The French Colonial Empire
graduate seminar
From the 16th century onwards, French imperial expansion, led through companies, conquest, and colonies, spread across the worlds of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, impacting millions of lives. This history has generated an abundant scholarship, including a robust historiographical revival in the past two decades. This graduate seminar covers the history of the French Colonial Empire, from the Haitian revolution to the contemporary era, with an emphasis on the French Atlantic. Themes include: slavery and its afterlives, both in the Caribbean and Africa; subjecthood and citizenship; intersections between race, gender, and empire; intellectual, artistic and political movements such as Negritude, Surrealism, and Pan-Africanism; and debates and struggles around departmentalization, autonomy or independence for former colonies.
African Decolonization and Radicalisms
undergraduate seminar
In October 1945, the fifth Pan-African Congress met in Manchester, England. Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Amy Ashwood Garvey (Jamaica), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), W.E.B. Du Bois (USA), and others debated and strategized the future of the global struggle for pan-African decolonization, Black liberation, and against imperialism and capitalism. Throughout the 1950s, other solidarity networks emerged, such as the internationalist networks Malian nurse and anticolonial activist Aoua Keita, or Ghanaian journalist and parliament representative Mabel Dove Danquah, weaved across the Atlantic and the Third World. Was the achievement of national independence for African countries from the late 1950s through the 1970s the crowning achievement of these prior struggles? Which political futures did African intellectuals, activists, envision and try to build? Through a mix of primary and secondary sources, we explore the transnational networks, mobilites, and geographies that sustained African radicalisms and decolonization in the mid-20th century, as well as the tensions and failures of these movements. We will move across key locales of decolonial worldmaking, from Accra to Algiers, and Bissau to Bandung..
Caravels and Caravans: Histories of the Sahel
undergraduate seminar
This seminar follows West African Muslims as they traveled and migrated, built communities and states, produced literature and scholarship, and contended with overlapping systems of slavery, and colonialism. Our focus will be on the West African Sahel, a region that includes parts of today’s Nigeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal, located at the confluence of two distinct worlds: the Atlantic Ocean and Sahara Desert. Represented in our seminar by the encounter of the caravel and the caravan, the Sahel was shaped by the circulations of people, ideas and goods stemming from both worlds. Our historical investigations will be at once firmly grounded in the Sahel, and often on the move, following the movements of West African Muslim pilgrims, scholars, slaves, soldiers, merchants, rulers, and revolutionaries.
Women, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Africa
undergraduate lecture
This course investigates the rich histories and experiences of African women across time and space, foregrounding their relationships to power and authority, colonial oppression, spirituality, knowledge production, community-building, commerce, intimacy, and labor. Beyond, students will become familiar with the major debates surrounding gender and sexuality on the continent, and grapple with the ways these two historically situated, socially constructed categories, have shaped major developments in African history. Most of our focus will be on the 19th and 20th centuries, though in the first weeks of class we will examine earlier eras of African history.
From Mecca to Jamaica: Global Histories of Muslim West Africa
undergraduate seminar