We’re in the middle of a job search and I’ve been really enthralled by listening to all the candidates talking about their syllabi and their teaching.
This always pushes me to think about my own classes over the last three decades. I’ve never really taught the same class twice in the sense that I usually make major changes to the syllabus even for courses that retain the same title and basic subject matter. But I also have a kind of “pop-up” approach to thematic classes. I teach them once and often that’s it. There will be something about the class that doesn’t grab me or that I think didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, so I move on to the next idea. I’m not very patient about working the kinks out of a class that doesn’t go the way I imagined it might.
In 2015, I taught a course that was intended on one hand to put some narratives by travellers and explorers to Africa into play, without that being the only thing the course was doing. The other half was designed to talk about Africans as travellers in the world outside the continent and as travellers or explorers within the continent, as migrants, hunters, and diplomats. I wanted to take advantage of new scholarship on Africans in Europe before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, but also to just foreground Africans as travellers even within the Atlantic world.
I think it was just too conceptual to work as an undergraduate class. I think it might work as a graduate-level reading group, where everyone was bringing in new material and the whole group could push at ideas about travel, exploration, space, migration, etc. My students in 2015 played along with me because they could see I was excited by a lot of the readings, but I could really feel that they had a hard time grasping what we were doing. I also muddied the waters by assigning people a complicated set of pre-structured roles in class discussion, which turned out to also be way too meta to work well. Then to make it worse we were doing a fair amount of what’s called “jigsaw reading” where different members of the class read different things and had to report out on those to the whole class. Way, way, WAY too many moving parts.
You can see in the syllabus below that the travels to Africa material got the short shrift—it’s basically ibn Battuta, Mungo Park and then some very recent material. I don’t know that I’d be comfortable teaching a course that was just about African explorer narratives at this point, despite the fact that they’re an interesting set of primary materials. That might be how I’d teach them, in fact—as tools for training students in how to ‘read against the grain’, more as a workshop in historical interpretation and research and less as a study of explorers as such. But there is also the frame that Fabian offers in Out of Their Minds, which is that the period from Mungo Park up to the 1870s or so has a lot of Europeans present in Africa who are basically testing out framings of racial domination and colonial power in their narratives but who are also travelling in territories unambiguously under African sovereignty and the instability of their attempts to manage that gap through their published narratives. That might be enough to make a class work out. Or not. I keep thinking of a course my kid took in college not long ago where they read the canon of imperial literature, where part of the problem was that much of it is in literary terms pretty bad and much of it is interesting mostly for its instrumental uses and its dissemination of racial tropes. The main problem is that after a while, that’s a monotonous conversation to keep having in a class—you either need a way to move to more complicated or contradictory texts or to some contrasting or alternative literary discourse. (Say, jumping from H.Rider Haggard to A Passage to India and Mister Johnson and then maybe after that A Bend in the River and The Heart of the Matter.)
For all that this course didn’t work, though, I’m still kind of in love with what I was trying to do, and with a lot of these readings. (I desperately want to find another excuse to teach My Friend the Mercenary, which is a fascinating and totally fucked-up book.)
History 90H
Africans Explore/Africa Explored
Fall 2015
Professor Timothy Burke
This course is a conceptual evolution of a class that I have taught here for some years on the history of how “Africa” has been imagined and represented in global culture. One dimension of this class is a narrowing of focus around that same history down to the experiences of travellers, wanderers, migrants and explorers within the African continent and in moving to and from Africa. We will be thinking about what they saw and how they saw it, and how the social circumstances and cultural foundations of their travel were visible (or concealed) through their journeys. In particular, we’ll be thinking this semester about how “Africa” as a place has been imagined through and within the accounts of travel and movement, and whether there are alternative histories lying within those accounts.
