Courses

Essentials of grammar, basic vocabulary, practice in speaking and reading Swahili the most widely used indigenous language of East Africa. No P/D/F or R credit is allowed for this class.

Prerequisites: ZULU W1201-W1202 or the instructor's permission. Introduces students to the basic structures of Zulu, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa, especially in the Zululand area of KwaZulu/Natal province.

Prerequisites: YORU W1101-W1102 or the instructor's permission. In this course, learners will continue practicing all four language skills through every day dialogues, writing letters, and describing basic situations. In addition, they will be introduced to Yoruba literature and learn how to read and comprehend basic Yoruba texts, such as newspaper articles. Finally, they will be introduced to current affairs as well as social, artistic and, cultural events and issues in Nigeria. The class uses a highly interactive classroom style, supplemented by extensive use of video – both prepared and student-produced – and other computer-assisted tools. Please note this course is offered by videoconferencing from Cornell as part of the Shared Course Initiative.

Introduction to the arts of Africa, including masquerading, figural sculpture, reliquaries, power objects, textiles, painting, photography, and architecture. The course will establish a historical framework for study, but will also address how various African societies have responded to the process of modernity.

This seminar offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the history of African cities. It cuts across disciplinary boundaries of history, geography, anthropology, political and cultural sociology, literature and cultural studies, to explore the vaious trajectories of urbanization on the continent.

This course provides a general introduction to some of the key intellectual debates in Africa by Africans through primary sources, including scholarly works, political tracts, fiction, art, and film. Beginning with an exploration of African notions of spiritual and philosophical uniqueness and ending with contemporary debates on the meaning and historical viability of an African Renaissance, this course explores the meanings of ‘Africa' and ‘being African.' Field(s): AFR*. NO FIRST YEAR STUDENTS PERMITTED.

Prerequisites: EEEB W2001 and EEEB W2002 Environmental Biology I and II, or the instructor's permission. Only six percent of Africa's land is protected, and these areas are rarely large enough to sustain wildlife populations. Mostly, wildlife must share land with people who also face survival challenges. This course will explore how wildlife and people interact in Kenya, where new approaches to conservation are being developed and implemented. Lectures will cover the ecology of tropical grasslands and first principles underlying conservation and management of these landscapes. Field trips and projects will examine the dynamics between human actions and biodiversity conservation. This course is part of the study abroad program in Kenya on Tropical Biology and Sustainability and cannot be taken separately n campus.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Concentrates on the dances of West Africa, including Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, and a variety of dances performed at various functions and ceremonies. Explanation of the origin and meaning of each dance will be an integral part of the material presented.

This course examining post-war British literature, film and music builds a narrative of post-war Britain by looking at the tensions, battles and struggles between white Britons and immigrants of color from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. Black British cultural production (denoting work by peoples of South Asian as well as African and Caribbean origin) both challenged traditional conceptions of the nation and offered creative and transformative responses to a mounting atmosphere of racism and xenophobia. The materials I have assembled for class – novels, music, films – depict not only the immigrant experience but also the bleakness of postwar Britain and the subcultural movements among both Black and white youth that opposed and challenged the rigid class system, the monarchy, patriarchal family structures and post-imperial illusions of grandeur.

Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 Advanced Grammar and Composition or an AP score of 5 or the director of undergraduate studies' permission. Universalism vs. exceptionalism, tradition vs. modernity, integration and exclusion, racial, gender, regional, and national identities are considered in this introduction to the contemporary French-speaking world in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Authors include: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé.

In this course, we explore cultural production in the contemporary Maghreb. We consider how important dimensions of social and political life are explored in literature and film as well as the role of these and other media in shaping social and political dynamics. We focus on Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, though we also situate these nations in broader regional and global contexts. As former French colonies, these three nations share a multilingual cultural environment in which French coexists with Arabic. Though our sources are primarily in French, we examine material produced in both languages with options to read/watch in translation. Most of the course materials are also available in English translation.

The course begins in roughly 1990, a time of disenchantment when the political leadership brought to power at Independence was replaced or at least challenged. We explore the dynamics of Algeria’s ‘Black Decade’, Morocco’s emergence from the ‘Years of lead’ and, with an eye to more recent developments, Tunisia’s ‘Arab spring’ as well as less punctual and less highly mediatized currents of social and economic life. Our primary focus is on the varied ways in which the arts and cultural media have responded and contributed to change while also revisiting the past and reframing national narratives. The course is interdisciplinary, combining historical, sociological and anthropological approaches with close reading of texts and films.

The syllabus is organized both historically and thematically. We explore questions including aesthetic responses to violence and the theorization of trauma and memory; the changing geography and sociology of migration and the changing landscape of media and publication. Many of our sources explore the meaning of ‘modernity’, often in conjunction with explorations of subjectivity and spirituality, gender and sexuality.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. This course deals with the scholarship on gender and sexuality in African history. The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies, the social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities, and the connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales.

In this course we will explore in a critical manner the concept of poverty in Africa. The emphasis is on historicizing categories such as poverty and wealth, debt and charity and on the ways in which people in Africa have understood such categories. As such the course takes a longue durée approach spanning over a millennium of history, ending with contemporary understandings of poverty.

