Monday 05:30PM - 08:15PM
SDU Main Bldg, Room 420
This course provides an introduction to key themes in Africa’s modern history. Given its vast scope, the course will focus specifically on Sub-Saharan Africa, and the historical circumstances that have tethered its diverse regions together since the turn of the sixteenth century. Framing our study along this five-hundred year timeline allows us to foreground the complexity of precolonial livelihoods, institutions, and states before exploring the extent to which they transformed under the modern pressures of the slave trade, colonial conquest, and predatory capitalism. Ultimately, this course seeks to debunk longstanding myths about the continent by illuminating Africa’s connectedness to the wider world and centring the voices, values, and efforts of Africans themselves.
In addition to analyzing a wide variety of primary sources—from maps and music to government reports, newspaper articles, and oral traditions—this course delves into academic studies and debates that have shaped the field of African history as a whole. Students will be asked to interrogate these sources and the many different kinds of evidence scholars have marshalled to make arguments about the past.
