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Oct 31, 2024
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HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara This course will examine the history of the Sahara, a region that is often treated as a “blank space” or only peripherally included in histories of the Middle East/North Africa and Africa. Beginning in the early Islamic period and the heyday of the trans-Saharan trade (eighth to seventeenth centuries), we will trace the region’s history up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the formation of nation-states and (often contentious) political borders. Employing textual primary sources, literary and cultural representations, ethnographies, and music, we will outline a history that counters the myth of a “blank space” and instead reveals a vibrant and diverse region characterized by long histories of exchange and mobility. While being attentive to themes of race, religion, colonialism, state formation, trade, and environment, we will also problematize the depiction of the Sahara as a natural “borderland” between an imagined North and sub-Saharan Africa, instead bringing the histories of these two areas together.
Unit(s): 1 Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II Prerequisite(s): HUM 110 Instructional Method: Lecture-conference Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F) Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):
- Evaluate data and/or sources.
- Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
- Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.
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