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Anthropology Department

Brandeis University

Spring 2014

ANTHROPOLOGY 133b

Colonialism and Postcoloniality in Africa: Encounters and Dilemmas

Janet McIntosh

Class:Monday and Wednesday 2:00-3:20, Lown 203

Instructor:Dr. Janet McIntosh

Office location: Brown 207

Mailbox location: Brown 229

Office number: 781-736-2215

Email:

Janet’s office hours: Monday and Wednesday 12:30-1:30, by appointment

TA: Jara Connell ().

Course Description:

This class uses an anthropological lens to explore thecross-cultural encounters, clashes, dilemmas, and representations of colonialism and post-coloniality in sub-Saharan Africa. The focal point will be British colonialism, but there will be some comparative discussion of other colonialisms, particularly French and Afrikaner. Topics include: colonial racism and the “civilizing mission”; missionary encounters as cultural encounters; African experiences of colonial medicine and colonial psychiatry; miscegenation and European anxiety about the so-called “black peril”; colonial psychologies; colonial ideologies surrounding “animal cruelty,” dress, and servants; the impact of “Indirect Rule”; African nationalism and resistance movements (special case study: the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya); the post-colonial politics of land alienation (special case study: Zimbabwe); African memories of colonialism; whites in Africa today; and contemporary dilemmas surrounding modernities, globalization, and development.

The learning objectives of this course dovetail with two concerns central to contemporary anthropology: cross-cultural encounters/misunderstandings, and the ways in which power asymmetries are enacted, experienced, resisted, and represented in such encounters. Through an anthropological approach to colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, we explore radically different cultural assumptions (European and African) regarding matters ranging from religion, health, property ownership, gender, the body, and even love. Also in an anthropological vein, we will examine how colonial inequality was grounded in meaning-making, including racial and racist ideologies and colonial misunderstandings of the sociocultural arrangements they encountered in Africa. We will learn about different modes of resistance, ranging from political organization to subtler weapons of the weak. We will also examine the crises of conscience and defensive maneuvers among elite groups (colonial Europeans and contemporary white Africans) confronted by resistance and critique. And, examining some themes of post-coloniality in Africa, we probe about the family resemblance between colonial upheavals and contemporary agendas (“modernization,” “development”), as well as the complex, ambivalent, and diverse ways in which Africans have responded to these changes. Along the way, students will explore the anthropological theme of how macro-level political arrangements ripple into the minutiae of daily experience and meaning-making, and vice-versa. Your own participation, including leading class discussions, will be crucial to this class. (Note: this course is cross-listed in Anthropology and AAAS. It also counts toward Brandeis’ Non-Western and Comparative Studies requirement.)

Course Requirements:

1)Class attendance.

2)Participation and class facilitation. Participation in this class will require dedication, since I’ll count on you not only to keep abreast of the readings but also to engage with them deeply, striving to comprehend and question them.

As part of your participation, students will rotate through what I call a “panel of experts.” When it’s your turn on the panel (comprised of about 4-5 students), you and your fellow experts will be responsible for not only mastering the readings for the week, but also responding to a selection of questions about the readings posed by your peers (and probably a prompt from me as well). This will probably mean conducting some library/external research on the topics at hand. In class, your task will be to respond to those questions (as a group)…you can do this conversationally, or in terms or an organized presentation involving visual/other aids. Details to be provided—and we will fine-tune the process as we go!

3)Contributions to 3 Latte Forums (Fora?)over the course of the semester

4)15-20 page final essay

(Note: Graduate students are required to compose a longer final paper; 30-ish pages.)

Grading:

-Class attendance: 10%.

-Participation and class facilitation: 30%. This grade will be established on the basis of the quality of your contributions to discussions and class facilitation (on the “panels of experts”).

-Latte Forum contributions: 30% (10% per forum)

-Final essay: 30%

Policy on Attendance:

Attendance is mandatory and will be factored into your grade (see above). Each student is permitted no more than one excused absence; absences beyond that will require a make-up exercise so as not to hurt your attendance grade.

