African Studies

This course overviews the challenges and opportunities for the international community in contemporary Africa. Taught by a former ambassador with wide Africa experience, the course exposes students to the major themes in the world's interactions with Africa, ranging from humanitarian intervention to economic opportunity, from struggles against terrorism and instability to great power competition. The course is intended for future practitioners in diplomacy, business, or media with an interest in Africa and more widely for those seeking to understand global engagement with a great continent.

This course explores the viability of the Afro-Gothic as a distinctive sub-genre of the postcolonial Gothic. It seeks to answer the question "What is the Afro-Gothic?" through a historicization of the concept Gothic in relation to narratives about, and by, continental and diasporic Africans. In the postcolonial Gothic, the classic tropes of the Gothic—incarceration within labyrinthine structures, tyrannical patriarchs, histories of hidden brutalities, suppressed and deadly secrets, haunting by the past oppressed and abused, and appearances of ghosts and other un-dead figures—are appropriated to exposes legacies of colonial trauma. Our more focused inquiry stems from the peculiar racialization of the Gothic during the 19th century, when Gothic darkness became increasingly associated with African blackness.