“Reading Poetry” has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience (Second Edition) gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.

This fairly active forum focuses on Moroccan Arabic. Its linguistic with sub-forums are focused on translation, books and exercises to practice Darija, and instructional videos. There are also many sub-forums on cultural issues. Additionally, there is a sub-forum conducted entirely in Arabic. Users must be logged in in order to post.

Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We’ll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the “obscene”, as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves.

This subpage of the Virtual Arabic blog offers realia material (realia is real life material meant to be used to aid language study in classroom situations) regarding culture and social material. The material listed on this subpage include social movement campaigns, aspects of everyday Arabic culture, and political cartoons. Material is available in picture, video, and text format.

This list presents a basic set of vocabulary words that deal with categories of clothing, jewelry, and tailoring. The words include both nouns and verbs that describe various clothing items, clothing styles, and types of clothing accessories.The majority of words contained within the website are nouns, and some verbs are interspersed. The words and verbs are presented in both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic. All of the words feature Arabic script and transliteration.

This website displays a list of over 40 words related to family relationships in the Arabic language. Each relationship (father, son, daughter, aunt, etc.) is written in Arabic text, English translation, and English transliteration. Arabic words describing generic categories of people (old woman, young man, etc.) are also included.

This list presents a basic set of vocabulary words that deal with categories of food and prepared dishes, including verbs and nouns that deal with cooking, ordering, takeout, ingredients, spices, fruits and vegetables. The majority of words contained within the website are nouns, and some verbs are interspersed. The words and verbs are presented in both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial Arabic. All of the words feature Arabic script and transliteration.

This webpage presents a list of vocabulary words associated with seasons, days of the week, months, and the different types of calendars used in the Arabic-speaking world. The words are presented in chart format, and list the word in Arabic, English translation, and English transliteration.