This course gives students a critical understanding of ethnographic and theoretical writing on sub-Saharan Africa. Grounded in some ‘classic’ debates around African knowledge (of/about Africa, traditional/modern, written/oral) and land (autochthony, power, authority), it also explores more recent and emerging theoretical engagements in science, technology, and bureaucracies. In doing so, students will engage with key contemporary questions about how the sub-continent’s societies orient themselves and respond to new precarities, in a postcolonial and neoliberal age.