Africa Imagined: Visions of a Continent, 1600-2000

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Hilary Sapire
• Assessment: to be confirmed

In this module we introduce you to the changing European image of Africa from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Rather than a module on African history, this is about the history of European understandings of the African continent, its peoples and its landscapes as they changed through different stages of Europe's entanglement with Africa:

• Exploration
• Trade
• Imperial expansion
• Colonial conquest
• Colonial rule
• Decolonisation

We begin with European travellers' and colonists' perceptions of the Khoesan at the Cape in the seventeenth century and conclude with a consideration of the representation of African societies in the mass media in the mid-twentieth century. Discrete themes are tackled each week and are explored through a study of contemporary literature, ethnography, traveller's accounts, visual representations, journalism. Whilst the emphasis is on British Africa, you are expected to develop a comparative perspective on Dutch, French and British perceptions of Africa.