General Background Reading

Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: African in the philosophy of culture, London 1992

Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State, Harvard 2014

Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: the past of the present, Cambridge 2002

John Parker and Richard Rathbone, African History: a very short introduction, Oxford, 2007

John Iliffe, Africans: the history of a continent, Second edition, Cambridge 2007.

Richard J. Reid, A history of modern Africa, 1800 to present, 2nd edition, Oxford 2011

Crawford Young, The Postcolonial state in Africa, Madison, 2012

Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines, New Brunswick 2002

Stanford University has a very good gateway to internet resources on Africa: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/guide.html

Readings for week 4 (October 1)

Susan Vogel , Dogon sculpture (in AFRICAN ARTS) – this is available, along with other readings on: http://www.learn.columbia.edu/africa/html/library.html

Patrick McNaughton and Diane Peirine, Art, Art History and the Study of Africa: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo-9780199846733-0017.xml

Allen C Roberts, Arts of C Africa http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo-9780199846733-0126.xml

(both of these are online in OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES)

 

Questions:

How can we use the ‘art’ of precolonial Africa to think about political, social and moral systems on the continent and changes within these? What are the problems associated with the conceptualisation of objects as ‘art’, as ‘artefact’, as ‘totem’?