Description
This specialisation concerns the “long durée” of Africa and the historical roots of current crises. Attention will be paid to the way in which people in Africa have developed ideas and mechanisms of power over time. Sometimes this has taken forms that Europeans can recognise as states, such as in the great empires of medieval Africa. At other times, power has been exercised through relations of kinship, dependency and slavery. Since the 19th century it has also been organised through bureaucracies originally introduced by Europeans: it is a point of debate whether and how colonial types of administration actually came to assimilate older indigenous techniques of domination, or whether the reverse has taken place.
Timetable
Mondays and Thursdays: Check on Blackboard
Method of Instruction
The course runs for three months, from January until March, consisting of three modules of four weekly blocks. A block consists of a presentation by one or more lecturers on the Monday (13.30- 17.00) after which precise assignments are handed out to students who have the time to work on them till the workshop meetings (13.30-17.00) on Thursday. They will draft a text of about three pages that serves as an aid-memoir for their presentation. Compulsory reading: 150 pages per week, supplemented with recommended reading that can be used for the assignments and the preparation for the individual research project. Through lectures, readings and assignments students will develop skills essential for locating and analyzing sources used in historical research.The course ends with presentations of the draft of the research proposal to a team of senior researchers.
Course objectives
On the basis of a thorough overview of recent debates and the current state of the study in this specialized field, students build up their own thematic specialization allowing them to prepare and formulate their future research project to be carried out in the third semester. The course prepares the students for the writing of his or her research proposal.
Required reading
To be announced on Blackboard
Examination
Weekly assignments, paper and draft of the research proposal
Blackboard
Information to be provided at the start of the course.