This is not really a “maybe” course in that I’m teaching it this fall, but I’m at the stage of reworking the syllabus where a few final choices are crystallizing, which I thought might be interesting to go over.
In my department (and many other history departments), surveys are intended to be broad overviews of a particular period and place. They don’t have prerequisites, so they should provide something of an introduction to history as a discipline as well. At the same time, we have third and fourth-year students in our surveys who are just looking for a course that isn’t taught as a first-year introduction, some of whom are drawn to the class by an interest in the subject matter.
My survey courses are where I’m most invested in mastery of the content compared to the development of skills—they’re the only courses I teach where I have a conventional final exam at the end of the semester that I grade primarily with that objective in mind. I have to balance that against wanting the reading loads and writing work during the semester to be a bit less than what I would look for in a mid-level thematic class.
Many years ago when I started teaching at Swarthmore College, I tried teaching a survey course on all of sub-Saharan Africa since 1860 (essentially from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the present) and another survey from 800 CE to 1860 CE. After several iterations, I concluded that this just wasn’t going to work for me or my students, especially in the earlier of the two surveys, when “Africa” just is not a salient unit of analysis. I ended up trying to focus both courses on regional touchstones but even then (especially in the earlier class), trying to put something like the Empire of Mali and Senegambia in the frame with Swahili coastal society in East Africa and the formation of states and societies south of the Limpopo just didn’t work. I ended up reinforcing the sense that “Africa” was a country rather than a continent and students ended up having a good sense of processes and concepts but no sense at all of particular places, peoples, or events.
So I broke the surveys into regional and period-based chunks. There’s West Africa between 800-1800; Southern Africa from 1300 to the present; and a third that has oscillated between an East African survey from about 1200 to the present and a Central African survey that focuses tightly on the colonial and postcolonial era. That may seem to some people to be rather specialized for a “survey”, but many ostensibly “European” survey courses in many history departments are making similar choices when you look under the hood. (E.g., a 19th-20th C. class will often focus on nationalism, war and revolution and effectively privilege the Big Three of the UK, France and Germany; it’s a rare survey-level class that spends a lot of time in the Balkans, in Italy, in East-Central Europe or in Scandinavia.)
History 8A 2022 Draft
Reading loads: about 80-120 pages per week, mostly skimmable.
Here’s the major challenge. At this point in a syllabus build, as I try to finalize it, I’m generally editing down the readings to get to something realistic. Swarthmore students are generally able to handle a fair amount, and I spend a lot of time talking about techniques for skimming and triaging reading loads so that my expectations and aspirations are clearly laid out. But readings in any Africa-related class are ambitious because almost none of my students have any familiarity at all with any of these materials. The conceptual vocabulary is new to them, the places and place names aren’t known. I don’t want to make it easier by moving straight to talking about the Atlantic slave trade, either, which is at least something they know is important and consequential. This is an Africa-centered course, so I want them to understand what West Africa was before and without the Atlantic world.
Monday August 29th
Introduction and Overview
Review of Syllabus
Wednesday August 31st
Howard French, Born in Blackness
Pages 1-47
Discussion: African-centered history vs. Euro-centered history
So I’ve decided this semester to make that an active thematic problem to be worked a lot through our readings: what does it mean to understand West African history in this period in its own terms (if that’s possible) as opposed to in terms of what it means to us (whomever “we” are), with both frames being active and important? To that end, I’ve decided to start off with two weeks of reading Howard French’s new book Born in Blackness, which is very much about making sense of this period in terms of “us”. French is asking “Why don’t we know how important West and Central Africa were to European expansion? Why don’t we understand how different the early Atlantic world was from what came later? Why don’t we make our understanding of the Atlantic world include what was happening in West and Central Africa?”
That’s our introduction to the material: accessible, lucid, written from the perspective of contemporary American thinking, with an eye to what slavery and Africa mean (or don’t mean) to us right now.
Then we’ll go back into the same history, in a deeper dive that is more centered on West African societies in and of themselves.
