Swahili Coast: Issues, Methods, Historio

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to some of the key issues and terrains of scholarship in Swahili Coastal historiographies. Students will become familiar with some of the central intellectual debates and cornerstone texts, although the reading list is far from exhaustive. We will examine how some of the key issues and locations of research have shifted over time and discuss how and why national politics have shaped regional historiographies in the ways that they have. Of equal, or likely greater, importance is attention to how changes in intellectual theory and methods have impacted the form that scholarship has taken.