Africa and the West: From Monologue to Dialogue

Course Description

This course surveys interactions between the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa and the West.  For centuries the arena for the European and American slave trade, this region became the focus of abolitionist and evangelical fervor (in particular in Britain) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, then as the 19th century wore on it came increasingly to seem the West’s imaginative antithesis, its Other – a place of savagery, madness, disease, death; in short, the “Dark Continent,” a designation that marks Western attitudes to this day.  The 20th century saw a gradual shift in these attitudes, as painters, musicians, writers, and other artists began to acknowledge (and borrow from) the artists of Africa and its diaspora.  Increasingly, too, Africans and people of African descent emerged as significant players on the world political stage, both as spokespeople and – with the wave of decolonization that began in the late 1950s – as symbols of hope for colonized and oppressed peoples around the world. We follow this trajectory through a series of influential and/or representative readings.  You can expect to encounter a sampling of early slave narratives, travel narratives by figures like Henry Morton Stanley (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”), a variety of artistic works (poetry, novels, and/or plays, as well as music and paintings), and accounts of revolutions and human rights campaigns (including the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Council hearings of the post-apartheid South Africa).