Damn, out of likes. This is not a thread I want to wade through unarmed with likes.
Wow, I had no idea I was missing performance art. I hope @khepra is a bot, for his sake. I thought I spent too much time in this forum!
Every time I think I’m closing in on a point, it’s off on another path. I thought I felt one coming somewhere in the low 700’s with trade winds, but then it was off on another tangent. This would be the wrong thread to read in reverse on acid.
What problem? Did we run out?
Run out? Never!
because of this thread and I am out of likes as well.
Hold your horses, sonny: Bates isn’t a community college. Maybe it showed up in your trawling because they had the word community on their home page? (Didn’t look, so I don’t know if that’s how it came up in your list; I currently have an encyclopedic knowledge of colleges and universities which is fading fast – until it’s the last child’s turn – but basic info is still quite fresh in my mind.)
Yup, and what I find particularly funny about that is “Pan African” is a way to include North Africa in African studies, as well as the influence of various colonizing populations and religions.
Too early for me, but what the hell. Cheers!
Shouldn’t North Africa be included in Pan African studies? Does it’s location on the Mediterranean and diverse population as a result make it less African somehow?
When I took a couple of classes in the mid-eighties, they focused on sub-Saharan Africa for the African Studies program at CSU Fresno. I think their reasoning at the time was that North African countries were culturally similar to the other Arab countries by virtue of language and religion.
But how is it not Africa, despite that? And what about the Eastern coast and the influence of Islam there? Is that also “too culturally similar to Arab countries” to be considered African? Is there some pure essentialism that defines African? Although Fela Kuti certainly called Islam a colonial imposition, not all Muslim Africans (many of them Sub-Saharans) agree with that. Do we similarly discount Ethiopia as African because it has a long Christian tradition? I’d suspect that the field has changed a fair amount since the 1980s, though.
That’s my point: by changing the phrasing to Pan African, it made it more clear that the entirety of the continent was being studied.
The field has changed ENTIRELY since the 1980s with regard to Jews in Ethiopia: they are now all either dead or in Israel. (Given the choice between Israel and the U.S., they all chose Israel.)
But yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing that Pan African Studies covers: all the complexities.
Oh, certainly. When I took my classes we left out the most northern counties (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt). Chad, Niger, Ethiopia, etc. (geographically-speaking, those countries under the Mediterranean five) were included in the courses. Since the 80’s, Islam has grown in influence throughout the continent, so I believe @anon67050589’s comment above about Pan African makes a lot of sense.
(Those survey classes in history, geography, and literature are still my favorite, btw.)
So I think this whole round is probably due to me misreading what she wrote - I though she was saying that pan Africanism excludes NA, but she was saying it was inclusive…
So I’m a dummy! 
I went back and reread what I wrote because I was so sure that if you read it that way, I must have mis-typed something, or maybe was extraordinarily unclear in what I was trying to say!
We’re on the same page now: African Studies used to exclude North Africa (usually) whereas now it’s understood to be integral to the diversity and complexity of the continent as a whole.
Really, NA is a special case: it needs to be studied both in African Studies AND in Middle Eastern Studies. It’s not just about religion…it’s about trade, culture, genetics, etc. North Africa is situated in the center of the Venn diagram of two very different worlds.
Or to add a third category to our diagram, Mediterranean studies, which takes the region around the sea as a geographic location and assumes that through much of history, that was where most of the people there were oriented, inside towards the sea.
No, you’re not! Maybe it’s a generational thing (that’s always my explanation 
).
Exactly!
