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1. 112.658/7. Graduate Seminars in Modern European History
Approaches to African History
Liazzat J. K. Bonate
FALL 2013
Thursdays 2:00-5:00 PM
Office: Bldg. 7, R. 435
Tel.: 02-880-6227
Email: liazbonate@snu.ac.kr
Office hours: Tuesdays 2:00-3:00
and by appointment
Course Overview
This course will examine theoretical and methodological approaches to African history. It
intends to address such questions as: what are the particular challenges for researching and
writing African history? What kinds of methods have been developed and used by historians
to overcome those challenges? And, in which ways these approaches could be useful not only
for reconstructing and interpreting the history of Africa, but also the history of other regions?
African history posed specific challenges to scholars, in particular for the pre-colonial period,
related to the reliance of ‘conventional’ historians on archival and written sources. These
kinds of sources were hard to find for the pre-colonial period of African history, and scholars
began to introduce interdisciplinary methods, such as historical linguistics, oral traditions,
and ethnographic research. Thus, African history field became an exciting terrain for testing
groundbreaking methodology and analytical tools, which have been inevitably
interdisciplinary.
Specific learning goals for students are:
 to became acquainted with basic analytical and methodological tools for researching
African history;
 to acquire knowledge about interdisciplinary methods for historical research.
Evaluation
1. Regular attendance, diligent reading of the assigned material and regular participation in
class discussions -25%;
3. Mid-term essay - 30%
5. Final essay -- 45%
Course Schedule and Readings
Week 1 – Introduction
Week 2– Approaches to Africa
Reading
 Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa;

2. I. Pre-Colonial Africa
Week 3 – Historical Linguistics
Reading
 David L. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian Change and Social
Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century;
Week 4 – Oral History
Reading
 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History;
 Eric Hobsbaum and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition;
Week 5 – Trans-Saharan Trade
 Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and
Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa;
Week 6– Indian Ocean Trade
 Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: East African Consumerism and the
Genealogies of Globalization;
Week 7 – Slavery and Ethnicity
Reading
 Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, & Popular Consciousness
on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888;
Week 8– Mid-term, no classes
Mid-Term essay is due.
III. Colonialism
Week 9 – Christianity
Reading
 Paul Stuart Landau, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity
in a Southern African Kingdom;
Week 10– Colonial Medicine
Reading
 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and
Mobility in the Congo;
Week 11- Rumor and History
Reading
 Louise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa;
IV. Post-colonial History
Week 12 – Commoditization of Ethnicity?
Reading
 John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc.

3. Week 13 – The Limits of Historical Invention
Reading
 Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of
Historical Invention.
Week 14 – no classes, finalizing the essay.
Week 15 – final essay is due.