125010 PS Proseminar Cultural and Media Studies (2011W)

Discourses on and representations of Africa have become ubiquitous in Western societies. In this course, we will analyze a large array of 'texts' which convey wildly contrasting images of Africa, Africans and Africanness. We will span a period of more than a century, from the heyday of the British Empire to "today's MTV and techno-capital driven world of deideologized and depoliticized visuality" (Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan), and cover genres and media as diverse as fiction writing, film, pop music, websites, advertising, book covers and stand-up comedy.

The aims of this course are to hone your skills in cultural analysis, to raise awareness of the multifarious ways in which 'Africa' has been conceptualized and to investigate the mechanisms at work in the circulation of these 'Images of Africa'. We will, for instance, study contrasting interpretations of a modernist novel -- Chinua Achebe's and Edward Said's readings of Heart of Darkness -- before adopting various "reading positions" (Stuart Hall) ourselves; we will analyze the subtle interplay of cultural signifiers in minimalist Nigerian short stories by Segun Afolabi and investigate how some Western publishers use book covers to flaunt the 'Africanness' of the works so as to cater to the tastes of Euro-American readers "greedy for escapism" (Brenda Cooper) and an 'exotic' reading experience; and we will probe into clichéd images of Africa in advertisements and selected film scenes before trying to unravel how some of these stereotypes are shattered while others are perpetuated in satire and pop culture.

For these analyses, we will revisit a number of approaches, methodologies and theories that were introduced to you in the Introduction to Cultural and Regional Studies, for example Michel Foucault's notion of discourse, Edward Said's Orientalism, Gramsci's theories of hegemony, or the deconstruction of binary oppositions. In addition, we will resort to more recent approaches in postcolonial theory which provide fresh perspectives for cultural analysis, above all Homi Bhabha's 'Third Space of enunciation' and Graham Huggan's 'Postcolonial Exotic'.