African Studies: Geography

Abstract

This entry briefly highlights the content of geographic work on Africa during the past three decades. Most geographic work in the 1970s and 1980s concentrated on regional geography with an emphasis on country surveys, descriptions and compilation of geographic data at country or regional level. The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of new paradigms in the study of African geography. While the empirical subject matter may be agriculture, health, gender issues, development, etc., the theoretical paradigm guiding geographic research during the 1990s was often about issues such as representation, discourse, resistance, and indigenous development within broader frameworks influenced by the ideas of prominent social science scholars such as Foucault, Said, and Sen. The works fall into the two main subdisciplines of geography, namely, human geography (by far the most dominant) and physical geography now commonly referred to as earth systems science and/or global change studies. Within these two main sub-disciplines, various theoretical perspectives overlap to characterize the growing body of research by geographers on Africa.