Required readings:

There are no books to purchase for this course. Course materials are (or will soon appear) on LATTE.

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY: You may only submit your own original work in this course. Please be careful to cite precisely and properly the sources of all authors and persons you have drawn upon in your written work. Please take special care to indicate the precise source of all materials found on the web, indicating the correct URL address of any material you have quoted or in any way drawn upon. Plagiarism (from published or internet sources, or from another student) is a serious violation of academic integrity.Remember, you must indicate through quotations and citation when quoting from any outside source (internet or print).

ACCOMMODATIONS: If you are a student with a documented disability on record at Brandeis University and wish to have a reasonable accommodation made for you in this class, please contact me as soon as possible.

ELECTRONIC DEVICES:Laptops are allowed solely for purposes of taking notes. Please disable internet access during class or simply refrain from using the internet. If the internet is too tempting, please take notes by hand.

READING LIST

Mon Jan 13, Wed Jan 15th:

WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION: COURSE THEMES, PRE-COLONIAL AFRICA

  • Parker, John and Richard Rathbone. 2007. Ch. 1, “The Idea of Africa,” and Ch. 5, “Colonialism in Africa,” in African History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Pp. 1-24, 91-113.
  • Wilson, Christopher. 1952. Excerpts from Before the Dawn in Kenya. Nairobi: The English Press, Ltd.

Mon Jan 20th: MLK day; no class

Wed Jan 22nd:

WEEK 2: IMPERIAL REPRESENTATIONS

  • Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1991. “Africa Observed: Discourses of the Colonial Imagination,” in Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, Vol. I.University of Chicago Press. p. 86-125.

McClintock, Anne. 1995. Excerpt from “The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge. Pp. 21-56.

Youtube videos:

“The Victorian View of Non-Europeans”

“Colonialism: Sins of Europe in the Scramble for Africa”

Mon Jan 27th, Wed Jan 29th:

WEEK 3: MISSIONARY ENCOUNTERS AS CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

  • Price, Richard. 2008. “The Making of Missionary Culture,” and “Cultural Encounters: The Destabilization of Missionary Culture,” in Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth Century Africa. Cambridge University Press.Pp. 16-38, 57-92.
  • Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 1997. Ch. 2, “Preachers and Prophets: The Domestication of the Sacred Word,” and Ch. 3, “Cultivation, Colonialism, and Christianity,” in Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2.University of Chicago Press. p. 63-165.

Mon Feb 3rd, Wed Feb 5th:

WEEK 4: POLLUTION, PATHOLOGY, and DANGER: COLONIAL MEDICINE AND COLONIAL PSYCHIATRY

Missionary Medicine:

  • Vaughan, Megan. 1991. “The Great Dispensary in the Sky: Mission Medicine,” in Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford University Press. Pp. 55-76.
  • Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 1997. “The Medicine of God’s Word,” in Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2.University of Chicago Press. pp. 323-364

African Experiences of Colonial Medicine, Colonial Psychiatry

  • White, Luise. 2000. “‘Bandages on Your Mouth’: The Experience of Colonial Medicine in East and Central Africa,” in Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. University of California Press. Pp. 89-121.
  • Vaughan, Megan. 1991. “The Madman and the Medicine Man: Colonial Psychiatry and the Theory of Deculturation,” in Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford University Press. Pp.100-128.

