Spring 2017  |  HIST 5932 Section 001: The Production of Knowledge, Negotiating the Past, and the Writing of African Histories (68072)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
A-F or Audit
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017
Mon 01:25PM - 03:20PM
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 335
Course Catalog Description:
Recent scholarship on social history of Africa. Focuses on new literature on daily lives of ordinary people in their workplaces, communities, households.
Class Notes:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?pohla001+HIST5932+Spring2017
Class Description:

The nationwide protests and student movements known as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall that have rocked South Africa's university campuses are not simply or only about free education. Students have also repeatedly, and problematically, called for the ‘decolonization' of the University and its curricula. The protests highlight the contradictions and disappointments of the recent past in South Africa, confront the legacy of racism in its institutions and knowledge systems, and resonate with a history of anti-racism and struggle.

But this is not just about a hashtag …

These student movements challenge us to think about the relationship between (African) History, the long history of anti-racism and anti-colonial struggle, and the political, economic, ecological, institutional and epistemological crises of the present. The course will therefore take as its point of departure the question of what it means to teach, think and engage with African History in a time of struggle? As a field with its own genealogy and ‘origin' in area studies, African History and Historiography have long (and almost always urgently) responded to and engaged with times of crisis and trouble. Notwithstanding later critiques, the ideas and methods of (radical) social history, for example, provided African historians and historians of Africa a critically important and valuable counter to colonial and missionary accounts of early Africa with their European/Western bias and to the bias in traditional archives which tended to exclude African sources. Similarly, Africanist/nationalist history was an important response to decolonization and independence. But, beginning in the early 1990s, the field has also had to respond to the critique of History, to the poststructuralist critique of Marxist historiography, to the so-called ‘cultural turn,' and to challenges from subaltern studies and postcolonial/postapartheid theory.

In this intensive reading and writing seminar for African history graduate students and other graduate students with an interest in Africa or postcolonial theory, we will address African history's complicity with and responsibility to imperialism/colonialism/apartheid, the problematic/difficult questions of the demand for ‘decolonization' of historical knowledge production, critical questions of the archive, as well as the postcolonial in (African) history (less as a chronological than) as a theoretical concept and methodological approach.

The seminar will resonate with the course "Provincializing Marx," co-taught by Professors Vinay Gidwani (Geography and Global Studies) and Ajay Skaria (History and Global Studies), Geography (GEOG 8980) and History (HIST 5960/8960), also in the Spring Semester. The format will be a mix of lecture, presentation and discussion. Students must be prepared to engage closely with challenging texts, and think cooperatively and generously. A reading list is yet to be finalized, but among the texts to be included will be (excerpts from) Hegel, Fanon, Biko, Diagne, Scott, Derrida, Spivak, Rancière, Chakrabarty, Biko, Mbembe, and others. A full syllabus with readings and requirements will be available at the beginning of the semester.

Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68072/1173
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
29 November 2016

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