360°: African Traditions
Students will explore the ways in which African societies are trying to overcome colonial legacies, promote well-being, and contribute to fashioning our interconnected world.
Students will explore the ways in which African societies are trying to overcome colonial legacies, promote well-being, and contribute to fashioning our interconnected world.
In 2017, Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr founded the “ateliers de la pensée de Dakar,” bringing together local and diasporic thinkers to take a pluralistic look at the realities of the African continent and the possible futures. Inspired by these conversations, this cluster addresses the following questions: How do local healing and cultural traditions continue or change in our postcolonial world? What forms have they taken? How does the triple legacy of Islamization, Westernization, and Globalization play out in the health decisions and practices of West Africa today? Students will explore the ways in which African societies are trying to overcome colonial legacies, promote well-being, and contribute to fashioning our interconnected world.
Courses
This course, taught by Agnès Peysson-Zeiss, will borrow from Achille Mbembe's views of Africa in which it is decolonization that ushered a temporal rupture which made possible a wide array of futures for the continent. After an introduction on the history of the region (background, French influence and gender relations), the 360 students will be able to examine local and global knowledge and their potentialities on the ground through a variety of approaches that include healing practices related to well-being in various areas of life, through the arts, literature, music and film. It is this exchange with both diasporic and local artists and thinkers, through lectures, readings and workshops at Bryn Mawr and in Senegal that students will be able to find some of the answers this cluster is raising. They will investigate the consequences of decolonization into the present through a series of modules and examine the differences, consequences and overlap of all the knowledge.s, creativity and futures that exist on and for the continent.
In the recent decades, the world has experienced an increasing threat for public health from the emerging infectious diseases that have provoked epidemics and pandemics. The course will focus on the impact of epidemics and pandemics on cities in Africa. We will discuss the issues of public health history, social and cultural history of disease as well as the issues of the history of medicine. We will examine the histories of global initiatives to control disease in Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective (history, and social and biomedical sciences), using case studies from across the continent. We will explore various themes, such as the anxiety and panic caused by the disease outbreaks; the state, medical, and popular responses; the politics of disease control; the conflicts of interests between the interests of commerce, public health, and civil liberties; and the health disparities within cities. We will focus on the colonial and postcolonial cities in Africa. We will also explore the questions regarding the sources of African history and their quality. Taught by Kalala Ngalamulume.