Topics vary by semester
Professor(s)
Notes
What is apartheid? How does it differ from other forms of racial and spatial segregation? Is it a useful category to use in global comparisons? We cannot answer these questions without deeper knowledge of the context from which the term originated: modern South Africa. This class examines South Africa’s “long 20th century” from ca. 1870 until end of apartheid rule in 1994 to study the rise and fall of South Africa’s system of racial segregation. In studying South Africa’s specific trajectory of “racial capitalism”, we will come to understand the creation of a modern industrialised economy underwritten by the systematic denial of civil and political rights based on race. Ordinary South Africans were not passive victims to this process, and we will study their efforts to resist and subvert the spatial, social, and legal strictures of colonialism and apartheid. In addition to studying famed and central political freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela, we will also learn about resistance from artists, writers, students, intellectuals, and the broad coalitions they attempted to build at home and in exile. At the end of the course, we ask: in the single generation since apartheid’s end and the first democratic elections of 1994, how has South African society transcended the past? To what degree does South Africa’s past shape its present?
Learning Outcomes
- Working with primary sources: students will gain experience with how to analyze evidence produced in a specific time and place, and how to contextualize the evidence within a “bigger picture” of local, regional and global dynamics.
- Reading & understanding academic scholarship: in weekly readings assignment for homework, students will continuously practice reading classic and new academic scholarship on South Africa’s pasts in order to articulate an author’s argument; evidence base; contributions to new knowledge; and potential areas of bias or limitation. Scholarly texts will appropriately challenge students within a 2000-level reading load.
- Argumentative writing for humanities and social sciences: students will improve their written argumentation skills through one analytical paper assignment during the term. The opportunity to resubmit the paper after incorporating instructor feedback will enable students to apply lessons on strengthening analysis and written communication.
- Historical synthesis: students will be able to synthesize complex historical events and processes of colonialism, segregation and apartheid in South Africa through two written exams. The midterm and final exams will ask students to prepare synthetic study sheets in order to aid memory and better apply their knowledge in the seated exam exercise.
- Meet important South African historical figures from the 17th c. to present in order to explain why their stories reverberate with new meaning in different periods of the South African struggle.
- Assess the kinds of archives that shape our present understanding of the South African past, who is typically excluded from these archives, and why.
- Articulate the historical causes and lived dynamics of colonialism, segregation, apartheid in the South African context.
- Place apartheid within a global historical context to be able to explain why the system lasted so long, and how its premises of racial/ethnic segregation and exclusion relate to other colonial contexts of the past and present.
Syllabus
Book List
Title | Author | Publisher | ISBN Number |
---|---|---|---|
South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid | Nancy Clark, William Worger | Routledge | 9780367551001 |
Welcome to our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa | Phaswane Mpe | Ohio University Press-Not Available at AUP Bookstore | 9780821419625 |
Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost | Dugmore Boetie | Ohio University Press | 9780821424353 |
Schedule
Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
---|---|---|---|
Monday | 12:10 | 13:30 | Q-704 |
Thursday | 12:10 | 13:30 | Q-704 |