printer friendly pageAFRICAAM 30: The Egyptians (CLASSICS 82, HISTORY 48, HISTORY 148)
This course traces the emergence and development of the distinctive cultural world of the ancient Egyptians over nearly 4,000 years. Through archaeological and textual evidence, we will investigate the social structures, religious beliefs, and expressive traditions that framed life and death in this extraordinary region. Students with or without prior background are equally encouraged.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 41: Genes and Identity (ANTHRO 41, CSRE 41A)
In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations
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In recent decades genes have increasingly become endowed with the cultural power to explain many aspects of human life: physical traits, diseases, behaviors, ancestral histories, and identity. In this course we will explore a deepening societal intrigue with genetic accounts of personal identity and political meaning. Students will engage with varied interdisciplinary sources that range from legal cases to scientific articles, medical ethics guidelines, films, and anthropological works (ethnographies). We will explore several case studies where the use of DNA markers (as proof of heritage, disease risk, or legal standing) has spawned cultural movements that are biosocial in nature. Throughout we will look at how new social movements are organized around gene-based definitions of personhood, health, and legal truth. Several examples include political analyses of citizenship and belonging. On this count we will discuss issues of African ancestry testing as evidence in slavery reparations cases, revisit debates on whether Black Freedman should be allowed into the Cherokee and Seminole Nations, and hear arguments on whether people with genetic links to Jewish groups should have a right of return to Israel. We will also examine the ways genetic knowledge may shape different health politics at the individual and societal level. On this count we will do close readings of how personal genomics testing companies operate, we will investigate how health disparities funding as well as orphan disease research take on new valences when re-framed in genetic terms, and we will see how new articulations of global health priorities are emerging through genetic research in places like Africa. Finally we will explore social implications of forensic uses of DNA. Here we will examine civil liberties concerns about genetic familial searching in forensic databases that disproportionately target specific minority groups as criminal suspects, and inquire into the use of DNA to generate digital mugshots of suspects that re-introduce genetic concepts of race.
Last offered: Spring 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 46N: Show and Tell: Creating Provenance Histories of African Art (AFRICAST 46N, HISTORY 46N)
Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, displayed, managed, and sold an art object. Knowledge of provenance can both inflate and deflate the value of an art object and it can also shed light upon legal and ethical questions including assessing repatriation and restitution claims for African art objects. Furthermore, by telling the story of how a particular object moved through multiple pairs of hands, often over the course of centuries and across several continents, we gain nuanced appreciation of the social currency of artwork as well as of changing perceptions of aesthetic and monetary value, and insight into the extractive dynamics of colonialism and postcolonial global economies. For this class, you will have the unique opportunity to work first hand with an important African
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Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, displayed, managed, and sold an art object. Knowledge of provenance can both inflate and deflate the value of an art object and it can also shed light upon legal and ethical questions including assessing repatriation and restitution claims for African art objects. Furthermore, by telling the story of how a particular object moved through multiple pairs of hands, often over the course of centuries and across several continents, we gain nuanced appreciation of the social currency of artwork as well as of changing perceptions of aesthetic and monetary value, and insight into the extractive dynamics of colonialism and postcolonial global economies. For this class, you will have the unique opportunity to work first hand with an important African art collection in North America: the Richard H. Scheller Collection at Stanford University. You will select one object from the collection and create a detailed provenance history, documenting and detailing its origins, its movement across space and time, and its arrival to the Scheller collection in Silicon Valley. You will use archival materials from Scheller¿s collection, online databases and archives, and secondary literature. Your final project for the class will be to create a visual StoryMap that allows you to display your provenance history with narrative text and multimedia content. In this way, you will not only have completed a class assignment: you will also have constructed for posterity a remarkable hitherto unknown history of an important African art object.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Cabrita, J. (PI)
AFRICAAM 47: History of South Africa (CSRE 74, HISTORY 47)
(Same as
HISTORY 147.
HISTORY 47 is for 3 units;
HISTORY 147 is for 5 units.) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evolution of African and Afrikaner nationalism; the rise and fall of the apartheid state; the politics of post-apartheid transformation; and the AIDS crisis.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 47S: Black Earth Rising: Law and Society in Postcolonial Africa (AFRICAST 90, HISTORY 47S)
Is the International Criminal Court a neocolonial institution? Should African art in Western museums be returned? Why have anti-homosexuality laws emerged in many African countries? This course engages these questions, and more, to explore how Africans have grappled with the legacies of colonialism through law since independence. Reading court documents, listening to witness testimonies, analyzing legal codes, and watching cultural commentaries¿including hit TV series Black Earth Rising¿students will examine the histories of legal conflict in Africa and their implications for the present and future of African societies. This course fulfills the Social Inquiry and Engaging Diversity Ways requirements.
