Writing African History: Beginnings, Methods, and Debates
HIST 1900
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
This course focuses on the development of African history as a field in the academic discipline of history. History developed as an archive-based discipline in nineteenth-century Europe with an emphasis on written records and European ideas of human progress. The German philosopher Hegel would opine that: “Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Such commentators usually excluded Egypt from the rest of Africa, ignored Africa’s rich oral histories, and the Islamic intellectual tradition that had flourished in West Africa from the sixteenth century. The field of African history emerged during European decolonization, and the first generation of African historians obtained their doctorates from European universities in the 1950s and 1960s. They were tasked with writing new histories for new nations, they partnered with African political leaders to make the continent the center of African studies, and they sought to reconstruct a useable past and to expand the evidentiary base of historical writing. We will examine the beginnings, methods, and debates that have shaped the writing of African history: recovering the histories of precolonial states; arguing the Africanness of Egypt; interrogating the origins and nature of slavery and slave trade in Africa; examining the impact of colonialism; and the decolonial imperative that has shaped African historical writing to the present.
Course Notes
This course meets the "Beyond North America" History Concentration requirement and can count towards the seminar requirement. Former course number "Hist 2708."
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