This is most of French’s book, just skipping over the material on the plantation economies of the New World. That’s the kind of decision that comes up all the time in historical writing as well as teaching: you break apart things that arguably belong together. But this survey is not a survey of the Atlantic world nor is it of slavery and the slave trade per se. What you’re seeing here is a mirror in some sense of what early or colonial American and Latin American survey classes do, which is to extend into the Atlantic but typically stop at the coasts of West and Central Africa. More recently, there have been more scholars (like Michael Gomez, mentioned below) who can really represent Atlantic history with some attention to all its parts, and there’s an imaginable survey class for that too.
Monday Sept. 5
French, Born in Blackness
Pages 48-101
Discussion: What is the impact of this “untold story” being told?
Wednesday Sept. 7
French, Born in Blackness
Pages 102-167
Discussion: Wealth in persons vs. wealth in things
Monday Sept. 12
French, Born in Blackness
Pages 239-329
Discussion: Africa and the Atlantic world
Wed. Sept 14
Lecture: West Africa, 700-1300 CE
In the last part of my revisions, I’ll likely put more scheduled lectures into the final form of the syllabus. I generally only lecture formally in my survey classes, but I think I’m fairly proficient as a lecturer. This fall, after many years of asking, I’ve been given a time slot that the former Registrar inexplicably forbade anyone to use, a Monday-Wednesday 80-minute class. Previously I’ve had to do my surveys in MWF 50-minute chunks, which meant I generally either to lecture or to schedule a discussion. In this format, I think sometimes I’ll be able to schedule a 30-minute lead-in lecture and then turn to a targeted discussion where we’re working with a very particular section of the reading with a very particular goal.
Mon Sept 19
Michael Gomez, African Dominion, Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 3
Discussion: Academic writing and note-taking
FIRST PAPER ASSIGNMENT
Wed Sept 21
“Keita: The Heritage of the Griot”
Screening in-class
Start reading Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
Monday Sept 26
Niane, Sundiata
Wed Sept 28
Discussion: How to summarize a reading
Everybody should bring a two-paragraph summary of the key points in their assigned reading.
Jan Jansen, “Beyond the Mali Empire” (Half the class)
Patrick McNaughton, “The Semantics of Jugu Blacksmiths” (Half the class)
After two decades of teaching, I found out that having a group of students read different readings and then summarize their reading for the other groups actually has a formal name: “jigsaw reading”. It’s often associated with language instruction, but I find it a useful way to spread the material that students will be exposed to. The first reading on Sept. 28 will put the Mali Empire and Mande society into wider historiographical perspective; the second introduces the concept of Mande nyamakalaw, the so-called “artisan castes”.
I’ve taught several versions of the Sundiata (Sunjata) epic, and this older translation/transcription still works best. This time I’ll show the film “Keita” first in-class, which I think helps students understand the text better.
Gomez’ African Dominion is a great example of my dilemma when it comes to paring down reading. I want students to share my excitement about the book, which is one of several to really enrich the existing scholarship on the polities of the upper Niger between about 700 CE and 1500 CE. It’s going to be a challenging reading for them, and I will give them some instructions about how to break it down and skim it looking for highlights. But I don’t want to lose one of those chapters: they all seem to be necessary together—the Prologue and Chapter 1 set up Chapter 3, which is where those most discussable material is.
Monday October 3
Lecture: The early Atlantic
Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Chapter 1
Discussion: Compare Green and French
Wednesday October 5
Lecture: Summaries of politics and political economies, circa 1400 CE
Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Senegambia
The Forest-Savanna States
Commonalities and divergences
First paper due by 5pm
FALL BREAK
It took me a while to be fully attentive to aligning the workflow of the syllabus with major due dates—to lighten reading loads or other work as the due date for writing approaches. The paper will be short (2-3 pages) and likely focused on the Sundiata epic. I tend to write essay prompts new each time I teach a class, even one like this that I’ve taught before—I want the prompts to feel like they arise out of the particular version of a syllabus. I don’t have the same concerns that some professors have about plagiarized essays for a variety of reasons: I teach subject matter that’s heavily under-represented in higher education, my college’s students generally are motivated and capable writers. But also not reusing prompts ever is a good habit in this respect.
