SINY 55: Harlem: An American and African Neighborhood (Faculty in Residence)
This course investigates how African descended peoples from around the world – African Americans, Africans, Afro Latin Americans and Caribbeans – shaped the development of Harlem from the early twentieth century to the present. We begin with learning about the Great Migration which began in 1910 – one of the largest moments of internal migration in U.S. history – and how the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to North shaped Harlem. We will examine how African American settlement in Harlem created social, cultural, and economic innovation and contestation in an era of American racial segregation. We will then analyze the Harlem Renaissance - a moment that began in the 1930s - of explosive literary, musical, visual, and intellectual production. In moving towards the 1950s and 1960s, we will examine how Harlem, its residents and those who temporarily sojourned there, made it a center of Civil Rights mobilization in the United States. Our focus on the 1970s and 1980s allows us to examine poverty, flight, crime, and processes of zoning laws and tax policies that shaped life and education in the neighborhood. The early aughts permits us to examine how the expansion of migrants from West African shaped cultural and economic change and urban renewal and contestation. We will end with present day dynamics of gentrification, environmental factors, new construction and renewal and how historical dynamics shape the present and future. The city will be our classroom, and the focus will be experiential learning. Class sessions and conversations will take place at iconic Harlem landmarks. And will include conversations with business owners, residents, archivists, and curators. Our intellectual engagement with key texts will be enhanced by conversations with their authors.
Meet the Instructor(s)
Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Professor Rachel Jean-Baptiste is Stanford's Faculty Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies. She is also a Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. She is a historian of intimacy, investigating matters of emotional, bodily, and familial engagement in colonial and post-colonial French speaking-Africa and the Atlantic World. She investigates the ways in which these matters come into public view and debate, and how individuals, societies, institutions and governments try to regulate them. She is the author of two books – Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Ohio University Press, 2014) – as well as articles in numerous peer review journals and edited volumes.
She teaches about the ways in which societies across the globe and in different historical moments have lived and conceived of gender relations, particularly in everyday life, in the law, and in governance and politics.