AFRAMER 209A: Africa Rising? New African Economies/Cultures and Their Global Implications Jump to Today

This course, which is offered every semester, is taught in conjunction with, and as part of, the African Studies Workshop at Harvard (ASW). It consists of two components: (i) a public session, held every Monday afternoon at 2.00-4.00, at which a speaker invited from outside the university, a member of the Harvard faculty, or an advanced graduate student will present a pre-circulated paper to an audience similarly composed of faculty, visiting scholars, students, and Africanists from other institutions in the greater Boston area. (The pre-circulated papers are usually sent out, latest, by the Wednesday before it is to be presented.) Each session includes a brief introduction to the paper by its author, a commentary by a discussant, and an open conversation, in which students are given the floor first, followed by anyone else present; (ii) an under/graduate student seminar component, to be held every Monday at 10.00-11.40, at which the instructors will introduce and contextualize the topic of the paper to be presented later in the day at the public session, after which members of the class will have an opportunity to discuss it in depth. (In some instances, texts relevant to the topic, drawn from the contemporary Africanist canon, will be suggested as supplementary reading.)

The theme of the course derives from a story in The Economist in 2011 under the title, “Africa Rising.” It argued that the continent has come to epitomize both the "transformative promise of [capitalist ] growth and its bleakest dimensions.” During the semester, we shall explore Africa’s changing place in the world – and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there; this in relation to the papers presented in the public sessions of the ASW. We shall also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere across the globe; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory and analysis about current conditions world-wide.

Participants in this under/graduate course are expected to attend each Monday morning meeting at 10.00-11.40, having read the paper to be presented later that day in the public session – which everyone taking the class is also expected to attend (unless, in exceptional circumstances, permission is given for an absence). From the second week onward, after the instructors’ introduction to the topic (see above), a group of three participants in the class will lead the discussion – giving a very brief account of the central argument of the paper, as well as criticisms and questions raised by it (but NOT a summary of its content, which everyone will have read) – while all other participants will be expected to come to the meeting having prepared at least one question to be shared with the class. Your question should be emailed to the instructors and TF before class, preferably by Sunday evening; if it is not discussed during the class, you will have an opportunity to ask it of the author her/himself at the afternoon session. [NOTE: Once we have the class register, members of the class will be allocated on a random basis to their discussion assignments for the semester. Each group of three assigned to any given week will be expected to get together remotely in the days before the class to discuss the reading, and to plan their contribution to the session.]

Grades will be determined by class participation, including discussion assignments, and by either (a) a term essay based on a reading of two or more of the ASW presentations or (b)  an independent research paper, the topic of which is to be discussed with the instructors or the TF by the eighth week of the semester. Those who wish to do so may also write a (voluntary) mid-term essay, based on a critical reading of one or two of the papers presented to the Workshop during the first half of the semester.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE ON REMOTE TEACHING:

This semester we shall, perforce, be holding all meetings remotely. (The times of the two sessions each Monday have been changed for this Fall from their traditional slots to accommodate the fact that we may well have students logging in from different and distant time zones.) This is not the first time the course has been taught remotely. It went on line for the second half of last semester, when we had 30 students in the class, and up to 75 attendees at the workshop sessions, some of them from Africa; by common agreement the transition turned out to be very successful. We hope that the same will apply this year. However, to accommodate the technology, and to ensure the success of the class, we offer a few guidelines: