Introduction to African and Africana Studies

Abstract

This course introduces a global socio-historical framework within which to examine multiple modern African Diasporas. Considering the historical contexts of contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, we examine cultural, economic, and philosophic aspects of African peoples around the globe. We will examine how ideas of what it means to be African culturally, racially, and politically are \ud continually produced and contested. The moment of independence of many African nation-states from European colonial rule in the mid 20th century operates as a centering point from which we will consider economics, race, politics, and artistic expressions. We will explore ideas of “tradition” and “modernity,” representations of Africa, more recent processes of commodification, as well as various cultural and political responses to them. We will consider bodily practices, aesthetics, political ideologies, and social movements in the creative production of African modern worlds and their relationship to contemporary movements of African peoples to the Americas and Europe. In this sense we consider different socio- historical movements in the context of Caribbean and North American history. We also explore African peoples and practices in their continuing dialogues and returns to the African continent. In an abstract sense, the course argues for a complex set of links between violence, memory, and aesthetics. We will use philosophical, political, historical, literary and ethnographic texts as well as popular artistic forms to understand contemporary and historical dynamics of the continent and its global reach. We will consider the nature of historical and anthropological inquiry and expressive texts to examine the practices through which history is continually re-produced in the present