FRIDAY FEB 7th: 1st FORUM POSTING DUE

Mon Feb 10th, Wed Feb 12th:

WEEK 5: RACE, SEGREGATION, and BODY POLITICS

  • Kennedy, Dane. 1987. “Black Perils” and “Racial Boundaries” in Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939. Duke University Press. Pp. 128-166.
  • Hansen, Karen Tranberg. “Body Politics: Sexuality, Gender, and Domestic Service in Zambia.” in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation. Eds. Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner. New York: Blackwell. Pp. 550-564.
  • Conklin, Alice. 1998. “Redefining ‘Frenchness’: Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa, 1914-1940” in Domesticating the Empire: Race Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, Eds. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda. Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia. Pp. 65-83.
  • Thomas, Lynn. 1998. “Imperial Concerns and ‘Women’s Affairs’: State Efforts to Regulate Cliterodectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, c.1910-1950,” Journal of African History 39(1)

No class Feb 17-21st

Mon Feb 24th, Wed Feb 26th:

WEEK 6: COLONIAL MENTALITIES

  • Dinesen, Isak. 1992[1937]. Chapters 1, 2, and (half of) 3, Out of Africa. Random House.
  • Thiong’o, NgugiWa. 1997. “Detained: A Prison Writer’s Diary,” in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher Burghard Steiner, eds.. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Pp. 613-623.
  • Shadle, Brett. 2012. “Cruelty and Empathy, Animals and Race in Colonial Kenya.” Journal of Social History45: 1097-1116.
  • Memmi, Albert. 1991[1965]. “The colonizer who refuses,” “The colonizer who accepts,” in The Colonizer and the Colonized. Beacon Press. pp. 19-76.
  • Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 1997. “Fashioning the Colonial Subject: The Empire’s Old Clothes,” in Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. 2.University of Chicago Press. pp. 218-276

Mon March 3rd, Wed March 5th:

WEEK 7: MODES OF AFRICAN AGENCY: INDIRECT RULE, AFRICAN NATIONALISM, AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

  • Osbourn, Emily L. 2003. “‘Circle of Iron’: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of ColonialRule in French West Africa”, Journal of African History 44(1): 29-50
  • Geschiere, Peter. 1993. “Chiefs and Colonial Rule in Cameroon: Inventing Chieftaincy, Frenchand British Style,” Africa 63(2):
  • Parker, John and Richard Rathbone. 2007. “Imagining the Future, Rebuilding the Past,” in African History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Pp. 114-134.
  • Rodney, Walter. 1997. “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” excerpted in Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner, eds. Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation. Blackwell. Pp. 585-596.
  • Fanon, Frantz. 2004[1963]. Excerpts fromThe Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. pp. 35-55, 249-51, 289-310.

FRIDAY MARCH 7th: 2nd FORUM POSTING DUE

Mon March 10th, Wed March 12th:

WEEK 8: LOYALISM, RESISTANCE, NATIONALISM: A CASE STUDY in MAU MAU

  • Anderson, David. 2005. “’Parasites in Paradise: Race, Violence, and Mau Mau.” Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
  • Berman, Bruce. 1997. "Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Modernity: The Paradox of MauMau", in Roy Richard Grinker and Christopher B. Steiner, eds. Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation. Blackwell. Pp. 653-670.
  • John Lonsdale, 1990. “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,”Journal of African History, 31(3): 393-421
  • Anderson, David. 2005. “Spoils of War: Decolonizing Kenya, Memorializing Mau Mau.” Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Students will review and “show and tell” contemporary news coverage in Kenya and the UK concerning the June 2013 ruling in London’s High Court that Mau Mau Veterans deserve monetary compensation and an apology.

VIDEOS:

News clips of the time at:

John Nottingham, colonial official who broke away:

Mon March 17th, Wed March 19th:

WEEK 9: THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION: LAND REFORM IN ZIMBABWE

Readings:

  • First 5 pages of “Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe.” 2002. Human Rights Watch Vol. 14 No. 1. (You’re welcome to skim further as well, if you’re interested in more detail.)
  • Hanlon, Joseph, Jeannette Manjengwa, and Theresa Smart. 2012. Chapter 1, “Veterans and Land,” in Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land. Kumarian Press.
  • Polgreen, Lydia. 2012. “In Zimbabwe Land Takeover, A Golden Lining.” New York Times.
  • Scoones, Ian, Nelson Marongwe, BlasioMavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba, ChrispenSukume. 2010. Chapter 1, “Livelihoods and Land Reform in Zimbabwe.” Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities. James Currey.
  • Please watch in full the feature-length film “Mugabe and the White African” (youtube link is in latte with the readings). I recommend you do the readings first for context; I’m assigning this video—which was heralded in the West but tells only one side of a complicated story—so that we can discuss the politics of representing land reform.

