Material Culture and Africa's Neglected

For many centuries, historians have adhered to an unwritten rule – history is made by using textual documents. But how can we uncover the histories of those not included in the textual sources, and how can we complement and enrich the textual archives? This course interrogates one answer to these questions – that of material culture, and narrate the history of Africa through things. Borrowing methods from a variety of disciplines, most notably women’s and gender studies, anthropology, archaeology, and art history, historians have begun to use artifacts and objects to uncover the untold historical narratives. The course refers to the entire African continent, challenging the common division between North Africa (which is usually more closely associated with the Middle East in modern scholarship) and Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as many other divisions. In response to its decades-long marginalization in modern scholarship, Africa, in all its various subdivisions, is places at the center. As the course unfolds, the centrality of Africa in the international movement of things will become clear.