Topics vary. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

This course will deal with Law and Society in Africa. After surveying the various legal systems in Africa, the focus will be on how and to what extent the countries of Africa re-Africanized their legal systems by reconciling their legal systems that are used as instruments of social change and development. Toward this end, the experiences of various African countries covering the various legal traditions will be included. Specific focus will be on laws covering both economic and social relations. This emphasis includes laws of marriage, divorce and inheritance, laws of contracts and civil wrongs and African's law of investments and International Relations, among other laws. Throughout this course a comparative analysis with non-African countries will be stressed. Readings include research papers, reports, statutes, treaties, and cases.

SPRING 2016: This seminar will introduce key authors and issues in Francophone studies through texts that specifically focus on various experiences of war in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Significantly, the first piece of fiction by an African author may well be Bakary Diallo's Force Bonte, (1926), the autobiographical story of a WWI Senegalese Tirailleur, physically deformed by his war experience and trying to through his writing. While Force Bont¿ is unique as an early piece, similar narratives have not ceased to proliferate in French and Francophone fiction. Indeed, writers from all over the former French Empire have repeatedly offered fictional accounts of colonial subjects' involvement in European wars, and especially WWII, with various degrees of ambivalence. As conflicts and genocides continue, the experience of war fukes a new wave of Francophone accounts at the turn of the twenty-first century. We will use an extensive diachronically and synchronically developed reading (and viewing ) list of texts and films from Senegal, Congo, Rwanda, Guinea, Algeria, Martinique, Mauritius, and (Metropolitan) France from the 1920s to 2014.


Using this material as the basis for our exploration we will address several questions: What are some of the important tropes deployed in these narratives and how do they relate to broader issues concerning colonial and postcolonial violence? How do the wars of others (e.g. WWI and WWII) complicate the experience of war and questions of engagement and solidarity? How do such experiences lay the groundwork for other wars, of liberation, for example? Finally how does war impact the articulation of memory, survival and writing in colonial contexts, in the postcolony, and in the European Metropole? Primary texts in French. Class discussion in French or English.

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious" wrote James Baldwin "is to be in a state of rage almost all the time. " While more attention has been paid to how other feelings like forgiveness or love have been the moral underpinnings to African American social movements, this class makes an effort to look at the history of and value this more difficult but equally important African American cultural expression of black rage, one that is often maligned as a destructive and subject to hyper- surveillance and suppression. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this phenomenon by looking at the discourse surrounding events,like Nat Turner's rebellions, Stonewall, the Attica Uprising, and Black Lives Matter, historicizethe construction of "black rage" as a medical disorder and legal defense, studyits offshoots, like "protest psychosis" and the "Angry Black Woman," and examine how artists as vast as Richard Wright, Nina Simone, Alice Walker, Glen Ligon, Public Enemy, Kara Walker, and Solange have explored it as a site of black resistance. Focusing on one of the most misunderstood African American political emotions -- black rage -- this course will examine how artists have steadily moved it from the margins of black life into to the mainstreamin American culture.

The Accelerated Elementary Zulu course is intensive, and can be taken to fulfill a language requirement, or for linguistic preparation to do research on South Africa, Southern Africa/Africa-related topics. The course emphasizes communicative competence to enable the students to acquire linguistic and extra-linguistic skills in Zulu. The content of the course is selected from various everyday life situations to enable the students to communicate in predictable common daily settings. Culture, as it relates to language use, is also part of the course content.


Students will acquire the speaking, listening, and writing skills at the ceiling of low intermediate level and floor of high novice level, based on the ACTFL scale. The low intermediate level proficience skills that the students will acquire constitute threshold capabilities of the third semester range of proficiency to prepare students for Intermediate Zulu I course materials.

Offered through the Penn Language Center

Continuation of Elementary Amharic I.

How can we frame issues of memory and nostalgia as collective, social phenomena rather than solely individual experiences? What do nostalgic recollections of a previous era tell us about the contemporary moment? This course will interrogate processes of remembrance through a social science lens, engaging with a wide array of interdisciplinary materials across geographical regions and theoretical perspectives. We will discuss how memory is a deeply political and social act that intersects with class, race, gender, and generation in ways that have important implications for the present. Topics will include, for instance: colonial nostalgia, memories of the slave trade, gender and memory, and the politics of memorialization. Beyond traditional academic material, we will employ artistic portrayals of memory to enrich our discussions, such as the novel and film. Students will be asked to reflect on their personal encounters with nostalgia and memory through both weekly writing assignments and a creative final project that will engage mixed media to examine a topic of their choice.