Iberian Expansion and the "Discovery" of Africa in Travel Narratives and Art, 1420-1640
AFAM 310
Spring 2016 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
ARHA 300, AMST 308, HIST 232 |
| Course Cluster: African Studies |
This seminar is broadly centered on Atlantic history from the early 15th to the middle of the 17th centuries. It addresses the origins of culture contact between Europe and Africa and the subsequent creation of mixed cultures. The course will trace European expansion from the earliest Portuguese sea voyages along the African coast, shortly after 1420, to the opening of maritime commerce to West Africa and the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. We will examine evolving attitudes on the part of both Europeans and African peoples toward each other as documented in travel literature and in artistic representations of Africans by European artists and of Europeans by African sculptors. After Portuguese explorations of Africa began around 1420, the expansion of commerce and the settlement of Europeans, mostly Portuguese, on the West African coast led to a period of extensive métissage (mixture), both cultural and physical, and of remarkable fluidity in attitudes toward Africans. However, by the early 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade had begun to take on important dimensions, setting the stage for the increasingly racialist attitudes that would characterize European relations with Africa during the colonial period. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA AFAM, SBS AFAM |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AFST-MN)(AMST) |
Major Readings:
Amselle, Jean-Loup Logiques Métisses,Anthropologie de l'Identité en Afrique et ailleurs. Paris, Payot, 1990. Translated in English as 'Mestizo' Logics.
Barry, Boubacar, Livio Sansone, Elisée Soumonni, eds., Africa, Brazil and the Construction of trans-Atlantic Black Identities, World Press, Trenton, 2008.
Devisse, Jean. The Image of the Black in Western Art (3 vol.).
Horta, José da Silva. "Evidence for a Luso-African identity in 'Portuguese' accounts of 'Guinea of Cape Verde' 16th-17th century," History in Africa, 27 (2000), 99-130.
Gruzinski, Serge. La Pensée Métisse. Paris, Fayard, 1999.
Kaplan, Paul. The Rise of the Black Magus.
Lowe, K. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Mark, Peter. Blacks in European Eyes: The Portrayal of Africans in Early Renaissance Painting. Syracuse. 1974.
Mark. 'Portuguese' Style and Luso-African Identity; precolonial Senegambia, sixteenth to nineteenth century. Indiana University Press, 2002.
Mark. 'Towards a Reassessment of the Dating and the geographical Origins of the Luso-African Ivories: fifteenth - seventeenth Century," in History in Africa, 2007.
Morgan, Philip, and R. Kagan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews and Crypto-Jews in the age of mercantilism, 1500-1800. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Prussin, Labelle. "Judaic Threads in the West African Tapestry: No more Forever?" in Art Bulletin, vo. Lxxxviii, no. 2, June 2006.
Smithsonian Institution, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, contracted for 2007 but still in press, vol. 3.
Schorsch, Jonathan. Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. Cambridge, 2004.
Snowden, Frank. Blacks in Antiquity. Harvard University Press.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge, 1992.
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Examinations and Assignments:
One exam, one research paper 15-20 pages based on original research (reading knowledge of Portuguese helpful but not essential). |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course is part of African American Studies newly developing focus on Atlantic History. The course will be housed in AFAM. |
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