Instructions
Write a 4-5pp (pages) response (double-spaced, 12 point font) to the question below.
Your reply should be your own analysis, with an absolute minimum of quotes (if they appear at all). Submit the paper AS A WORD DOCUMENT to your TA via NYU Brightspace (or directly to the TA if that is her/his/their preference).
The Question
A major premise of the first three weeks of the course is that antiquity and authoritative documents constitute important contexts for understanding the early global African experience.
We have now read the primary sources Kebra Negast and Sundiata: Epic of Old Mali, together with secondary sources written by Hansberry, Popovi’c, and Gomez.
In conjunction with the lectures, we have explored:
1) ancient Egyptian-Nubian relations, the Graeco-Roman world, and Ethiopia
2) Africans in the Bible
3) the classical Islamic world, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian subcontinent
4) early West and East Africa
In these places and periods, we have discussed the roles of Africans in dynastic rule, imperial conquest, commerce, migration, cultural and religious exchanges, slavery, etc.
Taking into consideration all of the required readings (and only those readings), the lectures, and the places and periods mentioned above, craft an argumentative essay that responds to the following characterization of the early African global experience:
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it — that is in its northern part — belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia.
Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (d. 1831), German philosopher.
Writing Response Papers (from the syllabus)
Response papers should include the following elements:
– a topic statement within the first or second paragraph, specifying your main argument and any subsidiary points, if there are any
– an overview, also within the first or second paragraph, summarizing how the rest of the paper marshals the evidence to support the thesis
– clear organization of information throughout the rest of the paper, in support of the thesis
– a conclusion summarizing the thesis and its support
– proper rendering of such common words as “among” rather than “amongst”; “toward” and “afterward” – as opposed to “towards” and “afterwards”; “twentieth century,” not “20th century,” etc.
