AFRICAAM 247: Gender and Sexuality in African History (FEMGEN 247, FEMGEN 347, HISTORY 247, HISTORY 347)
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.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 247B: Health, Healing, and the Body in African History (HISTORY 247B, HISTORY 347B)
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.
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