Undergraduate - UnitAZA3417 - Africa and its others

Upon successful completion of this unit, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge of and familiarity with the following types of information, academic perspectives and skills:

1. Demonstration of a critical awareness of the ways in which different texts, movies, brochures, posters, paintings, articles and so on, encourage us to interpret and construct Africa in a particular way
2. A better understanding of Africa and how it relates to the world or how the world relates to her
3. Appreciation of the significance of the various documents' constructions of (African) identity/ representation within their socio-cultural and historical contexts
4. Ability to perform a close analysis of the different types of documents used, i.e., in case of a literary text, he should be able to demonstrate a sensitivity to the particular devices, language and strategies employed
5. Demonstration of an awareness and understanding of the major theoretical approaches in Cultural Studies within academic debate in Africa and internationally
6. Ability to employ those and evaluate such theoretical approaches in an interpretation of the various documents used in this unit
7. Intellectual familiarity with the different critical concepts relevant to the unit: othering, africanism/africanization, post-colonialism, post-modernism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, globalization, traveling cultures, migration, diasporas, authenticity, ethnicity, hybridity, mimicry, endogeny, exogeny and so on
8. Students undertaking this unit at a third-year level will be expected to meet all these objective criteria at a higher level of demonstrable and proven competency than those completing the unit at a second-year level.