In this course we will examine African Independence as part of a project to redefine what it means to be human in a world in which too much of the power and wealth remains in the hands of a very few people.
Through the lens of four watershed events – World War Two, the end of colonialism, the Cold War, and the new global interconnections – African Independence shows how Africa is shaped as much by what happens in America, Europe, Russia, and China as it is by events within its own geographic borders. It also reveals how much of the rest of the world is shaped by events in Africa.
Tukufu Zuberi
Tukufu Zuberi is the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, and Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies. His research focuses on Race, African and African Diaspora populations. He has been a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brizil. He recently served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology. He has also served as the Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography, the Director of the African Studies Program, the Director of the Afro-American Studies Program, and Faculty Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies. In 2002, he became the founding Director of the Center for Africana Studies.
Dr. Zuberi is the author of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth-Century (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and African Independence: How Africa Shapes the World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). He is the series editor of the “General Demography of Africa” (a multi-volume series). He has written more than 55 scholarly articles, and edited or co-edited eight volumes. These edited volumes include White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva) that was awarded the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award by the American Sociological Association. He has also edited several special editions of several important journals in the United States. Dr. Zuberi is the writer and producer of African Independence, and award-winning feature-length documentary film that highlights the birth, realization, and problems confronted by the movement to win independence in Africa. He is also known as a host on the hit Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series History Detectives. Currently filming its eleventh season, History Detectives regularly pressents th social history of American culture to the public.