Mon March 24th, Wed March 26th:

WEEK 10: WHITES IN AFRICA TODAY

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

  • Vice, Samantha. 2010. “How do I live in this strange place?” Journal of Social Philosophy. 41(3): 323-342.
  • Harding, Jeremy. 1999. “Picking up the Pieces.” New York Times, May 30th, 1999.

(Please read the review article. The article includes a link to the first chapter of AntjieKrog’s “Country of my Skull,” which is optional.)

Guilt, Denial, Identity in Kenya

  • McIntosh, Janet. N.d. ““Land, Belonging, and Structural Oblivion among Contemporary White Kenyans” (manuscript submitted to Africa)
  • McIntosh, Janet. In Press. “Linguistic Atonement: Penitence and Privilege in White Kenyan Language Ideologies.” Anthropological Quarterly.
  • McIntosh, Janet. 2006. “’Going Bush’: Black Magic, White Ambivalence, and Boundaries of Belief in Post-Colonial Kenya.” Journal of Religion in Africa 36(3-4): 254-295.

Mon March 31st, Wed April 2nd:

WEEK 11: POSTCOLONIAL DILEMMAS

Colonial Memory

VIDEO: “Les MaitresFous,” by Jean Rouche

  • Stoller, Paul. 1995. “Embodied Memories: Mimesis and Spirit Possession,” in Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession and the Hauka in West Africa. Routledge. Pp. 37-48.
  • Parker, John and Richard Rathbone. 2007. “Memory and Forgetting, Past and Future” in African History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. Pp. 135-149.

Witchcraft, Modernity, Uncertainty

  • Ashforth, Adam. 2001.“On living in a world with witches: everyday epistemology and spiritual insecurity in a modern African city (Soweto),” in Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge.
  • McIntosh, Janet. 2010. “Mobile Phones and Mipoho’s Prophecy: The Powers and Dangers of Flying Language.” American Ethnologist 37(2): 337-353.
  • Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2001. “Delusions of development and the enrichment of witchcraft discourses in Cameroon,” in Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London: Routledge.

Mon April 7th, Wed April 9th:

WEEK 12: POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITIES: FAMILY STRUCTURES, LOVE, DOMESTICITY, GLOBALIZATION

  • Mutongi, Kenda. 2007. Excerpts from Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya.University of Chicago Press.
  • Hunter, Mark. 2009. “Providing Love: Sex and Exchange in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” in Love in Africa, eds. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas. University of Chicago Press. Pp. 134-156.
  • Spronk, Rachel. 2009. “Media and the Therapeutic Ethos of Romantic Love in Middle-Class Nairobi,” in Love in Africa, eds. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas. University of Chicago Press. Pp. 180-203.
  • Ferguson, James. 1999. “Expectations of Domesticity: Men, Women, and the ‘Modern Family’,” in Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. University of California Press. Pp. 166-206.

FRIDAY APRIL 11th: 3rd FORUM POSTING DUE

Monday April 14th (no classes April 15th-22nd)

WEEK 13: POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITIES continued

  • Ferguson, James. 2006. “Globalizing Africa? Observations from an Inconvenient Continent,” and “Chrysalis: the life and Death of the African Renaissance in a Zambian Internet Magazine.” In Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press. Pp. 25-49, 113-154.
  • Weiss, Brad. 2002. “Thug Realism: Inhabiting Fantasy in Urban Tanzania.” Cultural Anthropology 17(1): 93-124.

Wednesday April 23rd, Monday April 28th:

TBA