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| This course focuses on histories of Africa--as well as ways of thinking about histories in Africa—from roughly the rise of Islam to the eve of the colonial encounter with Europe. As the second-largest continent on Earth, today home to well over a billion people in thousands upon thousands of distinct language and culture groups, Africa has a diverse set of pasts that is hard to generalize. African history considers both what was historically shared by African societies regionally as well as what makes each unique, with a variety of textual, oral, and material evidence that creates a rich picture of the past. How have African pasts prior to the late nineteenth century affected later African experiences (including the global legacy)? How do we reach into the lives and minds of people with different sets of understandings and values in the world? What are the limits of our knowledge, historically and in terms of how we think about Africa conceptually? We’ll consider all of these through a variety of processes that invoke various examples and historical evidence for careful analysis. |
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