SOAN 249 - African Globalities

FDR: SS4
Credits: 3

This seminar course examines African histories, cultures and philosophies through the analytic lens of “globality”. Transcending persistent tropes of an isolated, primordial continent set apart from the world, the course works to situate Africa within the conceptual frame of global modernity. Rather than re-treading well-worn critiques of (pre- and post-) colonial “representations” of Africa, the course foregrounds African agency, scholarship and epistemologies, turning the analytic “gaze” outward upon the world from an African perspective. Course themes reckon with 1) “Africa” as both a place and an (often problematic) cultural imaginary; 2) debates related to Afrocentric scholarship; and 3) how richer engagements with African histories and cultural forms configure visions of Afrofuturism. Drawing on diverse anthropological texts while integrating a wide-range of interdisciplinary perspectives on art, culture, politics, literature and philosophy from leading African and Africanist scholars, this course opens intellectual space to consider how Africa is (and indeed has always been) generative of thoroughly modern global trajectories.