Love in Africa

Catalog description

This course focuses on love in Africa, from the late 19th Century to the present. By doing so, the course introduces students to a multiplicity of themes in African history, from the history of gender and sexuality to popular culture, generational conflicts, and the AIDS epidemics. Studying love is central to understanding how Africans have imagined and lived their lives as gendered individuals and members of their societies, often in the face of oppressive colonial regimes and strenuous living conditions. The course will view love in its various declensions: as an emotion and expression of intimacy (the notion of romantic love), as virtue (love in theological and political discourses), as a set practices at the chore of conjugality and sexuality, and as an object of debate in the public sphere. Students will learn how to historicize affects and their relationships to society, politics, and economy. We will read fiction and primary sources, watch movies, and discuss recent academic works that will help us understand change and continuities in how individuals and communities across Africa have defined, debated, and experienced love.