African 202 (Section 1): Africa’s Ocean Imaginaries

This four-week course explores how African storytellers engage Africa’s oceanic worlds—across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans—to narrate histories of movement, memory, and imagined futures. We approach the sea not as backdrop but as a dynamic archive where people, objects, and ideas travel and transform.

Through literature, film, poetry, and visual culture, we explore how water structures belonging and displacement, how it holds memory, and how diasporic identities emerge through routes rather than roots. We also consider the global journeys of cultural objects—from empire and museums to contemporary artistic reclaims—and how these mobilities inform debates on power and sovereignty.

Students will engage works by Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Yaa Gyasi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, contemporary African filmmakers, and emerging African animation to trace themes of trauma, drift, return, and contested ownership. The course asks not simply where home is, but how African worlds are made through movement, and who gets to narrate those crossings. From maritime memory to speculative aquatic futures, we consider how African people and objects travel globally while remaining grounded in histories of struggle and creativity. By the end of the course, students will gain interdisciplinary tools to read the ocean as both a historical condition of migration and a creative force shaping global debates on identity, justice, and Africa’s futures.