2020-21 Academic Catalog

This course explores “Africa” as a historical construction, place, culture, artistic practice, commodity, and identity shaped by imperial ambitions, global trade, religious impulses, aesthetic forms, memory, and struggles for sovereignty. It illustrates how art, nationalism, and politics have been at the center of ideas about Africa and its relationship to colonialism and modernity from the nineteenth century to current times. In addition to select case studies, students will work with diverse sources such as missionary accounts, speeches, press releases, visual art, songs, and musical performances. Students will produce an original research paper of fifteen to twenty pages using primary and secondary resources.