean. These are the contexts within which Black Women‟s Studies emerged along with various subaltern feminisms mobilized by other women of color in the Global North and South. Syllabus
Key Issues in African American & Black Atlantic Thought:
This course examines central currents in the intellectual history of the African American experience and other African diasporic experiences with which it has interacted and intersected both in the United States and other national contexts in the transatlantic world. Focus is on the prevailing trends in social and political thought, especially those related to questions of racism, slavery, freedom, citizenship, cultural identity, gender and sexual politics, economic justice, politics, crime and criminalization, diaspora, and international affairs. Emphasis will be placed on the leading voices of resistance and social change that have influenced black public consciousness, social and political action, and intellectual activities, including the formulation of social criticism and theory—both formal/academic and vernacular varieties.
Syllabus
