Seminars are offered on a different topic each semester. Invited speakers for seminars generally present on Wednesday nights as part of our Speaker Series open to the public. (Unless announced otherwise, seminar presentations take place in WH218 Wednesdays 5:30-7:30.)
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Africa, Media, Materiality
Professor Beth A. Buggenhagen, Department of Anthropology
This course offers graduate students in African Studies the opportunity to analyze media practices in a variety of social, religious, and historical contexts across the African continent. The readings will focus on photography, film, video, television, digital technologies, and digital social media. We will begin by considering how photography and film were used within the social sciences and humanities as documentation for colonial projects, fieldwork data, material objects for museum exhibitions, and as works of art. Students will then be asked to reflect on how these techniques of representation have been appropriated by various social, religious, and political actors on the continent and to what purposes. Finally, we will consider recent ethnographic work on media practices around the continent, including North Africa and Egypt. The course emphasizes visual as well as textual approaches to the material; and will include a variety of media with the aim of encouraging students to think critically about the media of representation and communication.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Sex, Death and Rebirth in Ancient Egypt
Professor Steven Vinson, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Like the people of many ancient cultures, the Egyptians saw sexuality as the principle behind the deepest mysteries of existence: the force behind the creation and maintenance of the universe, and the key to overcoming death. In this course, we will explore how sexuality was ascribed to the cosmos, and how the religious and philosophical conceptions of divine sexuality intersected with the lived experience of real women and men.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Food and Conflict in Africa
Professor Professor Gracia Clark, Anthropology
Food shortages can both cause and result from conflict at various levels of society. This course examines the whole spectrum of causal relationship between food and conflict: from famines caused by drought or war and the public response to them to household conflicts over food production and distribution. Other featured instances from Africa will be conflicts between farmers and herders over land use, food riots in response to price rises and the gender dimensions of the impact of food shortages and subsequent responses.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: African Political Economy
Professor Osita Afoaku (School of Public and Environmental Affairs)
This course will familiarize students with historical and conceptual frameworks for understanding the diverse forces shaping the course of political and economic development in contemporary Africa as well as development strategies adopted by African countries. The subject matter of the course is multifaceted and broad in scope and, therefore warrants an interdisciplinary approach. Some of the themes to be covered in class discussion include, but are not limited, to the following: the challenge of instituting democracy and good governance in post-colonial Africa; reconciling the goals of economic growth and sustainable development; the plight of historically marginalized groups such as women, ethnic minorities, the youth, rural communities, and the urban poor; the sources of recent conflicts on the continent and their effects on material progress, human dignity, and political stability; the impact of globalization, foreign governments, transnational corporations, NGOs, and key multilateral institutions such as the IMF, UN, and World Bank on African development agendas; and the challenge of coping with population, environmental degradation, urbanization, and other related problems . Ultimately, it is hoped that the course will help participants to bridge knowledge gap relative to political, social, and economic conditions in contemporary Africa and its place in the global political economy.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Voices and Values in Colonial Relationships and African Performance
Professor Ruth Stone, Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Joint-listed with FOLK F609
The course focuses on dialogues and conversations that occur in performances in Africa, particularly within colonial relationships. Music, dance, theater, literature, and popular culture create sites where the dominant and the dominated alike position and reposition themselves. Students will engage with guest speakers who address some examples of these voices and values as they have played out. Students will also conduct research in an archive on the Bloomington campus or elsewhere. Drawing upon primary sources, those students taking the class for 3 credits will write a paper, analyzing at least two voices in performance contexts and how they have interrelated in a real or metaphorical dialogue in the context of Africa.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: The Twentieth Century II: Afrocosmopolitanism
Professor Akin Adesokan, Comparative Literature
Joint-listed with CMLT C538
A seminar on the intellectual relationships between the African continent and the progressive world in the second half of the 20th century, focusing upon three related historical and aesthetic formations: the recovery of African agency in the pre-1945 collaborations between nationalists and diasporic and liberal intellectuals and activists; the rise of tricontinental liberation movements and anti-colonial artistic cultures (cinema, literature, music) for which the journal Présence Africaine and the Cuban revolution were catalysts; and the unfolding reassessments of postcolonial political culture in the aftermath of Soviet communism and apartheid regime. The course works with the premise that these formations are unavoidably internationalist, given that the leading figures are diasporic intellectuals dealing with issues of race and class in multiple contexts. Readings will be organized around the decisive place of the African continent in the structural relations between contemporary discourses of cosmopolitanism and the global migrations of the late-19th century.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Africa in the History of Ideas
Professor Eileen Julien, Comparative Literature
Joint-listed with CMLT C571
The study of Africa and the development and transformation of key disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Through an examination of seminal texts and ideas by thinkers such as Appiah, Armah, Barber, Bernal, Bachir Diagne, Fabian, Fanon, Hegel, Hobsbawm & Ranger, Hountondji, Ibn Khaldun, Mamdani, Mbembe, Mudimbe, Rodney, Wallerstein and via students’ own contributions, this course will consider distinctions between “discipline” and “field,” between “inside” and “outside,” and terms such as African, Afrocentrism, cultural nationalism, diaspora, globalization, postcolonialism, postmodernism. We will have a number of visits by distinguished scholars.
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Public Health in Africa
Professor Michael Reece, Applied Health
Joint-listed with HPER H617
AFRI A731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Fieldnotes in African Research
Professor M. Frank-Wilson, IU Libraries and Professor R. Stone, Ethnomusicology
Joint-listed with FOLK F609
Grad G731 Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Contemporary Africa in the Classroom: New Perspectives on the Africa Volume
Professor Professor Maria Grosz-Ngate, African Studies Program
Grad G731 Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Language in Contemporary African Politics & Jurisprudence
Professor Samuel Obeng, Linguistics
Grad G731/E600 Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Temporalities, Polities and Cultural Formations in Africa
Professor Beverly Stoeltje, Anthropology
Grad G731 Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Globalization, Regionalization and the Changing Nature of Sovereignty
Professor Randall Baker, School of Public and Environmental Affairs
GRAD G731, Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Imaging Cultural Forms and Their Social Contexts
Professor Eileen Julien, African Studies/Comparative Literature
Joint-listed with AAAD-A 590 and CMLT-C 603
GRAD G731, Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar
Topic: Popular Culture and African Cities
Professor Didier Gondola, History, IUPUI
GRAD G731 Seminar on Contemporary Africa
Topic: Innovative African Political Economies
Joint-listed with ANTH E600 Problems in African Ethnography
H795/G731
Topic: African Cities
Professor Phyllis Martin, History Department
Joint-listed with HIST H 795
Topic: African Expressive Culture Now
Professor Patrick McNaughton, Art History and Professor Daniel Reed, Ethnomusicology