In addition, however, this course offers a consideration of the concepts of travel and exploration themselves. We will be asking whether “travel” is always a word that is linked to power and wealth. Can we talk about Africans (whether within Africa, or in the African diaspora) having been explorers or travellers? Does reclaiming these words “provincialize the West” in some productive fashion, is this a way of “hacking” world history to see experiences that previous narratives have obscured? Is it important to view the African diaspora as something other than a modern phenomenon, or merely the consequence of the transatlantic slave trade? Or should we use some other vocabulary when we talk about both the voluntary and involuntary journeys of Africans themselves? Is “exploration” always a contaminated concept?
How about exploration by other peoples, particularly Europeans, within Africa? Can we (and should we) try to read this history of travel and observation as more than just an integral part of the exploitation and conquest of African societies? Is there something to the idea of exploration that’s legitimately attractive or inspiring, no matter who does it or the circumstances of its doing?
Assignments and Grading
History 90H is not intended as an introductory course, so while I have no expectation of prior familiarity with African history or the history of Western imperialism, I do expect students in the course to be able to bring some distinctive skills and knowledge to bear from other coursework or experiences they have had while enrolled at Swarthmore.
Reading
This class involves a substantial amount of reading, with much of our work focused on primary texts and source materials. We will be doing a significant amount of “jigsaw reading” in which half the class will be reading one assignment and the other half reading a different assignment. What this primarily implies is that students should be prepared to provide rough summaries of the content of their reading for the benefit of other members of the course.
Discussion Preparation
In addition to being able to summarize the reading, students must also prepare each week (e.g., for one of our two class sessions in a given week) one question that they believe should come up in discussion and write this question down before class. This question should be brought to class. Questions can range from simple requests for additional information about some aspect of the readings to an ambitious interpretation or provocation aimed at the material.
During the semester, individual students will sometimes be assigned a fixed (but rotating) role to play in discussion. These roles are: Wikipedian, Bibliographer, Enthusiast, Skeptic, So What? and Meta. I will explain more about these roles during our first class session and distribute a guide to each role.
Writing
We will be writing three papers, each of which will involve a limited amount of additional reading or very constrained research. The first paper will be 5-6 pages in length; the second and third will be 7-10 pages each.
Our first paper will involve engaging an additional reading provided by the professor that extends and complicates our readings from the week of September 16th. The second paper will involve working with an exploration narrative of the student’s choice (a long list of suggested titles will be provided) and is due November 23rd. The third paper involves working with several works of theory and historiographical commentary and is due Friday December 11th.
Tuesday Sept. 1st
Introduction
Exploration, Travel, Migration, Discovery
Thursday Sept. 3
Dane Kennedy, Introduction, Reinterpreting Exploration (Available on Moodle)
Stewart Weaver, Exploration: A Very Short Introduction, Chapter 1 “What Is and Is Not Exploration” and Chapter 2, “The Peopling of the Earth” (Available as ebook on Tripod)
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, pp. 3-12 (Available on Moodle)
The Bantu Migrations and They Came Before Columbus
Tuesday September 8th
Thomas Spear, “Oral Traditions: Whose History?”, History in Africa , 1981, (Available on JSTOR)
OR
David William Cohen, “The Undefining of Oral Tradition”, Ethnohistory, 1989, (Available on JSTOR)
AND
Harold Scheub, ed., “The Twin Brothers”, in African Tales (Available as ebook on Tripod)
David William Cohen, Towards a Reconstructed Past, “Daudi Waiswa” and “Daudi Gahole Kaima” (Available on Moodle)
Thursday September 10th
Jan Vansina, Paths Through the Rainforest, Chap. 2 (Available on Moodle)
AND
Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu Peoples, Ch. 2 (Available as ebook on Tripod)
Tuesday September 15th
Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, pp. 37-70. (Available on Moodle)
AND
