African Studies
- AFS 101: Beginning Yoruba IYorùbá is a West African language spoken by about 50 million native speakers. Most of its speakers live in Nigeria. There are also Yorùbá speakers in Togo, Benin Republic, and the Caribbean. This course offers students an intensive training and practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing Yorùbá. Initial emphasis is on spoken language and conversation all rooted in the culture of the people. During the second term students read and listen to texts that provide an introduction to independent search in the Yorùbá culture.
- AFS 106: Intermediate Yoruba IThis course offers a refinement of the student's speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. It prepares the student for further work in literary, language, and cultural studies as well as for a functional use of Yoruba. Study of structure and vocabulary is based on a variety of cultural documents including literary and nonliterary texts.
- ANT 314/ENE 314/AFS 314: The Anthropology of DevelopmentWhy do development projects fail? This course examines why well-meaning development experts get it wrong. It looks closely at what anthropologists mean by culture and why most development experts fail to attend to the cultural forces that hold communities together. By examining development projects from South Asia to the United States, students learn the relevance of exchange relations, genealogies, power, religion, and indigenous law. This semester the class will focus on energy in Africa.
- ANT 453/AFS 453: Rituals of GoverningThe spiritual and the sacred hold enduring significance across many realms of political and social life. Anthropological studies productively unsettle standard assumptions in many aspects of conventional thought, which often presume the declining importance of religion and spirituality in political life. This course draws upon classic and contemporary anthropological works on a range of topics concerning cultures of governing, including ritual theory, divine rule, stranger-kings, mysticism and magic, spirituality and embodiment, and law. Secondarily, the course engages materials from film, psychoanalysis, literature, and critical theory.
- ART 378/AFS 378/AAS 377: Post-1945 African PhotographyThis course examines the role and status of photography in different phases of Africa's political, cultural and art historical experience since 1945. We explore how African photographers used the photographic medium in the service of the state, society and their own artistic visions during the colonial and post-independence eras. Photography's relationship with art and its social function in Africa will underlie our discussion.
- HIS 423/AFS 424/REL 423: The History of Christianity in Africa: From St. Mark to Desmond TutuThis course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?
- ITA 309/AFS 309: Topics in Contemporary Italian Civilization: Africa in Italian ImaginationThis course explores the colonial experience discussed by Italian writers who were in contact with Northern Africa between the 19th and the 20th centuries. This association between Italy and Africa has not been extensively developed neither within Italy or abroad, and it will be the primary focus of this course. The newly unified Italy (1861) looked at Africa as a colonial opportunity to expand its might and wealth. Writers soon embarked to places such as Alexandria and shared a unique perspective on Africa: they understood the continent not as a space to conquer and colonize, but rather as a surprisingly tolerant society in which to live.
- LIN 260/AFS 262: Languages of AfricaAbout 2000 of the world's 6000 to 7000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but very little is known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are found nowhere else, e.g. click consonants), their history and the history of their speakers (from ca 10,000 BP to the (post) colonial period), and their cultural contexts, among other topics. This course has no prerequisites, and is open to anyone with an interest in African languages or the African continent.