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Course Description :
From the anti-colonial accounts of the proponents of Negritude
to the postcolonial
endeavors of contemporary africanist scholars, the
historiography of Francophone
African studies has gone through multiple epistemic changes that
make it one of the
most complex and vibrant academic disciplines of our time. In
this course, we willundertake an assessment of the major
formulations of these discourses through a
genealogy of its major epistemic shifts, in order to evaluate
the actual state and
predict the future trajectories of colonial and postcolonial
Franocphone African
studies. We will start our journey with the examination of the
ways Negritude scholarssuch as Aimee Ceesaire marka radical shift
from earlier francophone intellectual
movements attempts to show the perfectibility of African
descended cultures in order toprove their humanity. Its major
thinkers theorize a negro humanity, fundamentally
opposed to the universalist, yet provincial, modern
representation of humanness.However, while early theories of
Negritude such as those of Aim Csaire have clear
anti-colonial postulations, they develop, as Franz Fanons oeuvre
shows, an essentialist
ethno-centric conception of Africa that functions as a blackened
re-articulation of modernmodes of definition of the world. As such,
Negritude fails to take into consideration thefundamentally
political nature of black subjectivities. Franz Fanon prepares the
ground
for the development, in the 1980s, of what is today referred to
as postcolonial Africanstudies, the examination of which will
constitute the third movement of our journey. We
will, therefore look at the ways African scholars such as
Anthony Appiah and VincentMudimbe, acknowledge the importance of
early discourses on Africa, yet insist on the
necessity to think of Africa beyond the dichotomy set by Western
imperialist accounts.Such a perspective will lead to a better
understanding of our contemporary condition
beyond the idea of Africa invented by European modernity and
early anti-colonialthinkers. We will conclude the course with two
major intellectual movements, namely,
the movement ofAntillanit inspired by Edouard Glissant and the
one of decoloniality astheorized by Mignolo. The former questions
any idea of purity as the foundation of
Africanness. For Glissant, for example, it is precisely because
human cultures areconstantly becoming that the only way of
understanding the present Caribbean cultures is
to acknowledge their fundamental and ongoing mtissages in what
can today be called,le tout-monde, a mixed world that finds its
condition of possibility in its plurality. For
the decolonial movement, on the other hand, it is necessary that
formerly colonizedpeople actualize aradical liberation from Western
colonial paradigms that haveconstituted the conditions of their
existence. Even though the decolonial movement ismostely .. by
Latin American thinkers, it can be applied to the African realities
and is
very likely to be of African studies in the years to come.
Requirements:
Weekly written response: Each student is required to turn in a
written response (at
least one full, double-spaced page) to the weekly assigned
readings. In addition,students are required to bring interesting
questions related to each weeks reading.
Responses are due at the beginning of each class. Late versions
are not acceptable.
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Presentation: Each student is expected to do at least one oral
presentation of a
reading.
Mini conference:
We will organize, at the end of the quarter, a mini-conference
with students in
African Studies The best four papers of the two seminars will be
accepted forpresentation at the 17th international conference of
the International Society of
African Philosophy and Studies, organized by the Department of
French and Italian
and the Department of African Studies at The Ohio State
University. For more
information, please visitwww.isapsonline.com or contact Dr.
Cheikh Thiam([email protected]).
Attendance: Anyone who has more than two unexcused absences will
automatically
fail this course. Two tardies count for one absence.
Final Paper: A 12-page research paper is due the last day of
class.
Grading: Your final grade will be calculated according to the
following breakdown:Weekly responses 15%Presentation 10%
Mini conference 15%
Final paper 60%
Weekly Schedule
January 4 : Introduction
January 11: Ngritude et pense anti-coloniale
Aim CsaireDiscours sur le colonialisme
Cahier dun retour au pays natal
January 18: La Ngritude au del de la Ngritude
Franz FanonLes damns de la terre, Slection, TBA
Peau Noire Masques Blancs, Slection, TBA
January 25: De la thorie postcolonialeHomi Bhabha
Race, Time, and the Revision of ModernityGayatri Spivak
Can the Subaltern Speak ?
February 1: Thorie postcoloniale et africanismesVincent
Mudimbe
The Invention of Africa
