How Africa Has Been Made to Mean with Prof. Amah Edoh

Chalk Radio

“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students with this concept in 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures, a course she’s shared on MIT OpenCourseWare. Topics include how her own experiences with formal education shape how and why she tries to value students’ voices in the classroom, redefining students’ relationships to scholarly texts to make academia feel less alienating, giving students language to articulate relationships of power, encouraging students to experiment with creative cultural production, getting off campus to experience cultural performance in a social context, and living the life of a new faculty member (spoiler alert: it’s a lot like engaging in marathon improvisational theatre, and it’s exhausting!).

Relevant Resources:

MIT OpenCourseWare

The OCW Educator Portal

Professor Edoh’s course on OCW

“The Price of Love” [PDF] (Wedding Project) by Nwamaka Amobi and Gabrielle Ballard

Professor Edoh’s faculty page

Blog post on Professor’s Edoh’s approach to creating a supportive academic culture

Faculty profile: 3 Questions with M. Amah Edoh on Africa and Innovation

Spotify playlist

Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions

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Credits

Sarah Hansen, host and producer

Brett Paci, producer

Dave Lishansky, producer

Show notes by Peter Chipman