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Dr. Meredith Terretta Gordon F. Henderson Chair in Human Rights, Associate Professor of History Office hours: By appt. Winter 2021 Seminar meets via Zoom (connect through Brightspace): Wed. 13 Jan-14 Apr., 9:30-11:20 unless otherwise specified as 8:30-11:20 (as on the days of final oral presentations) HIS 7338: Decolonizing Africa in an Internationalizing World Background knowledge of African history is not a requirement for this seminar. Students of colonialism, including settler colonialism in Canada, as well as students of contemporary French and British history, will gain comparative insights applicable to their own fields of study. The seminar will consider African decolonization within an internationalist or transregional framework, guided by big questions about sovereignty, race and racialization, federation, alienation of land, extraterritorial political sites beyond borders, transnational solidarities, and worldmaking. Historiographical aims of the seminar are: to articulate social history with internationalist history, to reperiodize decolonization, to examine its postcolonial aftermaths, and to question whether decolonization has been achieved. Secondary goals include exploration of the importance of colonial history to both former colonial powers and formerly colonized African states. Students will gain historical understanding the influence of Africa’s decolonization on shifting global norms. Students are encouraged to undertake comparative/transregional research for the final projects. The comparison of decolonization in Canada and South Africa—as sites of competition between two colonial powers—is but one example of possible research inquiry.

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Statement on Use of Racial Slurs in the Classroom:

In October 2020, the University of Ottawa experienced numerous incidents in which one instructor used a racial slur in a classroom and controversy ensued around the professor’s intentions and the university response. While recognizing the importance of academic freedom for professors, I also recognize the importance of students’ own academic freedom and right to a dignified classroom experience free of hate speech. I will avoid, and I expect students to avoid, the use of racial slurs in class. Check out my thread on the incident on Twitter here: or cut and paste the link: https://twitter.com/MTerretta/status/1318666294309261312?s=20

EXPECTED STUDENT CONTRIBUTIONS TO KNOWLEDGE:

1. Regular and critically engaged oral contributions to discussion and debate, including feedback generously offered to peers on oral presentations of conceptual essays (weekly). 25%

2. Expert presentation of one week’s readings and critical review of readings/book. Sign up for expert weeks under Groups on Brightspace. Experts will present the week’s work in no more than 15 minutes and ask questions to launch the discussion. A written critical review must be distributed electronically to members of the class the Monday before Tuesday morning presentations by 5 pm at the latest. All students will have read the literature review, so the presentation must go beyond merely reading the paper aloud. 25%. Skills sharpened: critical review and synthesis. Useful for learning to write a scholarly literature review. Oral communication of ideas and discussion. Learning to respect allotted time limit.

3. 5-8 page overview of how this seminar articulates with your own research specialization. Students should use the concepts and methods elaborated in course material to reflect critically on their own research and approach. In a historiographical discussion, the paper should explain to what extent concepts of decolonization and/or transregionalism orient scholarly historical literature on their field of specialization, the potential for these concepts to contribute to the historiography, and a proposed method for their application. This is a secondary source historiographical, conceptual paper. No primary research is required. 20%. Skills sharpened: the development of conceptual argument and historiographical awareness.

4. Ten-minute oral presentation (7 and 14 April: Sign up under Groups on Brightspace): students present their conceptual and historiographical overviews, elaborating the theoretical/conceptual framework they are adopting, any revisionism it has inspired, and the method they conceive for applying it to their research. Written overviews must be distributed electronically to members of the class the Sunday before Tuesday morning presentations by 5 pm at the latest. Presentations must go beyond merely reading the paper in order to obtain full credit. 10%. Skills sharpened: how to talk about your work in a way that engages others; practice in how to respect time limits.

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5. Final version of the 5-8 page overview, incorporating peer and professor feedback. Please note that there should be a significant improvement integrating critical feedback between previous and final versions. The improved, final draft is valued at 20% of the mark. Skill sharpened: how to revise a draft into a final, polished version that incorporates peer feedback.

WEEKLY READINGS (readings are discussed on the day under which they are listed. On 13 Jan, we begin by discussion Allman, Terretta, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni):

Wk 1—13 Jan: African history of decolonization? Jean Allman, “Between the Present and History: African Nationalism and Decolonization.” In

The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History edited by John Parker and Richard Reid (2013): 1-19. (available online via uOttawa library)

Meredith Terretta, “Decolonisation at the Historiographical Crossroads between Africanist and Internationalist Perspectives.” African Studies Review, forthcoming. (on Brightspace)

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa.” History Compass (2015): 485-96. (available online)

Wk 2—20 Jan: What is Internationalist History? What is Global History? Erez Manela, “International Society as a Historical Subject.” Diplomatic History 44.2 (2020):

184-209. (available online via uOttawa library) Martine Van Ittersum, Felicia Gottmann, and Tristan Mostert, “Writing Global History and its

Challenges—A Workshop with Jürgen Osterhammel and Geoffrey Parker,” Itinerario 40.3 (2016): 357-76. (available online via uOttawa library)

Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank, Empires, Chap. 10, especially 312-21. (available online via uOttawa library)

