Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors. We will begin this course by exploring various ways of understanding familial and gender relations, as both Africans themselves and social scientists have imagined them. We will then focus on how African men, women and families have participated in, influenced, and been transformed by various processes in African history, including slavery, migration, urbanization, colonial rule, legal change and the development of the postcolonial state. Family and gender history incorporates the analytical questions and tools of history, anthropology, political economy, and sociology.
Students can expect to read at least one book a week for the course.
Most Americans are familiar with slavery only as it developed in the Old South in the decades before the Civil War. Most also treated slavery as a way to assimilate foreigners, not as the racially exclusive dead end that American laws of slavery prescribed. The objective of HIAF 511 is to move beyond static stereotypes and consider the enslavement as a process of its many distinctive times and places in world history. The background reading for the modern portions of the course will be Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery . Other, extremely varied readings will develop the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Africa, medieval Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and colonial North America, and the United States.