Associate Professor at The Ecole Normale Superieur, Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Sénégal.
Babacar Fall is the Director of the research laboratory “Centre de recherche sur les métiers et la mémoire en Afrique” (Research Center on occupations...
Fellow, Weatherhead Initiative on Global History (spring 2016). Research Fellow, Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences; Visiting Scholar, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University.
Research interests: African history; African migrations; world history; comparative politics; and historical and ethnographic methodology.
Associate Professor, East China Normal University Global Fellow at Harvard, 2014-2015
Research Interests: The dissemination of Modern Chinese culture in the United States; and Modern Chinese mineral-resource development and foreign trade from...
The United States is the most powerful player on the international scene today, and is unlikely to relinquish that position any time soon. Understanding how and why this condition arose, and what it means for world affairs today, is our concern in this course. The emphasis is on U.S. policymaking over the past century, with due attention to the international and domestic political context in which decisions were made. Issues to be explored include the tension between isolationism and interventionism and between unilateralism and multilateralism; the emergence of the U.S. as a...
What do the sprawling cities of the global South tell us about the contemporary urban condition? How is urban space produced and experienced in an era of increased interconnectedness, but also of great inequality and instability? How does the view from the South change our understanding of urban forms and processes, especially when so much of the "South" seems to be located in the "North"? To address these questions we will explore urban lives and spaces across cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The course will include works in anthropology, geography, urban...
Hiphop is a global phenomenon that influences social life far beyond the music and entertainment industries. Yet beyond descriptions and critiques of its mass appeal, few have considered hip-hop's development of standards and evaluations across all artistic areas and culture. Moreover, the consequences of an audience trained in the changing standards of hip-hop and charged with upholding them, has not been thoroughly explored. This course provides a critical examination of hip-hop in the US and its role as a cultural, political and artistic resource for youth. It will explore the...
In a story titled Africa Rising (2011), The Economist argued that the continent epitomizes both the "transformative promise of [capitalist] growth" and its bleakest dimensions. This workshop will explore Africa's changing place in the world - and the new economies, legalities, socialities, and cultural forms that have arisen there. It will also interrogate the claim that the African present is a foreshadowing of processes beginning to occur elsewhere; that, therefore, it is a productive source of theory about current conditions world-wide. The workshop, open to faculty and students,...
