Postcolonial theories
What IS Africa?Politics.Culture,Identity; What is a postcolonial theory?What is a postcolonial anthropology?
These are key questions to be answered throughout this course.
This seminar offers an introduction to postcolonial anthropology. It zooms in on postcolonial theoretical perspectives to understand how they represent Politics, culture, and identity of/in Africa and how these representations challenge and contribute to social theories at large. Through the genre of ethnography, we examine these debates by focusing in on the major thematic foci of anthropologies of Africa: race, ethnicity,gender,labor, modernity, political economy, religion, illiberal governance, crime and policing, political violence, poverty, and corruption. We will read several texts that address each theme, often providing insight into these topics from different geographical contexts within Africa. In doing so, we will contemplate what it means to examine Africa as a region, interrogating the structural similarities that supposedly unite this extremely diverse part of the world, while also noting differences and inconsistencies that are often obscured when we mistakenly consider it to be a homogenous part of the world. We will also understand Africa, and the academic study of Africa, in the context of global North-South relations, as we are attentive to how scholarship has both problematized and reinforced the structural inequalities of the North-South binary. At the same time, this course’s focus on Africa in the context of late capitalism places the provocative texts we will read together in conversation with broader global debates about the effects of globalization and the expansion of neoliberalism on communities across the globe
- Lehrende/r: Souleymane Diallo