African Studies

This course introduces the Sahel region, whose strategic importance is expected to rise in the next decades. Located between the Maghreb and the Gulf of Guinea, the Sahel region is at the crossroads of many strategic issues. The course analyzes security threats (socioeconomic difficulties, cross-border trafficking, ethnic tensions, etc.) and terrorist threats as a result of the numerous cross-border and rural spaces characterized by a security vacuum that contributes to criminal and terrorist groups' activities. It examines the states’ structural weaknesses and political tensions that have jeopardized the region’s stability, as well as the rapid demographic growth and urbanization that could lead to new socioeconomic prospects or increased instability.

This course provides a critical understanding of a broad range of complex and diverse intellectual traditions in modern African worlds of thought. Its emphasis is on debates and arguments, conversations and contestations, and connections and displacements. In contrast to an essentialized and unitary notion of African thought, this course emphasizes the plural and dynamic worlds of African intellectuality, drawing particular attention to the vibrant histories of critiques and auto-critiques. In doing so, it also provides a basic sense of the various historical contexts of continental and diasporic activism in which these intellectual approaches were formulated and discussed. Among other themes, the course engages the debates on and around decolonization and violence, nationalism and tribalism, afro-communism and afro-feminism, precolonial epistemologies and customary law, aesthetics and materiality, religion and pedagogy, and postcolonial and neoliberal conditions. The study materials used in this course include original texts by African thinkers, visual sources, and musical compositions.