HIST619V-419V (PermReq) Special Topics in History: Religious Movements in Africa and the Atlantic World

(3 credits) Grade Method: REG/AUD.

0101(39080) Landau, P.

Wed......... 3:30pm- 6:00pm (TLF 2108)

This course is about politics, religion, and social and religious movements in Africa and the Atlantic world. We will read cutting-edge historical work in the field of Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic history. We will meet and discuss our reading in a voluntaristic and engaged fashion. As a result, in one semester you (we) will acquire appropriate background and conceptual tools for a Ph.D. in African American Studies, African Studies, History (Atlantic, American, African fields), or any other discipline (English, Economics) that would admit this course’s material as a subfield.

Stories from the intersection of religion and politics in the New World are suffused by Africanity, from Tituba, in Salem, Mass., to Vodoun priestesses in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, violence in Africa is apparently suffused by a tribal religious fanaticism. Breaking up this circular logic, in this course we will see Africa not an unchanging mass perpetually anterior to the Atlantic self, but as a work in progress over the same era. Focusing on identities, we will look at constructions of “Gold Coast” or “Mina” blacks in Brazil, compared with the creation of “Asante” citizens in nineteenth-century Ghana. Moving back toward religion, we will compare South and Central African religion and politics of the past, which descend to liberation movemen, churches, and messianic movements today. We will look religion in competing nationalisms, especially Yoruba and Cuban nationalisms. And we will end with alternative, transnational historical perspectives not only on the creation of African and Atlantic identities, but on the making of forms of life within African and Atlantic cultures, common to both.

In our discussions, we will be able to express ourselves freely, respectfully, and even boldly. We will leave the course with a vivid and rounded appreciation of resistance and religion as transnational phenomena in the developing world.

There are seven “units,” actually eight, because there is a 2a and 2b. Only graduate students are asked to adopt a unit of their choosing and issue a report alongside our regular discussion. If there are any ambitious undergrads, they may request this responsibility. The idea is to do only one unit in addition to the general participatory reading for the class, which entails posting comments to a listserv monitored largely silently by me (Prof. Landau). A unit constitutes a project requiring more than a week of independent preparation.

All classes are on Wednesday, at 3:30, 2108 TLF, down the hall from my office.

Week 1, Wed., Aug. 30: “Religion” as a motivation or condition

Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Norton: 1965), 1-29, 57-107 only. $10.62 on Amazon.com.

Week 2, Wed., Sept. 6: Situating Africa-ness in the Atlantic

Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Beacon Press, 1992; first pub. 1972): 121 pp. Buy used (ISBN: 0807009164) if possible.

selection on reserve from: Barry Hallen, J. Olubi Sodipo, Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford, 1986)

Julian Baldick, Black God: the Afro-Asiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Religions (Syracuse: SUP, 1998). For purchase at 20.00 and on reserve.

Week 3, Wed. Sept. 13: Possession and Cleansing

John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony : Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (CUP: 1998) Easily buy pbk. used on line.

selections on reserve from Heike Behrend, Ute Luig, eds., Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa, esp. chapters by Behrend and by Tobias Wendl (“Mina”).

Audrey Richards, “A Modern Movement of Witch-Finders,” Africa: Journal of the IAI, 1935: http://www.jstor.org/view/00019720/sp040005/04x0115k/0

and Jan Vansina, Renee Fox and Willy de Craemer, “Religious Movements in Central Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18, 4 (1976): 458-75 also on-line.

Week 4, Wed., Sept. 20: Yoruba Nations

J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Indiana: IUP 2000)

several selections from Toyin Falola, ed., Yoruba Diaspora in the New World (Indiana: IUP 2004), ignoring Lohze, Soares, and every chapter after Soares’s.

on reserve: Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation,” Comp Studs in Soc and Hist 41 (1999), 72-103, through JSTOR.

on reserve: Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (1996), chap. 2, i.e. 40-64 esp.

Unit One: Evaluate (i.e. do the reading and evaluate) Terence Ranger three-unit mini-course “Religion in Africa” (posted via link here): http://missionscholarship.org/docs/20050830_Ranger.pdf

Week 5, Wed., Sept. 27: “Your Mina Blacks”: in Ghana

selection from T.C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), on reserve.

three essays from Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Ohio Univ. Press, 1993), for purchase and on reserve.

