Back to Africa Movements

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

From Edward Blyden’s 1862 call for African-Americans to migrate back to Africa to the Ghanaian government’s celebration of 2019 as the “Year of Return” for Africans in the diaspora, people of African descent have debated and represented Africa as a site of belonging and resettlement. This course invites students to explore the history of black people’s (specifically African-Americans, West Indians, and West Africans who lived abroad) return to Africa from the eighteenth century to the present. We will examine how Africans engaged and reworked ideologies such as Pan-Africanism and Garveyism in their struggles against colonialism and postcolonial military rule. We will interrogate the following questions together: How and why did people of African descent pursue immigration to Africa? What were the limits of their political and cultural projects? How did they influence their host communities and vice-versa? To unpack these questions, we will situate the experiences of merchants, students, activists, formerly enslaved people, soldiers, and technocrats within the context of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, decolonization, and postindependence politics in Africa. Through lectures, discussions, and written assignments, you will gain a deeper understanding of the economic, political, and cultural relationships that people of African descent have forged across the Atlantic.