FYS 15 Knowledge and Nature in the African Diaspora
To what extent did Atlantic African environmental, medical, and scientific knowledge shape the physical landscapes and intellectual worlds of the Americas between the period of early colonialism until the Age of Revolution? This course follows the mobile lives of people including West Central African banganga in Mexico, Temne-speaking women in South Carolina, and Kimbundu-speaking physicians in Brazil whose technical skill and knowledge proved invaluable for the empires and nations they found themselves within after surviving the middle passage. Millions of people speaking diverse languages and hailing from cultures from the Senegal River to Angola quite literally laid the environmental, economic, and intellectual foundations of American nations including the United States. As a community our goal will be to understand the role of the African diaspora in transforming the environments of the Western Hemisphere, and the ideas and knowledge that Africans in the diaspora developed through enslavement, fugitivity, and emancipation. Our course will ask how rice and sugar plantations, and other industrial spaces, are the products of Atlantic African technology forged through diaspora between Africa, South America and North America. Human trafficking involving captives provided the groundwork of scientific sensibilities as West Central Africans developed empirical sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. Finally, we will take a look at the rich medical traditions of diverse peoples ranging from herbalists in Brazil to people of multiethnic ancestry like Afro-Yucatecan healers. This is an interdisciplinary seminar that will combine methods and readings from history, anthropology, ethnobotany, and environmental studies. Writing assignments throughout the course will enable participants to develop skill in expository writing, research with primary and secondary sources, and methods for historical analysis.
Prerequisite
Open only to first year frosh