AP/SOSC 3480 6.00
Culture, Democracy and Development in Africa
This course explores the complex interplay of political, social and cultural forces at work in Africa, as communities, nations and regions attempt to overcome historic disadvantages and contemporary crises. Of particular interest is the often-ignored capacity of African culture to generate change, resist oppression by both external and internal forces, and solve the problems of development. The course’s aim is thus to reunite the increasingly separate domains of African Studies as a regional field of enquiry focused on human history and society, and Development Studies as the “”problem solving”” field of applied research, where deep social, political and economic issues are viewed as abstract problems with technical solutions. The course reintroduces human agency into an understanding of Africa through the texts of a variety of African thinkers, past and present. The texts are informed by non-African theory as well as indigenous intellectual traditions, and this conceptual synthesis is also investigated in the course.
The course organizes these concerns into ten topics, each with a theoretical and methodological dimension as well as an empirical focus, and each with a critique of the relevant literature’s incorporation of gender analysis: (1) “Africa”” in colonial and postcolonial discourses; (2) Capitalism, class formation and transformations in ethnicity; (3) rediscovering the “”African genius””: peasants, resistance, and local governance; (4) Visionaries for the political kingdom: writings from the struggle for independence; (5) The interdependence of art, orality, and politics; (6) Development as the new colonialism: incursion and resistance in the era of symbolisation and Structural Adjustment Programs; (7) Governing Africa: dictatorship, democratic struggle, and civil society and the state; (8) Crises of the body and the land: the politics of AIDS, conservation and environment; (9) Imagining the new Africa: Africa’s transformative potential. It is recommended that students have taken a first or second year course in African Studies or Third World studies before enrolling in this course.