This course is designed as a seminar on a historiography that does not yet exist. It asks what a history of contemporary or ‘neo-liberal’ Africa would look like. The ambition of the seminar is to consider how historians might engage with and profit from the work of anthropologists working on the frontier between African states and the institutions of global civil society. It does so by decentering the state from the macro-narrative of the continent’s recent history. It also strives to situate the African present in relation to broader historical currents at work across the globe in the contemporary period.

This course focuses on economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa from a political economy perspective. It is divided into three sections. The first section examines the broad economic trends, policies and strategies of the past 50 years. The Washington Consensus and the "lost decades" are examined in some detail. The focus of this part is on economic growth and structural change, notably the controversies around economic policies and institutions. In the second section the course turns to socioeconomic dimensions and aspects of development including poverty, inequality, employment, health, education, and gender. The final section concludes with an examination of the implications of climate change, debates around foreign aid and an overview of what we have learned. Some readings are to be finalized.

The course aims to provide graduate students with an introduction to the key debates in social science research that can guide policy-making in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. More than five years after the spark of the Arab uprisings, the MENA region faces unprecedented challenges. The lack of progress in political and economic governance, conflicts, and unresolved development challenges underlie slow economic growth, high unemployment – especially among youth and women – and a system of crony capitalism that is increasingly narrower and less performing. This course aims to provide graduate students with a good understanding of the development challenges of the region and its complex political economy, with the aim of supporting policy-making at all levels – national, local, and among civil society groups, and along several socio-economic domains.

What is the relation between cinema and colonialism? This seminar approaches cinema as a dynamic historical agent that aided, negotiated, refracted, and contested the mechanisms and meanings of colonialism in South Asia. We will study cinema as technology, as industry, and as cultural form, paying attention to questions of film finance, on-screen representation, production infrastructures, circuits of distribution, and sites of exhibition. We will watch films made by British ethnographers, Indian expats, Hollywood orientalists, and South Asian nationalists to
study how film served as a key weapon of imperial propaganda as well as anticolonial resistance. From orientalist films that constructed the colony as exotic and dangerous, to the spatial uses of Indian films to reinforce race inequalities in the diaspora (eg. East Africa), cinema is deeply imbricated with colonial strategies of racial, gendered, and caste-based othering. This is a history of cinema as a history of empire; where cinema is not just a text to be read but a cultural, industrial, and social network of power relations.

The main task of this course will be to read novels by African writers. But "the novel in Africa" also involves connections between the literary genre of the novel and the historical processes of colonialism, decolonization, and globalization in Africa. One important question we'll consider is how African novels depict those historical experiences in their themes and plots—we'll read novels that are "about" colonialism, etc. A more complex question is how these historical processes relate to the emergence of the novel as an important genre for African writers. Edward Said went so far as to say that without imperialism, there would be no European novel as we know it. How can we understand the novel in Africa (whether read or written) as a product of the colonial encounter? How did it shape the process of decolonization? What contribution to history, whether literary or political, does the novel in Africa make? We'll undertake a historical survey of African novels from the 1930s to the present, with attention to various subgenres (village novel, war novel, urbanization novel, novel of postcolonial disillusion, Bildungsroman). We'll attend to how African novelists blend literate and oral storytelling traditions, how they address their work to local and global audiences, and how they use scenes of characters reading novels (whether African or European) in order to position their writing within national, continental, and world literary space.

This course will be the first part of a two part introduction to theoretical approaches to modern social science and cultural studies in Asian and African contexts. The first course will focus primarily on methodological and theoretical problems in the fields broadly described as historical social sciences - which study historical trends, and political, economic and social institutions and processes. The course will start with discussions regarding the origins of the modern social sciences and the disputes about the nature of social science knowledge. In the next section it will focus on definitions and debates about the concept of modernity. It will go on to analyses of some fundamental concepts used in modern social and historical analyses: concepts of social action, political concepts like state, power, hegemony, democracy, nationalism; economic concepts like the economy, labor, market, capitalism, and related concepts of secularity/secularism, representation, and identity. The teaching will be primarily through close reading of set texts, followed by a discussion. A primary concern of the course will be to think about problems specific to the societies studied by scholars of Asia and Africa: how to use a conceptual language originally stemming from reflection on European modernity in thinking about societies which have quite different historical and cultural characteristics.

This course focuses on Lusophone African and African Brazilian cultures and the relations, continuities, ruptures and influences between them. Brazil is the result of the miscegenation of Ameridians, African and Europeans, and this means that is also a cultural mélange of these groups. The African cultural contribution to Brazilian culture and grand-narrative is the primary focus of this course, however, to understand Brazil one needs to understand the cultural diversity found in Lusophone Africa, with which Brazil has had a long relationship. The readings for this course include texts from different disciplines and genres. We will study texts, movies and other forms of visual arts from the following authors: José Eduardo Agualusa, Pepetela, Mia Couto, Jorge Amado, Achille, Mbembe, Hilton Costa, Jocélio Teles dos Santos, Livio Sansone, José Luis Cabaço, Benedita da Silva and Solano Trindade.