The aim of this course is to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of African American and other African Diaspora social practices and experiences. This class will focus on both classic texts and modern works that provide an introduction to the dynamics of African American and African Diaspora thought and practice. Topics include: What is Africana Studies?; The History Before 1492; Creating the African Diaspora After 1500; The Challenge of Freedom; Race, Gender and Class in the 20th Century; From Black Studies to Africana Studies: The Future of Africana Studies.

SPRING 2016: This graduate research seminar is created to explore the history of slavery in the Middle East and parts of Africa, from the reign of the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent, through the spread of Ottoman rule to the Arab world, to Iran and the Gulf, and throughout the Nile Valley, to the legacies of many different trades in slavery in the contemporary Middle East. Students will be asked to think seriously about how slavery impacted Middle Eastern societies, and how this phenomenon has been studied. The material we will use will draw from historians of the Middle East, the narratives of slave-owners and former slaves, and from the historiography of other fields of study, notably Africana and African Studies. We will also begin to explore the visual culture of slavery, in art, in photography and in film.

This course provides the opportunity for students to investigate the relationship between the emergence of African peoples as historical subjects and their location within specific geopolitical and economic circumstances.


SPRING 2017: This jointly taught course is designed to introduce students to scholarship on the politics of Africa and the African diaspora in the period after World War II. The major themes of the 19th and 20th century congeal during this period: colonialism and anti-colonial movements toward national liberation, anti-apartheid and civil rights movements ranging from black movements in Brazil , Jamaica and the United States to South Africa, Britain and France. Readings and lectures will cover the politics of several African nation-states and diaspora populations, with an emphasis on the continuities and tensions between territorial nationalist movements with internal ethno-national tensions (African politics), to civil rights movements within plural societies where black populations have been characterized as minority populations. Students will read across several disciplines: history, sociology, political science, comparative literature, cultural studies, as well as Africana Studies, in the exploration of concepts and phenomena of sovereignty and citizenship, identity and identification, networks across nation-state and regional boundaries linking diverse African-descended populations, all within the context of the nation-state system.

See the Africana Studies Program's website at www.sas.upenn.edu/africana for a description of the current offerings.

Reading and discussion course on selected topics in African history.

Reading and discussion course on selected topics in African history.

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.