Southern African Frontiers, c. 1400-1860

Catalog description

This seminar explores southern Africa before 1860 to explore a global phenomenon: the pernicious emergence of race as the salient marker of human difference. We examine successive frontiers over millennia to track the changing dynamic between indigenes and newcomers. Discussions unpack overarching trends in the ways people negotiated cultural, political and economic difference. Both violence and absorption were always in play, but by the mid-nineteenth century, fluidity and hybridity gave way to assimilation to European norms. In these borderlands at the end of Africa lies the tragic history of our world: inherited race as an overpowering and rigid determinant of status. P