Introduction to the African Diaspora

An introduction into both seminal as well as innovative scholarship about the African diaspora, a working definition of which is the dispersal of Africans and their descendants throughout much of the world. The course focuses on the movement of Africans on and off the continent since antiquity. It traces these communities and individuals as they made their way through the Mediterranean and Europe, the central Islamic lands, Asia, and the Americas. The course surveys several key topics: African history and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, literary and cultural productions of the diaspora, the meanings of race, the politics of Blackness across temporal and spatial planes, and how people of the diaspora shape and have been shaped by their physical movement.