De Montellano et al, “They Were NOT Here Before Columbus”, Ethnohistory 44:2, 1997. JSTOR
“Tudor Parfitt’s Remarkable Quest” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/tudor-parfitts-remarkable-quest.html
AND
H. Soodyall, “Lemba Origins Revisited”, South African Medical Journal (just the abstract, available via Tripod)
The African Diaspora Before the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Thursday September 17
Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers in Renaissance Venice”, Renaissance Quarterly, 2013 (Available via Tripod)
OR
Aurelia Casares, “Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada”, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Available via Moodle)
Tuesday September 22
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africansindianocean/essay-south-asia.php
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30391686
AND
Li Anshan, “African Diaspora in China”, Journal of Pan African Studies, May 2015 (Available via Tripod)
OR
Ghada Talhami, “The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1977 (Available via Tripod)
OR
Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail, Chapter Three (Available via Moodle)
The Middle Passage
Thursday September 24
Randy Sparks, Two Princes of Calabar
Tuesday September 29
Oladauh Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, Chapters 1-3 (Available as ebook on Tripod)
OR
Alexander Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, Introduction and Conclusion (Available as ebook on Tripod)
OR
Mariano Candido, “Different Slave Journeys”, Slavery and Abolition, 2010 (available on JSTOR)
Living in the Metropole
Thursday October 1
Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus
First paper based on Keita, “Long View of Historical Interaction”, due Monday October 5
Tuesday October 6
Veit Erlmann, “’Spectatorial Lust’: The African Choir in England, 1891-1893” in Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage (Available on Moodle)
OR
Walter Williams, “Ethnic Relations of African Students in the United States With Black Americans, 1870-1900”, Journal of Negro History, 65:3 1980 (Available on Tripod)
Reversing Sail
Thursday October 8
James Campbell, Middle Passages, Chapter 4-5 (Available on Moodle)
FALL BREAK
Tuesday October 20
Kevin Gaines, African Americans in Ghana, Chapter 2 and 3 (Available on Moodle)
AND
Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail, Chapter Seven (Available on Moodle)
Circulations
Thursday October 22
Bernard Dadie, An African in Paris, selection (Available on Moodle)
AND
Janet McGaffey, Congo/Paris, short selection (Available on Moodle)
OR
Paul Lee, “The Making of a Pan-Africanist: Kwame Nkrumah in America”, Michigan Citizen, 2001 (Available on Tripod)
AND
Jessica Allina-Pisano, Eric Allina-Pisano , "’Friendship of Peoples’ after the fall: violence and pan-African community in post-Soviet Moscow, in Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa (Available on Moodle)
Tuesday October 27
Manthia Diawara, We Won’t Budge
Thursday Oct 29
Diawara, continued
Start discussing What is the What
Tuesday November 3
Eggers, What is the What
Thursday November 5
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/things-every-african-immigrant-can-relate-to
http://www.africanimmigrant.ca/
http://africasacountry.com/2013/06/senegalese-award-winner-tells-france-to-shove-it/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Zambians-In-America/138131302946595
http://www.mzansigirl.com/
“Back From South” on YouTube
“My American Husband 1” on YouTube
(I will make some distribution of all this so that you are not all looking at all of this material.)
Week 9:
Early Travels to Africa
Tuesday November 10
“The Emperor’s Giraffe”, Natural History, 1992 (available on Tripod)
AND
Robin Derricourt, Inventing Africa, pp. 1-17 (available on Moodle)
AND
Ibn Battuta, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, short selection (available on Moodle)
19th Century Explorers
Thursday November 12
Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa
Tuesday November 17
Park, continued
Johannes Fabian, Out of their Minds, short selection (Available on Moodle)
Thursday November 19
Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa
Second paper due Monday November 23 5pm
Tuesday November 24
http://www.rangerdiaries.com/
http://www.brightcontinent.co.za/
http://travelingafrica.blogspot.com/
http://www.updmedia.com/africa/
More in class
THANKSGIVING
Tuesday December 1
James Brabazon, My Friend the Mercenary
Thursday December 3
Brabazon, continued
Tuesday December 8
Sarah Erdman, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha
Final paper due Friday December 11th, 5pm.
Image credit: Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash