- Complete course listing for 2023/24
- AFRI 1001 – Introduction to African Studies
- AFRI 3003 – African Social and Political Thought
- AFRI 3004 – The African City
- AFRI 3005 – African Migrations and Diasporas
- AFRI 4000 – African Socialism vis-à-vis Capitalism
- AFRI 4040 – Racecraft: African Perspectives
- AFRI 6000 – Thinking From Africa
Complete course listing for 2023/24
AFRI 1001 – Introduction to African Studies
This course introduces students to the major past and current aspects of African studies. The course will be taught from an interdisciplinary approach to include aspects of history, knowledge production, indigenous knowledge systems, decolonization, geography, politics and governance, trade and development as well as literature and the arts.
The course adopts a critical approach to rethinking the popular narrative of Africa in different fields of study. The course exposes students to critical and divergent perspectives on the complex nature of the continent, the progress made and the challenges involved in reasserting Africa’s role and agency in global affairs. Through the use of texts drawn from traditional and electronic sources, the course equips students with the skills to challenge the uncritical and dominant stereotypes on Africa as a backward, dependent and hopeless continent. While contextualizing the various ongoing crisis of knowledge in African studies, the course foregrounds Africa’s historical achievements, attempts at decolonization through music, arts, politics and economy.
AFRI 3003 – African Social and Political Thought
This course focuses on helping students understand various perspectives from which thought leaders in Africa have sought to provide ideas on the socio-economic and political development of the continent. Designed as an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary offering, this seminar presents the thoughts of leading thinkers in Africa such as Kwame Nkrumah, Obafemi Awolowo, Julius Nyerere, Sekou Touré, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral, Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Claude Ake, Adebayo Adedeji and a host of others. A thematic approach will be adopted in presenting the ideas of these thinkers.
The main objectives are to locate the work of these thinkers within the development aspirations of Africans amidst competing social and political thought from outside the continent, assess their relevance in the search for development in Africa, and build skills in interpreting divergent thoughts from prescribed readings. This course is also aimed at providing students of African Studies with broad knowledge of previous and contemporary social and political thought originating from the continent. It will allow students to debate the age-old concern over the dichotomy between indigenous and exogenous social and political thought in terms of the most appropriate approach to fostering autonomous development in Africa. The course will be in seminar format. This will take the form of active class participation by students, films, guest lectures from the wider Africanist community in North America and seminar presentations.
AFRI 3004 – The African City
This course examines the historical emergence and contemporary issues of the African city. Largely interdisciplinary in approach, the course seeks to acquaint students with a composite knowledge of the African city and life worlds by focusing on a few “representative” cities across the regions of the continent. The course emphasizes the contemporary African city with its rapid urbanization, growing youth population, cultural developments, and the socio-economic challenges of everyday urban life and livelihood. The readings include historical, political, literary, and cultural texts drawn from traditional and electronic formats to underline the common and distinctive sociopolitical and economic features of the African city.
After completing this course, the students will be able to:
• Understand the historic context for several African cities and assess the impact of colonialism on Africa’s urban development.
• Evaluate what “postcolonialism” means for African cities.
• Investigate the ongoing effects of neo-colonial practices; examine global and socio-political structures of power.
• Identify and critically analyze the representation of African cities in art, literature, and culture.
• Learn by heart the major capital cities of Africa; their populations and demographics; their positions in the global economic systems; their contributions to music, literature, cinema, art, and fashion; their major modes of public transportation, architecture, and other significant characteristics.
