Undergraduate Minor in African American Studies
The Sankofa bird is from the Akan people of Ghana, West Africa. It stands for "go back and fetch it". In relation to this minor, it stands for looking back to the past so that we may understand how we became what we are and to move forward to a better future.
The African American Studies minor (AAS) is an interdisciplinary course of study that focuses on the Black experience in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. Our central mission is to prepare students to critically understand, conduct research, and interpret the complex histories, societies, and cultures of people of African descent. If you like to read novels, study history, understand politics, or to watch films, then you'll like the disciplinary diversity of the African American Studies Minor (AAS).
The minor in African American Studies (AAS) requires 18 semester credit hours, with 6 hours of required courses and 12 hours of prescribed electives.The minor requires students to take two courses, AAS 2310 and AAS 4320. Students can choose from a prescribed electives course list, found in the course catalog, for the remaining hours.
AAS 2310: Introduction to African American Studies
This course provides an overview of black culture in America from an interdisciplinary approach, employing scholarship from history, literature, music, visual and performing arts, folklore, religion, sociology, psychology, philosophy, economics, and political science. It introduces epistemological considerations, theories, and methods that form the field of African American and African Diaspora Studies.
AAS 4320: Global Perspectives on the African Diaspora
This course connects the transatlantic slave trade, contemporary migrations, their legacies, and speaks to the broader issues of the African diaspora in relation to previous and ongoing struggles of black people of rebirth, progress, justice, and racial uplift. It will examine the African Diasporic women's definition of feminism while suggesting no universal black feminism.
Program Coordinator
dwonnagoldstone@txstate.edu