Wk 3—27 Jan: Sovereignty, Anticolonialism and Self-Determination Susan Pedersen, “The Struggle over Sovereignty.” In The Guardians: The League of Nations and

the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press) 2015, Chapter 7. (available online via uOttawa library)

Joseph Massad, “Against Self-Determination.” Humanity Journal 9.2 (2018). http://humanityjournal.org/issue9-2/against-self-determination/

Julie MacArthur, “Decolonizing Sovereignty: States of Exception along the Kenya-Somali Frontier.” American Historical Review (2019): 108-143. (available online via uOttawa library)

Bradley Simpson, “Self-Determination, Human Rights, and the End of Empire in the 1970s,” Humanity 4.2 (Summer 2013). (available online via uOttawa library)

Wk 4—3 Feb: Alienation of land Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership,

2018, Introduction, pp. 1-18; Chap. 1, Chap. 2. (available online via uOttawa library) M. Terretta “Claiming Land, Claiming Rights in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories,”

in C. Walton and S. Jensen, eds., Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021. (on Brightspace)

Wk 5—10 Feb: Violence

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Erik Linstrum, “Facts about Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain,” History Workshop Journal 84.1 (2017): 108-27. (available online via uOttawa library)

David Anderson, “Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives,” The Journal of Commonwealth History 39.5 (2011): 699-716. (available online via uOttawa library)

Emily Baughan, “Rehabilitating an Empire: Humanitarian Collusion with the Colonial State during the Kenyan Emergency, ca. 1954-1960,” Journal of British Studies 59 (2020): 57-79. (available online via uOttawa library)

READING WEEK—17 FEB Wk 6—24 Feb: Worldmaking Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, 2019. (available online via uOttawa library) Wk 7—3 March: Transnational solidarities Monique A. Bedasse, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania and Pan-Africanism in the Age of

Decolonization, 2017. (available online via uOttawa library) Wk 8—10 March: Extraterritorial political sites beyond borders Andrew Ivaska, “Liberation in Transit: Eduardo Mondlane and Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam,”

in Chen Jian et al, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018): 27-38. (available online via uOttawa library)

Meredith Terretta, “Cameroonian Nationalists Go Global: From Forest Maquis to a Pan-African Accra,” Journal of African History 51 (2010): 189-212. (available online via uOttawa library)

Wk 9—17 March: Youth and politics Emmanuel Asiedu-Acquah, “‘We Shall Be Outspoken”: Student Political Activism in Post-

Independence Ghana, c. 1957-1966.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 54.3 (2019): 169-88. (available online via uOttawa library)

Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre, “Introduction: Student Activism in an Era of Decolonization,” Africa 89 (2019): S1-S14. (available online via uOttawa library)

Pedro Monaville, “The Political Life of the Dead Lumumba: Cold War Histories and the Congolese Student Left,” Africa 89 (2019): S15-S39. (available online via uOttawa library)

-------------------, “Making a ‘Second Vietnam’: The Congolese Revolution and its Global Connections in the 1960s,” The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018): 106-118. (available online via uOttawa library)

Andrew Ivaska, “Movement Youth in a Global Sixties Hub: The Everyday Lives of Transnational Activists in Postcolonial Dar es Salaam,” in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, R. I. Jobs et al., eds (2015): 188-210. (available online via uOttawa library)

Wk 10—24 March: Race and racialization

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Jemima Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race, University of Chicago Press, 2012. (available online via uOttawa library)

Jemima Pierre, “Slavery, Anthropological Knowledge, and the Racialization of Africans,” Current Anthropology 61 (Oct 2020): S220-S231. (available online via uOttawa library)

Wk 11—31 March: Humanitarianism and Development Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to

Nongovernmentality, 2015. (available online via uOttawa library) Priya Lal, “Tanzanian Ujamaa in a World of Peripheral Socialisms.” The Routledge Handbook of

the Global Sixties (2018): 367-380. (available online via uOttawa library) Wk 12—7 April: Postcolonial sovereignty and self-determination Samuel Fury Childs Daly, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian

Civil War, 2020. (available online via uOttawa library) Wk 13—14 April: Importance of colonial history; shifting global norms; Michael Humphrey, “Recentering Histories of Past Imperial Violence: Kenya, Indonesia, and the

Reach of Transitional Justice,” in Decolonization, Self-Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics edited by A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke (2020): 262-81. (available online via uOttawa library)

France Nkokomane Ntloedibe, “Where are our heroes and ancestors? The spectre of Steve Biko’s ideas in Rhodes must fall and the transformation of South African Universities.” African Identities 17.1 (2019): 64-79. (available online via uOttawa library)

Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1-40. (available online via uOttawa library)

Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 52.3 (2020)” 764-782. (available online via uOttawa library)

Alex Lichtenstein, “Decolonizing the American Historical Review.” The American Historical Review (2018): xiv-xvii. (on Brightspace)

Alex Lichtenstein, “Year One of Decolonization.” The American Historical Review (2019): xiv-xix. (on Brightspace)

Michelle R. Moyd, “From the Editor’s Desk.” The American Historical Review (2020): xv-xix. (on Brightspace).

Adele Perry, Canadian Historical President, on Recognition of Indigenous and Racialized Scholars and Scholarship, 2019. (link on Brightspace)