Welcome

The department of African American Studies at UC Irvine offers undergraduate students an opportunity to study those societies and cultures established by the people of the African diaspora. The program's curriculum encourages students to investigate the African American experience from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical approaches. Among the topics explored in the course offerings are the process of colonization and the forced migration of African people, the positionality of African people in the racialized symbolic and social orders of the western hemisphere, the rhetoric produced by and about African people, and the cultural and aesthetic values associated with "blackness" and "Africanness."