SEMINAR IN AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES: TOPICS

AFRICAN 100

An introduction to current research in African cultural studies, ranging from various literary genres and uses of discourse; to diverse media including screen media, music, cartoons, and journalism; and to other forms of popular expression like soccer and drama. Through an introduction to these forms, study the diverse methods used by scholars in this field, such as textual analysis, film criticism, ethnomusicology, discourse analysis, and ethnography; and to the cultural diversity of Africa and its diasporic cultures.

AFRICAN 405

Examines various mediated cultural forms such as broadcasting, news, performance, music, film, or social media created and used across regions and countries in Africa, addressing issues such as cultural identity, nation building, constraints on expression, access, and reception, and the interaction of global and African cultural forms.

AFRICAN 605

Introduces foundational texts in the study of modern Africa and the social, political, and economic contexts of the continent's cultural production and productivity. Conceptual explorations of interesting issues such as the African encounter with Europe, anticolonialism, race, racialism, and subjectivity, African and European languages and epistemology, transformations in gendered structures, and the environment, and the circulation and consumption of cultural forms and practices. Examines the long histories and theories of cultural production and practices in Africa, the local/global provenance of forms and styles, and the contexts of their local, national, and global circulation and consumption. Promotes critical thinking by putting like and unlike texts together and considering rhetoric and implied meanings, all in the context of Africa's interactive history with the world in the modern era.

AFRICAN 202

Various topics in African cultural studies and African expressive cultures. Topics will include cultural and/or political themes that cut across multiple media and genres, including two or more of the following: literature, film, media, music, performance, language use, etc.

AFRICAN 803

A study of culture and cultural production, circulation, consumption, and meaning making in Africa. Discussions foreground material and imaginative cultural forms and practices-their origins, languages, contents, forms, functions, genres, and audiences. Examines the uses to which particular meanings of culture and its forms are put, by whom, and to what purpose, and how meanings are fought over, reshaped, and reconstituted, and under what conditions those are or can be possible. Surveys the entrenched modes of both conceptual and critical apprehension of the cultural forms and practices (from Negritude to postcolonialism and postmodernism), explores their methods of reading, raises the issue of their linkages to sources in Euro-America, and assesses the extent to which the unique concerns of the biography of culture in Africa (expressed by its creators and scholars) have tried to tame and refashion what are now globally shared critical tools of cultural reading.