African Studies

Through close readings of works of political, economic and religious thought produced by African intellectuals, this course provides a grounding in some of the major debates around identity, sovereignty, and racial, gender and sexual equality as they have played out on the African continent. First, the course starts with the time when Africans became African: when they began to think of themselves as “African” in a sense different from other human beings they encountered from other continents. Second, while African intellectual history is related to political, economic, social and cultural histories of Africa, it is not the same thing. African thought influenced all of these histories, but the course focuses on the non-material, ideational, and ideological influences on these histories and their material results. In the end, the course develops a better understanding of how Africans in the past made sense of their world and how that understanding has affected the present.

This course focuses on critical debates on the political economy of Africa, with specific reference to Sub-Saharan Africa. It is anchored in the works of Archie Mafeje. DP requirements: None. Assessment: Continuous assessment (essays, projects, tests, etc.) counts 100%. Course entry requirements: Third-year status. 

This course is an introduction to the study of state-building and state-formation dynamics in Africa since precolonial times, and to the broader question of politics in Africa. It introduces multidisciplinarity into the study of politics: it is indeed one of the major contributions of African studies to combine political science with history, anthropology, and development studies. Two main approaches are combined. First, the historical approach, which evokes pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa. Archives, maps and documentary film extracts are used to illustrate the ways in which power is exercised and criticized on the longue durée. Second, the sociological approach considers the modalities of policymaking in Africa, to which a plurality of actors take part – in partnership but also often in competition with state bodies.

This course explores how concepts of mobility, boundaries, and (un)belonging are negotiated in modern travelogues about Europe by afrodiasporic as well as African writers. In the postcolonial fashion of "Irritating Europe", the class examines central ideas of European self-imagery, such as its humanism and supposed progressiveness. Students analyze how Black travel literature not only functions as a deconstruction of colonial discourses but also establishes a new literary geography: the Afropean space.