African Studies

Professors: Somda (Director)

The African Studies program offers an interdisciplinary engagement with Africa and its diaspora, drawing on the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It emphasizes critical, historically informed approaches to understanding Africa and encourages students to engage with the continent’s diverse histories, societies, and cultures. By incorporating multiple perspectives, the program challenges conventional narratives and stereotypes and fosters a deeper appreciation of Africa’s complexity.

A core curriculum, combined with study abroad opportunities, provides students with both academic and immersive experiences. The program is further enhanced by a series of campus events, including guest speakers, special programs, and visiting scholars, which enrich students’ encounters with contemporary African issues and scholarship. Students are equipped to participate in meaningful cross-cultural dialogues and gain a nuanced understanding of the African experience both on the continent and in the diaspora.

Requirements for the Concentration in African Studies

Number of Units
Six units are required.

Required Courses
Complete three of the following courses:

AFST 205 Global Africa
AFST/ANSO 210 Thinking Africa
AFST/ANSO/HIST 278 Africa Now
AFST/ANSO 280 Geography of Africanness

Three additional courses chosen from the following list. Courses should include Africa specific study abroad subject to approval by the Director of African Studies.

AFST/ANSO 211 Global Black Feminism
AFST/ANSO 290 Africa in Global Context
AFST/ANSO 295 On Being Human In Africa
AFST/FREN 445 Afro-Perspectives
AFST 455/FREN 335/455 Letters From the Francophonie
AFST/HIST 273 Atlantic Slave Trade
ANSO/CES 410 Missionaries to Pilgrims: Diasporic Returns
ENGL 260 African Cinemas of Belonging
HIST 292 WGS in Early Latin America
*SPAN 425 Topics in Spanish Linquistics

*SPAN 425 will count as an elective only if taught by Dr. Faulkner. To apply this course to the concentration requirements please fill out a Substitution form on the Registrar’s website.

Concentrators are encouraged to take as many core and elective courses as possible.

Courses taken abroad and at other U.S. colleges and universities, or with guest scholars on campus, may meet a concentration requirement. Students are encouraged to speak with the Director of African Studies as they develop their program.

Kalamazoo College also operates study abroad programs in Africa: Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, and Botswana. These give students an intensive academic and intercultural experience in an African region. The specific African countries in which the College operates are listed in the “Center for International Programs” section of this catalog.

