Global Arc

This course will further your awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as improve your mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

This course offers a refinement of the student's speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. It prepares the student for further work in literary, language, and cultural studies as well as for a functional use of Yoruba. Study of structure and vocabulary is based on a variety of cultural documents including literary and nonliterary texts.

This course will further develop students' awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as their mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

An exploration of the past, present, and future of Africa in a multidisciplinary setting. A dozen Africanist faculty members collaborate in an effort to shed light on both the huge potential of Africa and its peoples and the enormous challenges the continent faces. Topics vary from politics, economics, conservation, biodiversity, climate change, the environment, health and disease, and written and oral literature, to the impact of the world on Africa as well as Africa's contributions to and place in worlds present and past. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course explores the place of religion in shaping modern literature and aesthetics of the African Diaspora. With the model of Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic as a geographical anchoring point, we will seek to understand how writers (and artists) on both sides of the hemisphere have negotiated different conceptualizations of the African diaspora and different forms of religion (Christianity and Islam, but also indigenous spiritual traditions, such as Odinani) in their aesthetics.

This seminar will provide an understanding of contemporary Kenya in the context of its historical positioning and modern value to Western political interests, and how this position translates to livelihoods and aspirations of Kenyans. The first part will focus on 3 themes: 1) Kenya as home to earliest human origins; 2) Kenya's evolution as the "anti-socialism" capital of western capitalism in the region; 3) The country's central position in the anti-terrorism war between the west and middle east. We will problematize the image of corruption as the explanation to (under) development that the West paints Kenya and "Africa" as suffering from.

The United Republic of Tanzania is one of the best examples of how African states have struggled to reinvent themselves from a colonial experience and pursue a nationalistic development agenda. Tanzania's initial postcolonial trajectory attempted to ignore the power of neo-colonial capitalism, but failed due to both local and global forces. This course will explore the political, cultural, linguistic and economic experience of Tanzania since its colonization (first by Germany, and then by Britain after World War II), its postcolonial experiment with African Socialism through the cotemporary state of reinventing a new state and society.

Sub-Saharan Africa's record on the use of development aid has been at best mixed. It has received about $1 trillion in foreign assistance since 1960. In the early 1980s, three world regions, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Pacific, and South Asia had over 50% of their populations living in extreme poverty. Thirty odd years later, Sub-Saharan Africa's figures have barely shifted; they went down from 53% to only 47% in 2011. East Asia and Pacific, and South Asia regions also received substantial assistance and have significantly reduced extreme poverty among their populations. Critics of foreign assistance decry such assistance.

Little writing from Africa conforms to Western understandings of nature writing or mainstream environmentalism. But does that mean that African authors are disinterested in environmental questions? How do African authors represent their relationship to the land and non-human organisms? This seminar will explore acts of environmental imagination by African novelists from around the continent; organized roughly by biome. We will also discuss writerly approaches to environmental activism on the continent. The course will aid students ability to think, speak and write critically about African literature, the environment and relations of power.

Designed to allow juniors and seniors enrolled in the program to examine significant problems in Africa in an interdisciplinary manner. Topics vary from year to year, reflecting faculty research interests. Prerequisite: one core course and one cognate course, or instructor's permission. Required of all program concentrators; open to others by permission of program director and course instructor.