Check out these Winter 2020 African Studies course offerings:
Introduction to African Civilization II
HIST 10102
Monday/Wednesday: 1:30 – 2:50 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
African Civilization introduces students to African history in a three-quarter sequence. Part II focuses on Eastern and Southern Africa, including Madagascar. We explore various aspects of how the colonial encounter transformed local societies, even as indigenous African social structures profoundly molded and shaped these diverse processes. Topics include the institution of colonial rule, independence movements, ethnicity and interethnic violence, ritual and the body, and love, marriage, money, and popular culture.
Elementary Swahili 2
SWAH 25300/35300
Tuesday/Thursday, 11 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.
Instructor: Fidèle Mpiranya
Swahili is the most popular language of Sub-Saharan Africa, spoken in most countries of Eastern and Central Africa by more than 50 million people. Swahili is characterized by the typical complex Bantu structure. However, it is particularly easy to pronounce and fast learned. The Elementary Swahili series is designed to help students acquire communicative competence in Swahili and a basic understanding of its structures. The course presents basic phonological, grammatical, and syntactic patterns of Kiswahili. Through a variety of exercises, students develop communicative functionality in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Emphasis is put on dialogues and role-plays, individual and group presentations, and the use of audiovisual and web-based resources. Swahili culture and African culture in general are an important component of the course. At the end of the elementary course series, students are able to communicate efficiently in everyday life situations, write, and present short descriptive notes about elementary pieces of verbal creation (documentaries and video series in Swahili).
Linguistic Introduction to Swahili 1
LING 28355/38355
Tuesday/Thursday, 2 – 3:20 p.m.
Instructor: Fidèle Mpiranya
Spoken in 10 countries of Eastern and Central Africa, Swahili has more speakers than any other language in the Bantu family, a group of more than 400 languages most prevalent in sub-equatorial Africa. Based on Swahili Grammar and Workbook, this course helps the students to master key areas of the Swahili language in a fast yet enjoyable pace. Topics include sound and intonation patterns, noun class agreements, verb moods, and sentence structures. Additionally, this course provides important listening and expressive reading skills. For advanced students, historical interpretations are offered for exceptional patterns observed in Swahili, in relation with other Bantu languages. This is a general introduction course with no specific prerequisites. It allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.
Race and Ethnicity in the Modern Middle East
HIST 25709
Thursday: 11 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
This seminar examines the ways that race and ethnicity are identified and discussed in Middle Eastern societies from the late-eighteenth century to the contemporary period. This class will analyze debates surrounding Middle Eastern racial and ethnic constructions in order to consider the extent to which these are the products of European colonialism—as some claim—or other legacies including Ottoman slave trade networks. This course addresses the ways these categories have shaped nationalist discourses, anticolonial struggles, US involvement in the Middle East, and contemporary questions of citizenship. Students will examine the role of diaspora encounters in Europe and the Americas in crafting these categories and ask whether new flows of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Philippines to the Middle East are reconfiguring old constructions or creating new ones. Sources will include literature, music, and film and methodologies are cultural, social, and political history. The class comprises case studies from Morocco, the Nile Valley, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf States.