631 - 640 of 788 results for: HISTORY

This seminar investigates the social, political, cultural, and economic history of West and West-Central Africa from the earliest times to the present. This is a dynamic region, encompassing: 21 countries, about 1,000 languages, hundreds of ethnic and language groups, and varied religions and belief systems. This course explores the following themes:: Early Empires, Societies, and Technologies; The Era of Atlantic Trade: 1700's-1800's; Colonialism and Decolonization: ca. 1800-1960; Africa Today: States, Politics, and Culture after 1960; Islam, Culture, and Politics; Gender, Sexuality, and Family History; Culture, Arts, Music Literature. Course also explores how West Africans have shaped global history.

This graduate colloquium focuses on the place of women in modern African history. We focus specifically on the literary techniques that African women have used to represent themselves to the outside world. In the course of ten in-depth seminars, we will intensively read a number of African women-authored autobiographies and biographies from the twentieth century to the present day. We look at the auto/biographies of prominent as well as not-so-well-known African women: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Wangari Maathai's autobiographies will be read alongside the life stories of more "ordinary" women. The seminar straddles history, literary theory and gender studies, and it encourages students to think critically about the creative ways in which African women have portrayed themselves to their intimates and their families as well as to the wider world.

Historical research in Africa is liable to issues of authenticity and relevance to local communities, as well as power disparities between researcher and subject. Can we turn this weakness into a strength by developing theory and practice of participatory action research in which communities and scholars work together to make meaningful interpretations of the past? We will explore this issue, study previous attempts, and design a participatory action research project to be carried out in Ghana.

This course examines the history of gender and sexuality in twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. It explores how concepts, identities, and practices of gender and sexuality have changed in shifting social, cultural, political, and economic contexts across the continent and in connection with global currents. This historical journey encompasses European colonialism, independence, postcolonial nation-building, and current times. Course materials include African novels, films, material culture and multinational scholarly research and primary sources. We will also engage multidisciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and theories as tools for critical thinking, writing and varied modes of producing knowledge. Gender and sexuality(ies) as examined in this course act as gateways to explore transformations in : selfhood, peoplehood, and life stage; health, medicine, reproduction, and the body; law and criminality; marriage, kinship, family, and community; politics, power and protest; feminism(s); popular culture; religion and belief; LGBTQI+ themes; and the history of emotions, including love, joy, desire, pain, and trauma.

This course examines histories of healing and harming in Africa through the lens of the individual body and the body politic. The course begins with core concepts in the history of the body and African health histories. We then explore entanglements of health, politics, and the body in precolonial Africa. Historical case studies ask how colonialism reshaped ecological health, social and biological reproduction, therapeutics, the laboring body. Contemporary case studies examine the legacies of this history, focusing on queer bodies and HIV, toxicity and pollution, and decolonizing global health. Theoretical anchors include Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman. Readings will draw from foundational scholarship on health and healing in Africa, recent pathbreaking work by African scholars, and fiction by Jennifer Makumbi, Octavia Butler, Chinua Achebe, and Ayobami Adebayo. No prior knowledge of African history is expected.

This course will be built around a photography exhibition at the Cantor Art Center, featuring the images of South African photographer, Sabelo Mlangeni. The class will invite students to consider both the history and the present-day state of photography on the African continent, exploring themes such as social-realist documentary photography and an African tradition of studio photography. The class will also reflect upon curatorial questions, including how, where, and why certain photographic work is displayed, and the aesthetics as well as politics of museum display.

This course will explore the histories of race and slavery in the African continent. We will consider how these histories developed alongside and independent of global developments, including but not limited to imperialism, capitalism, and slavery in the Arab world, as well as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Students will engage with an array of primary and secondary sources that centralize the voices, experiences, and perspectives of Africans from different time periods. We will grapple with the complex histories of slavery within the continent and how the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion evolved over time.

This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory. PhD Students in History completing the two-quarter graduate research seminar requirement should enroll in HISTORY 449A in Winter and 449B in Spring quarter.

Known as ghulam or mamluk in Arabic, the slave-soldier was a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world of medieval Islam. Usually pagan steppe nomads, mamluks were purchased in adolescence, converted to Islam, taught Arabic, and trained to lead armies. Sometimes manumitted and sometimes not, in either case mamluks rose to positions of privilege and prominence in numerous regimes in the medieval Middle East. Nowhere was the mamluk institution so fundamental as it was in Egypt between 1250 and 1517 CE, when Cairo was ruled by these slave-soldiers, their ranks constantly renewed by imports of new mamluks from the Black Sea and Caucuses. Born in the age of the crusades and ultimately conquered by the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk Sultanate can be understood as a bridge between the worlds of medieval and early modern Islam, as well as between East and West, sitting astride the major Nile-Red Sea route that linked the Mediterranean world to that of the Indian Ocean and beyond. This class will investigate the rise and fall of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and its key roles in the commercial, diplomatic, and political history both of the medieval Middle East and the wider world.