AFRI 3005 – African Migrations and Diasporas
This course focuses on helping students analyze the multinational flows of people of African descent from antiquity through the eras of trans-Saharan (7th-18th century) and trans-Atlantic (16th-19th) slave trades to the contemporary times. From antiquity, Africans have moved to different continents of the world, including the Mediterranean, Americas, Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. Over the long durée of history, Africans have conquered others and have been conquered. The over 30 million Africans in other parts of the world have made enduring contributions politically, economically and socially to past and modern civilizations. This course will provide both historical insight and contemporary analysis of African migrations and diasporas in terms of the external and domestic factors that informed the migratory flows, the challenges African migrants face and their relationship with their home countries. The course will examine the various phases and spaces of migratory flows of Africans. The course will strengthen students’ ability to engage with the broader history of economic, social and political factors that continue to shape migrations and diasporas relations with Africa and allow students engage with the inextricable link between capitalism, racism, globalization and migration. It will examine identity formation and consciousnesses among African diasporas, transnationalism, as well as the contributions of Africans to the development of their host countries and countries of origin.
AFRI 4000 – African Socialism vis-à-vis Capitalism
This course focuses on the relationship between socialism and capitalism in the long durée of Africa’s encounters with different regions of the world through equal and unequal trade, domination through slave trade and imperialism, colonialism, globalization, neoliberalism. It also focuses on Africa’s resistance through Pan-Africanism, feminism, African socialism, and Marxism, neoliberalism and Afrocapitalism.
The course adopts a thematic approach to analyze how global capitalism has shaped the continent both in the relations among the various groups and countries within the continent as well as Africa’s relations with other parts of the world. Historically, the course examines Africa’s early commercial encounters with other regions, intra-Africa relations and how these led to building of empires and kingdoms, the internal and external contradictions that led to the fall of the empires and the onslaught of colonialism. In this regard, the course also establishes a connection between the birth of modern capitalism, the various regimes of slave trade including Tran-Saharan, Trans-Atlantic and Indian slave trades. Other aspects of the course include the political economy of Africa in terms of how post-independent African leaders adopted variants of capitalism and socialism, Marxism, and neoliberalism, African feminism, developmental regionalism and Africapitalism. The course would equip students with the analytical skills to critically appraise the contributions of Africans both on the continent and in the diasporas to the emergence of modern capitalism and socialism as well these economic systems have been adapted to African realities.
AFRI 4040 – Racecraft: African Perspectives
What is ‘race’ and how does racism shape the modern world? How do race, gender and sexuality interact with each other in producing social and economic hierarchies? Drawing on the argument of Barbara Fields and Karen Fields that race is produced by practices of racism, rather than an effect of the existence of racial difference, this course traces the ways in race is crafted. Thinking about ‘racecraft’ rather than ‘race’ enables us to make visible the historical processes that underpin race thinking, and thereby to make the concepts available for critique. The course begins from debates in (and about) Africa, rather than from the diaspora. Although African debates and diasporic debates intersect and shape each other, this course centres the vibrant intellectual and political work that accompanied some of the most profound challenges to colonialism and white supremacy. By examining contexts where blackness is the condition of the majority, and where challenges to white power are embedded in radical utopian imaginations of freedom, self-sufficiency and sovereignty, we might rethink the relationships between race and democracy. Also offered as AFRI 5050 / WGST 4812 / WGST 5901
AFRI 6000 – Thinking From Africa
This course examines key themes in the evolution of African Studies as a discipline, including the historical and ongoing debates over its boundaries and genealogies and its changing research paradigms. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach and interrogates the ways in which key historical processes, intellectual strands and institutional and political developments have shaped contemporary Africa. We address ethical and epistemological questions in the study of Africa, beginning from the position that Africa is a site of complex theoretical foment. Intellectual, institutional and ideological contexts shaping production and dissemination of knowledge about Africa, Africans and people of African heritage will receive particular attention in this course. By the end of the course, students will demonstrate ability to explain African Studies as a coherent discipline, its key analytical and methodological approaches coming from different disciplinary perspectives within African Studies, and should be able to craft research questions and projects that will take the discipline forward. Students taking this course will also be expected to attend at least some of the Institute of African Studies Knowing Africa seminar series, held on Wednesdays from 1-2.30pm.