Twentieth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

This paper details our experiences with two new interdisciplinary team-taught courses for a mix of students from both of our disciplines, American Studies and Francophone Studies. During January-May 2022, we created a new course called Blacks in Paris; we followed this classroom experience with a two-week field course in Paris called Paris Noir, also taught together. Both courses focused on diverse cultural groups living as expatriates or exiles in France: African Americans from the U.S. and Francophone artists and intellectuals from Africa and the Caribbean. While other U.S. universities offer courses either on African Americans or on Francophone communities in Paris, our courses provide a unique interdisciplinary approach to understand the complex history of Black Internationalism and Transatlantic Migration while questioning notions of Citizenship, Diversity, & Inclusion. In the semester-long course, we examined narratives from the French and Haitian Revolutions and the impacts of the abolition of slavery in the U.S. We also compared and contrasted 20th-century cultural, literary and political movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, and the Negritude movement. In the two-week field course, our focus shifted to contemporaries who are studying or engaging with communities in Paris today, both African American and Francophones of African descent. We made surprising discoveries about how our students interacted with these complex new forms of knowledge, and about the ways our classroom teaching and field work components complemented eachother. We will conclude the presentation with an outline of our strategies for redesigning our courses for Spring 2024.