Cornell University
Department of History
Fall 2009
HIST 4271/ASRC
4305
African
Environmental History
Instructor:
Professor Dan Magaziner
320 McGraw Hall
Office Hours: W 2 – 4, or by appointment
607 254 5334
Course Description
Elephants, jungles, malaria and famine: such are the common images of the African environment. Each contains a kernel of truth, but out of context each obscures more than it reveals. African Environmental History is a growing and vibrant area of study, which traces how people have lived, shaped and challenged Africa’s various environments; it considers how history, in its various incarnations, has marked the natural world and how the natural world has been inscribed in history. This course will consider critical issues in African Environmental History: ideas of landscape, the politics of resource use, the environment of the body, both sick and well, and the power of narratives and international politics to structure interactions with the natural world.
Requirements and
Evaluation
This a reading intensive 4000 level seminar. Student evaluation will be based primarily on consistent and informed participation in class discussion. Students will be expected to complete the readings assigned for each class meeting; in addition, each student will be responsible for occasional in class writing, and helping to lead one class discussion.
The course also contains a critical writing component. Africa is an incredibly diverse continent; so, predictably, are its environments. Over the course of the semester students will research and prepare a project on an environmental region in Africa, in order to better engage with the course’s themes. This project will have three parts, which will build on each other in order to generate a coherent final project – and to give you the experience of writing environmental history. This means that you need to do the leg work early in the semester to ensure that you choose a subject rich enough to carry you through to the end. The project must be historical: that is, concerned with change over time. If you are interested in a contemporary issue – oil in Niger Delta, for example – you should plan to research its development until the present. The project will build on itself as follows:
Environmental report: prepare a short (4 – 8 pgs.) report on the biological and physical conditions of a particular environmental region. (Which can be bigger or smaller than a political region; it’s up to you). What do people do in this region? How do they live there? What sorts of factors make social life possible there? Which factors inhibit it? Etc.
Historical report: prepare a short (4 – 8 pgs.) report on the social, economic and political (i.e., non-environmental) factors in the history of your chosen environmental areas. The goal is to generate questions that will complement those raised in the first report: how have non-environmental factors determined the social trajectories and possibilities in your region? Etc.
Final proposal: the course’s ‘final exam’ will be for you to propose a more thorough project on your chosen region, with a research proposal (12 – 15 pgs). This proposal will not offer a conclusive study, which usually requires fieldwork; rather, it will be a place where you bring together your ideas to offer hypotheses built on both your research and historiographical insights raised by the literature read in the course. By bringing together the environmental and historical factors, you will ask the sorts of questions that the historians we read in this class ask: are people subjects of their biophysical environment? Or is the environment subject to human history? How have African peoples met or succumbed to the challenges of the natural world? And, critically, how has this changed over time?
Successful projects will require a good deal of time spent
in the library, with online databases and frequent consultation with the
professor. Unsuccessful projects will require a brief glance at Wikipedia. The
due dates for the reports are on the course schedule, below.
Additional
guidelines and information
Paper finishing
Essays and other writing should be typed, double-spaced and stapled. Be sure to number your pages and always cite your sources – author, title, page number.
Academic integrity
Your essays must be your own work, with your sources fully and specifically acknowledged. Cornell’s academic integrity code is available online at: http://cuinfo.cornell.edu/Academic/AIC.html.
The long and the short of it is this: I’m good at catching plagiarists – I caught a couple last semester, in fact – and if I catch you, you will fail, at the very least.
Disability
Accommodation Policy
If you have a disability and would like an accommodation, please contact the Student Disability Office, located on the 4th floor of the Computing & Communications Center on the Ag Quad. They can be reached at 607 254 4545, or at clt_sds@cornell.edu. For more information, go to: http://clt.cornell.edu/campus/sds/index.html. Please note that requests for academic accommodations must be made during the first three weeks of the semester, except in unusual circumstances.
Readings
Readings are assigned per class period. Readings in bold are available for download on Blackboard and the following required texts have been ordered and are available from the Cornell Store:
James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800 – 1990 (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1999)
Tamara Giles-Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 2002)
James McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)
Thaddeus Sunseri, Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Control in Tanzania, 1820 – 2000 (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2009)
Randall Packard, Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1985)
In addition, the following optional texts are available from the Cornell Store, and on Blackboard:
Jan Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2007)
Julie Livingstone, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2005)
Course Plan
Introduction
T 9/1 Wilderness & Myth
Readings:
Peter Canby, “The Forest Primeval: A Month in Congo’s Wildest Jungle,” Harpers Magazine, (2002), p. 41 – 57 (Bb)
William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” Uncommon Ground, p. 69 – 90 (Bb)
T 9/8 What is ‘Environmental History’?
