Semester:
Offered:
Professor, John Mugane
Monday & Wednesday 10:30-11:45am
This course is an introduction to Africans through African languages and cultures. The course explores how sub-Saharan Africans use language and cultural production to understand, organize, and transmit indigenous knowledge about the world to each other and to successive generations. Language serves as a road map to comprehending how social, political, and economic processes like kinship structures, the evolution of political offices, trade relations, and environmental knowledge develop. Oral histories and cultural and intellectual products like novels, music, poems, essays, films, and photographs offer opportunities to open eyes to, interact with, listen and speak to, and think alongside Africans they entrepreneurs, artists, authors, teachers, thinkers as they uncover, communicate, and debate the major topics and issues facing African societies and people today.
As a Social Engagement course, AAAS 20 will wed scholarly inquiry and academic study to practical experience and personal involvement in the community. Students will be given the opportunity to study Africans, their languages, and their cultures from the ground up, not only through textbooks and data sets but through personal relationships, cultural participation, and inquisitive explorations of local African heritage communities with Harvard's African Language Program instructors as guides. Throughout the semester you will be asked to employ video production, ethnographic research, creative writing, “social-portraiture,” GIS mapping, and linguistic study as you engage with Africans, their languages, and their cultures. By examining individual lives of select Africans, linguistic debates, cultural traditions and interrogating their import in the daily lives of Boston-area Africans, we hope to bridge the divide between grand theories and everyday practices, between intellectual debates and the lived experiences of individuals, between the American academy and the African world. Ultimately, this course aims to see and present Africans themselves as visible, audible and coherent articulators at the center of professional work and disciplinary study of Africa.