History of West Africa

Catalog description

This course is a meditation on West African social history, and spans periods from the earliest through the postcolonial. We will read a monograph a week, cutting-edge works that help to shape the field of African history as a whole, serving as portals into the historiographic and methodological issues that historians of Africa encounter. The idea is for students to acquire an understanding of how the literature has built upon itself, as well as the means (methods/approaches) by which histories of the continent have been researched and written. This is the craft of the historian, and to best way to learn that craft is to consider how it unfolds over the course of an entire œuvre.The course is intended to support student research, which in practical terms, the course is the completion of a term/research paper by the end of the semester.