Readings:
William Worster, “Transformations of the Earth: Towards and Agroecological Perspective in History,” Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990), p. 1087 – 1106 (Bb)
William Cronon, “A Place For Stories: Nature, History, Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992), p. 1347 – 1376 (Bb)
Ellen Stroud, “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt Through History,” History and Theory 42 (2004), p. 75 – 81 (Bb)
Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” Rule of Experts, p. 19 – 53 (Bb)
James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land, Introduction, Ch. 1 – 3, p. 1 –
54
Landscape
T 9/15 Space, place and imagination
Readings:
Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness, Ch. 1, p. 15 – 50 (Bb)
Jan Shetler, Imagining Serengeti, Introduction, Ch. 1 – 3, p. 1 – 134 (Bb) (Cornell store)
Liz Gunner, “Remapping Land and Remaking Culture: Memory and Landscape in 20th century South Africa,” Journal of Historical Geography 31, no. 2 (2005), p. 281 – 295 (Bb)
T 9/22 Landscape and memory in Central Africa
Readings:
Tamara Giles Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest, selections
Dirt
T 9/29 Agriculture
Readings:
James McCann, Maize and Grace: African’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500 – 2000, p. 1 – 173 (required), p. 174 – 218 (optional)
James McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land, selections
T 10/6 Trees
Readings:
Thaddeus Sunseri, Wielding the Axe: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820 – 2000, selections
Environmental report due
Movie night: Taking Root (place t.b.d.)
T 10/13 No class – fall break
Body
T 10/20 Health, healing and ecology
Readings:
Steve Feierman, “Struggles for Control: the Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa,” African Studies Review 28, no. 2/3 (1985), p. 73 – 147. (Bb)
Julie Livingston, Debility and The Moral Imagination in
Botswana, Introduction, Ch. 1 – 3, p. 1 – 141 (Bb) (Cornell Store)
T 10/27 Disease
Readings:
James Giblin, “Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: an Evaded Issue?” The Journal of African History 31, no. 1 (1990), p. 59 – 80.
Helen Tilley, “Ecologies of Complexity: Tropical Environments, African Trypanosomiasis and the Science of Disease Control in British Colonial Africa, 1900 – 1940,” Osiris 19 (2004), p. 21 – 38
Randall Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease, selections
T 11/3 Taking a break
In-class movie: Madagascar – Escape 2 Africa
Meet with Professor to discuss research projects (Office hours and by appointment)
Power
T 11/10 Making Africa wild
Readings:
Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa, Introduction, Ch. 2, Ch. 11, 207 – 226, p. xi – xix, 25 – 36 (Bb)
Gregg Mittman, Reel Nature, Prologue, Ch. 1, 8, p. 1 – 25, 180 – 202 (Bb)
Jan Shetler, Imagining Serengeti, Ch. 6, p. 201 – 223 (Bb) (Cornell store)
Shirley Brooks, “Images of ‘Wild Africa’: Nature Tourism and the (Re)Creation of Hluhluwe Game Reserve, 1930 – 1945,” Journal of Historical Geography 31, no. 2 (2005), p. 220 – 240 (Bb)
Roderick Neumann, “Disciplining Peasants in Tanzania: From State Violence to Self-Surveillance in Wildlife Conservation,” Violent Environments, Ch. 13, p. 305 – 327 (Bb)
Njabulo Ndebele, “Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists,” blank: architecture, apartheid and beyond, p. 1 – 5 (Bb)
Historical report due
T 11/17 Development
Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism, Introduction, Ch. 1, 5, 7 and Conclusion, p. 1 – 53, 144 – 178, 207 – 276. (Bb)
T 11/24 Crisis
Readings:
Various media reports on Desertification and famine
Jeremy Swift, “Desertification,” The Lie of the Land, Ch. 4, p. 73 – 90 (Bb)
Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes, Introduction, Ch. 1, 2, 6, p. 1 – 48, 106 – 132 (Bb)
Susan Moeller, Compassion Fatigue, Ch. 3, p. 95 – 155 (Bb)
Optional:
Melissa Leach and James Fairhead, “Rethinking the Forest-Savannah Mosaic,” The Lie of the Land, Ch. 6, p. 105 – 121 (Bb)
Michael Stocking, “Soil Erosion,” The Lie of the Land, Ch. 8, p. 140 – 154 (Bb)
Allan Hoben, “The Cultural Construction of Environmental Policy,” The Lie of the Land, Ch. 11, p. 186 – 208 (Bb)
Movie night: Darwin’s Nightmare
T 12/1 Rain
Readings:
David Lan, Guns and Rain, selections
Jan Bart Gewald, “El Negro, El Niño, Witchcraft and the Absence of Rain in Botswana,” African Affairs 100 (2001), p. 555 – 580 (Bb)
T 12/15 Final project due