African 403: Theories of African Cultural Studies

A study of culture and cultural production, circulation, consumption, and meaning making in Africa. Discussions foreground material and imaginative cultural forms and practices-their origins, languages, contents, forms, functions, genres, and audiences. Examines the uses to which particular meanings of culture and its forms are put, by whom, and to what purpose, and how meanings are fought over, reshaped, and reconstituted, and under what conditions those are or can be possible. Surveys the entrenched modes of both conceptual and critical apprehension of the cultural forms and practices (from Negritude to postcolonialism and postmodernism), explores their methods of reading, raises the issue of their linkages to sources in Euro-America, and assesses the extent to which the unique concerns of the biography of culture in Africa (expressed by its creators and scholars) have tried to tame and refashion what are now globally shared critical tools of cultural reading.