Monday Oct 17
Lecture: The Spread of Islam and Non-Islamic Spirituality in West Africa
Rudolph Ware, The Walking Qur’an, Chapter 2
Discussion: Interpreting spiritual belonging
In-class viewing: scenes from Ceddo
Wed Oct 19
Ivor Wilks, “Mentally Mapping Greater Asante”
Discussion: How to represent boundaries, scale and power
Monday Oct 24
Ogundiran, The Yoruba, Chapter 1-2
Wednesday Oct 26
Ogundiran, The Yoruba, Chapter 5-6
Monday Oct 31
Oriji, Political Organization In Nigeria, Chapter 1
Discussion: The problem of names and typologies
Wed November 2
The Diary of Antera Duke (as much as you can manage)
Ogundiran’s book is another giving me fits in terms of trying to shave it down. I want all of the material I’ve assigned here to get into play, but it’s a lot to read. This is probably the most ambitious section of the course in terms of content, but I might stand pat as it is here. One alternative is for me to lecture out the content in the first part of Ogundiran and have them read 5 and 6 over the whole week.
The Antera Duke diary is also challenging but here I just want them all to get enough of a representative chunk of it that they can talk about what you might learn from it as a source. I’ll certainly do a 20-30 minute lecture to cover the preparatory material associated with the diary. I do like doing this now and again of giving students a piece of archival evidence “cold” and asking them to read it without the background just to give them some sense of the raw experience of finding material during research where you don’t know at first what’s going on in it.
Mon Nov 7
Randy Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, Chapter 1-2
Wed Nov 9
Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, Chapter 4
This is also a lot to read but I think we can spend a good week here. What I feel bad about is that this is usually the point in the course where we read something about how the Atlantic slave trade worked that includes the Atlantic and the plantation complex in the New World—I’ve used Robert Harms’ The Diligent and Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship before and they’ve worked beautifully. But this time I think I’m going to cover this material in a big lecture so that the reading stays really focused on what happened in West Africa, following the big theme of what an Africa-centered version of this history looks like.
Mon Nov 14
Lecture: Dahomey and Benin
“The Woman King” (if it’s available for streaming by then)
I doubt the film will be available to me. There’s reading on both Dahomey and Benin that I like, but this is where I begin to ease the throttle to help students focus on the second paper (probably focused on the Antera Duke diary and Randy Sparks’ book).
Over the years, I’ve gotten a better sense of what kinds of workload students are facing in other courses, and I know that as we lead up to Thanksgiving, they’re really struggling. Students who are feeling completely underwater in STEM classes that are important to their personal and professional aspirations are particularly stressed out at this point. So I try to ease up a bit in my own courses around this time.
Wed Nov 16
Lecture: The consequences of the slave trade for West Africa
Mon Nov 21
Lecture: End of the slave trade/abolition
Tues Nov 22
Second paper due by 5pm
Wed Nov 23
NO CLASS
This is me surrendering on the issue of the Wednesday class before Thanksgiving. I know I have colleagues who would see that as something of a betrayal on my part—it’s not an official part of break—but the fact is that you’re going to lose a big chunk of your class regardless unless you really hardass it up and put an important quiz or something on that day.
Mon Nov 28
Lisa Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds, pp. 1-107
Wed Nov 30
Lisa Lindsay, Atlantic Bonds, pp. 108-236
Mon Dec 5
Discussion: Agency, responsibility, causality
Wed Dec 7
Discussion: Memory, meaning, reparations
FINAL EXAM
Lisa Lindsay’s book is the most reading we’ll do in a single week, but I think it reads well, with a strong narrative flow to it, and I think it beautifully sets up our final week of discussions. That week will also consist of a review of the final exam, which will be in my usual format—a mix of identifications taken from reading and a choice of essay prompts. I may do the essays as a take-home, open-book exercise.
I would be interested in your thoughts on some of the aspects that this "what are we reading"-focused discussion doesn't cover. Eg, why teach a survey course? What are you hoping students learn/take away from the course? Or, at the other end, how much lecture do you do, and why? How much writing do you ask of them, and why?
I admire how attentive you are to student workloads and bandwidth and setting them up to do their best work through careful, thoughtful course planning.