Unit Two: A-section: Gérard Chouin, Eguafo: un royaume africain (Paris: Karthala,1998) (must know French); Sandra E. Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)

Week 6, Oct. 4th: Commodities and Deities

selections on reserve from Sandra T. Barnes, Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: IUP, 1997), your choice, but include “Ogou in Haiti” (Brown).

on reserve: Margarie Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean (Rutgers, 1997), esp. Dayan, Wexler, Barnet.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17, 2 (1991), 336-57, available on JSTOR.

Henry Drewal on Mammy Wata from Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, Images & Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, on reserve.

Unit Two: B-section: Kathryn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community (Berkeley: UCP, 2002); and Birgit Meyer,Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, for IAI, 1999); and http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v046/46.2meyer.html

Week 7, Oct. 11: Vodoun

Philip Peek, “African Divination Systems: Non-Normal Modes of Cognition,” in Peek, ed., African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (Indiana: 1991), 193-212

on reserve: Susan Vogel, “Spirit Spouses,” from Baule (Exhibition Catalogue)

Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press, 1995)

Unit Three: Haiti: Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti (Knoxville: UTennP., 1990); Michel Rolph Truillot, Haiti: State Against Nation (1990); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press, 1992).

Week 8, Oct. 18: South African trans-Atlantic hybridities

Unpub. ms., available on reserve, “Life and Times of Rev. Mathebula,” ca. 1825-1888.

Edgar and Sapire, African Apocalypse: Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a 20th century South African Prophet (Ohio: U. of Ohio P., 2000)

Gary Kynoch, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999 (Ohio: U. of Ohio P., 2004)

Unit Four: Religious Awakenings and South Africa: James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Univ. of N.C., 1998), and Isaiah Shembe primary and secondary sources to be accessed here. And on reserve: George Frederickson, Black Liberation: Comparative History of Black Resistance in South Africa and the United States (OUP: 1995), “Ethiopian Shall Stretch . . .” pp. 57-93.

Week 9, Oct. 25th: Continuities or Hybridities or New Constructions

selections from John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)

selections from Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Antonio Salas et. al., “The African Diaspora: Mitochondrial DNA and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 74 (2004), 454-65, available on JSTOR.

Week 10, Nov. 1: Understanding Peasant Collectivities

Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Duke: 1999, new edition), pages tba.

On reserve: John Janzen, “The Tradition of Renewal in Kongo Religion,” in N.S. Booth, ed., African Religions: a Symposium (New York, Nok: 1977), pp. 69-115.

Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: 1985, Heinemann, 1997): On reserve.

Week 11, Nov. 8: Hybridity as a stable condition

Stephan Palmie, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Duke: 2002), and

Ivor Miller, “Cuban Abakua’ Chants,” African Studies Review, 2005: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/african_studies_review/v048/48.1milleri.pdf

Palmie, “A view from itia ororó kande,” Social Anth (2006): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=408810

Unit five: Religion and Guerilla War: David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas & Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (U. of Cal. Press: 1985) Pbk. can be bought used on line cheaply; and Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth, & Resources in Sierra Leone (Heinemann: 1996); short, can buy used on line.

Week 12, Nov. 15: Learning from that Other Ocean

Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island : Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Duke: 2005). Brand new and excellent.

Week 13, Nov. 22: Africa and World Processes

Steven Feierman, “African histories and the dissolution of world history,” in Robert Bates, ed., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: 1993).

Week 14, Nov. 29: Other transnationalist vectors

On reserve: Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology (Chicago: 1990), 1-30.

Most of: Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan (Princeton paperback, 2004) . . .

Unit six (research): Prosperity, Pentacostals, and Mormons: emerging US-Style Protestant evangelical churches in Brazil and Nigeria: comparative perspectives

Week 15, Dec. 6th, last class: Beliefs

Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: 2004), $ 15.75 “on-line”.

On reserve: Cyprian Fisiy and Peter Geschiere, “Witchcraft, Violence and Identity: Different Trajectories in Postcolonial Cameroon,” chap. 7 in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger, Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London: Zed, 1996).

Unit 7: James Fernandez, Bwiti (1980) compared to James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003) in their treatment of culture in history.