African Studies Courses

AFST 205 Global Africa Global Africa examines Africa not as a continent on the margins, but as a central and generative force in global history. From early trade routes across the Sahara and Indian Ocean to contemporary migration, cultural production, and political activism, the course traces Africa's dynamic role in shaping and being shaped by global processes. We explore how African people, goods, ideas, and institutions have moved across borders and oceans-voluntarily and by force-and how these movements have forged enduring connections with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Topics include African consumerism and global capitalism, diasporic identities and cultural circulations, material diplomacy and the politics of restitution, as well as transnational visions like Pan-Africanism and Afropolitanism. The course encourages critical reflection on mobility, belonging, race, and global inequality, while centering African voices and experiences in global narratives.
AFST 210 Thinking Africa What does it truly mean to "think Africa"? Is there an African way of thinking, and of thinking Africa itself? This course challenges conventional narratives about Africa by exploring how the continent has been represented, theorized, and understood. We journey from colonial constructions to contemporary decolonial breakthroughs, engaging revolutionary African thinkers who question the very epistemologies that have shaped-and misshapen- knowledge of the continent. Through provocative philosophical texts, ethnographic accounts, and critical essays, the course uncovers how narratives of colonialization, liberation, and cultural reinvention have influence African studies. The course foregrounds intellectual traditions rooted in African contexts while exploring major debates across culture, politics, ethnics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
AFST 211 Global Black Feminism Global Black Feminism examines the gendered experiences of African women and women of African descent, focusing on the diverse expressions of womanhood, girlhood, and the construction and classification of gender and sexualities. The course explores struggles and forms of resistance often grouped under the label of feminism, while also engaging with alternative frameworks such as womanism and other culturally specific approaches to gender advocacy.
AFST 273 Atlantic Slave Trade This course examines the complex web of connections that linked together the various lives and fates of Africans, Europeans, and Americans via the Atlantic slave trade. It analyzes the mode of enslavement of Africans by slavers in Africa, the experiences of slaves in the Middle Passage, and the impact of the trade on continental and Diasporan Africans. It also explores the role played by Africa-based abolitionist movements in ending the trade in Atlantic Africa.
AFST 278 Africa Now What is the current state of the African continent? This course explores contemporary Africa within the context of long-term historical processes, focusing on the period following the wave of independence movements in the 1960s. The central question-"What is Africa Now?"-examines the present while tracing how we arrived here, with particular attention to the lives shaped by the legacies of independence and the afterlives of empire.
AFST 280 Geography of Africanness This course examines African identities and experiences across diverse topographies and landscapes, drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives (from social and cultural anthropology to history and political geography). It explores the extension of Africanness, its intersections with Blackness, and diasporic experiences, with a focus on the concept of "thinking Africa from its edges." Through multiple scales of analysis-from individual lived experiences to global representations-the course unpacks African identities and territories. It examines spaces as both literal locations and vernacular metaphors for human experiences, analyzing forests, deserts, and oceans not just as physical landscapes but as symbolic tropes to imagine refuges, challenges, and connections. Combining theoretical texts with ethnographies and historical accounts, the course highlights diverse experiences and methodologies. It critically interrogates knowledge production, the categories used to make sense of different spaces, and how these are used to plan governance, ensure control, and organize resistance.
AFST 290 Africa in Global Context This course examines the ways that people and places on the African continent have been and continue to be connected to global dynamics and explores the implications of these past and present connections for people's lives as they are lived today. Must have completed ANSO-103.
AFST 295 On Being Human in Africa The course examines the multiple experiences of Africans (their racialized and gendered existences, their affective relations, their ways of relating to and caring for each other and the land) and explores what it means to think and write about Africa. The course examines representations and discourses including fiction, academic writing, and social media and considers new paradigms and innovative technologies. Open to Sophomores only.
AFST 310 From Wakanda to Silicon Savannah: Imagining Black Futures This course explores how Black futures are imagined, contested, and produced across Africa and its diasporas. It begins from the premise that imagining the future has never been equally available to all: for much of modern history, Africans and Afro descendants were described, governed, and represented through regimes of enslavement, colonization, and racial capitalism as if they had no future of their own. Their futures were often reduced to their pasts-through essentialist views of timeless tradition, cyclical notions of history, or narratives that cast development as mere imitation of Euro-American models of growth and progress. Against these constraints, cultural, political, and artistic practices have become crucial sites for reclaiming futurity. Moving from speculative worlds like Wakanda to real-world sites of technological innovation often described as the "Silicon Savannah," the course examines how literature, film, digital culture, political thought, and social movements imagine futures shaped by race, technology, ecology, gender, and global capitalism. Rather than treating the future as neutral or inevitable, the course asks: Who gets to imagine the future? Whose futures are valued, and whose are erased? We treat "the future" not as prediction but as a cultural, political, and ethical field shaped by inequality, imagination, and struggle. Foregrounding African and Black intellectual traditions-Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, decolonial thought, Black feminism, and African science and technology studies-the course critically engages both utopian and dystopian visions of Black life to come. Through readings, media, and studio work, students analyze how Black and African futures are produced, contested, and practiced across multiple sites and mediums.
AFST 426 Lest We Forget: Memory and Identity in the African Diaspora What is memory? What is identity? And how do we understand the relationship between these two concepts, particularly for communities once defined as commodities? Research suggests the significance of origins in the formation of individual and collective identity. However, for the African diaspora, origins and the memory associated with it are traversed by trauma and displacement engendered by slavery, the middle passage, and contemporary structural oppressions. This course explores the different ways memory is deployed by the African diaspora as both a protective and resistance apparatus to construct identity and support citizenship claims to their contemporary nation-states. Must have completed 1 ANSO 300-level course.
AFST 436 African Indigenous Knowledges and Climate Adaptation This course examines African Indigenous knowledges as dynamic intellectual traditions and practical frameworks for understanding and responding to climate change. Drawing on anthropology, political ecology, African philosophy, and decolonial theory, students analyze how "valid" climate knowledge is defined, how colonial histories shape climate governance, and how Indigenous epistemologies challenge technocratic adaptation models. Readings combine foundational theoretical texts with ethnographies and selected articles on agriculture, conservation, land and resource governance, extraction, and climate risk management. Students develop tools to evaluate adaptation initiatives and to imagine African climate futures grounded in epistemic sovereignty, ethical collaboration, justice, and Indigenous resurgence. Must have completed one 300-level ANSO course.
AFST 445 Afro-Perspectives Today, the channels of knowledge production and distribution are heavily dominated by Western thinkers and institutions. As a consequence of that unequal relationship, voices from former colonial spaces, such as Africa, remain largely unacknowledged in scholarship even when such scholarship address circumstances specific to those marginalized spaces. This course uses a variety of media (comics, films, novels, songs, etc) to emphasize epistemic knowledge produced by African intellectuals about how Africans perceive, interact, and position themselves in relation to local and global questions such as fashion, immigration, diaspora, environment, feminism, race, Female Genital Cutting, etc. Course is taught in French. Must have completed FREN-301.
AFST 455 Letters From the Francophonie Fictional letters are powerful media through which authors explore themes of romance and friendship while also addressing various contemporary social issues such as otherness, climate and social activism, and racism. Using various texts (letters, film, social media) from across three centuries of French-language productions, this class surveys the milestones of the epistolary genre while also giving students the opportunity to hone their own writing and speaking skills in creative ways. Must have completed FREN-301.
AFST 593 Senior Integrated Project Each program or department sets its own requirements for Senior Integrated Projects done in that department, including the range of acceptable projects, the required background of students doing projects, the format of the SIP, and the expected scope and depth of projects. See the Kalamazoo Curriculum -> Senior Integrated Project section of the Academic Catalog for more details. Permission of department and SIP supervisor required.
AFST 600 Teaching Assistantship