Last offered: Winter 2021
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 48Q: South Africa: Contested Transitions (HISTORY 48Q)
Preference to sophomores. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994 marked the end of an era and a way of life for South Africa. The changes have been dramatic, yet the legacies of racism and inequality persist. Focus: overlapping and sharply contested transitions. Who advocates and opposes change? Why? What are their historical and social roots and strategies? How do people reconstruct their society? Historical and current sources, including films, novels, and the Internet.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-GlobalCom, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI, Writing 2
AFRICAAM 49S: African Futures: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Beyond (HISTORY 49S)
This course examines decolonization and its aftermath in sub-Saharan Africa. With a "wind of change" sweeping the continent, how did Africans imagine their futures together? From W.E.B. Du Bois to Black Panther, this course will engage in historical readings of political essays, speeches, film, and literature to consider how Africans envisioned their communities beyond empire. Topics will include a variety of projects for African unity, from experiments with Pan-Africanism, to religious revivalism, to Afrofuturist art and aesthetics.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 50B: Nineteenth Century America (CSRE 50S, HISTORY 50B)
(Same as
HISTORY 150B.
HISTORY 50B is 3 units;
HISTORY 150B is 5 units.) Territorial expansion, social change, and economic transformation. The causes and consequences of the Civil War. Topics include: urbanization and the market revolution; slavery and the Old South; sectional conflict; successes and failures of Reconstruction; and late 19th-century society and culture.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Olivarius, K. (PI)
;
Halom, B. (TA)
AFRICAAM 50C: The United States in the Twentieth Century (HISTORY 50C)
(Same as
HISTORY 150C. 50C is for 3 units; 150C is for 5 units.) 100 years ago, women and most African-Americans couldn't vote; automobiles were rare and computers didn't exist; and the U.S. was a minor power in a world dominated by European empires. This course surveys politics, culture, and social movements to answer the question: How did we get from there to here? Suitable for non-majors and majors alike.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AFRICAAM 53S: Black San Francisco (HISTORY 53S)
For over a century African-Americans have shaped the contours of San Francisco, a globally recognized metropolis, but their histories remain hidden. While endangered, Black San Francisco is still very much alive, and its history is an inextricable piece of the city's social and cultural fabric. This course aims to uncover the often-overlooked history of African-Americans in the city of San Francisco. The history of Black San Francisco unravels the myth of San Francisco liberalism showing how systemic racial oppression greatly limited the social mobility of non-whites well into the 20th century. Conversely, this course will also highlight the rich cultural and artistic legacies of Black San Franciscans with special attention on their ability to create social. Starting with the small, but influential middle and upper classes of African-Americans, who supported abolitionism from the West in the mid-late nineteenth century, to the rapid growth of the black population during WWII and moving
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For over a century African-Americans have shaped the contours of San Francisco, a globally recognized metropolis, but their histories remain hidden. While endangered, Black San Francisco is still very much alive, and its history is an inextricable piece of the city's social and cultural fabric. This course aims to uncover the often-overlooked history of African-Americans in the city of San Francisco. The history of Black San Francisco unravels the myth of San Francisco liberalism showing how systemic racial oppression greatly limited the social mobility of non-whites well into the 20th century. Conversely, this course will also highlight the rich cultural and artistic legacies of Black San Franciscans with special attention on their ability to create social. Starting with the small, but influential middle and upper classes of African-Americans, who supported abolitionism from the West in the mid-late nineteenth century, to the rapid growth of the black population during WWII and moving through post-war struggles against the forces of Jim Crow and environmental racism. This course will explore: What is Black San Francisco? How did African-Americans shape the culture and politics of San Francisco, and where does the history of Black San Francisco fit into the broader national historical narrative? Conversely, what is unique about San Francisco and similar black communities in the West? How do we reconstruct the past of people going South to West as opposed to South to North? And finally, as raised in the critically acclaimed 2019 film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and eluded by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, where does black San Franciscans, go from here?
Last offered: Autumn 2021
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
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