Africa in imperial and transnational history: Multi-sited historiography and the necessity of theory

Journal of African History

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 331-340

  Zimmermanw, Andrew ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Historiography; imperialism; method; slave trade; transnational; West Africa

Indexed keywords

COLONIZATION; DIASPORA; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; IMPERIALISM; POLITICAL HISTORY; SLAVERY; THEORETICAL STUDY;

AFRICA;

EID: 84888313832     PISSN: 00218537     EISSN: 14695138     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853713000728     Document Type: Review

References (87)

1. This project resulted in A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ, 2010).
2. My work on imperial history was Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001).
3. F. Cooper, 'Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history', The American Historical Review, 99:5 (1994), 1516-45.
4. Cooper also criticizes the limitations of the national histories that resulted from this initial decolonizing maneuver. R. Reid, 'Past and presentism: the "precolonial" the foreshortening of African history', The Journal of African History, 52:2 (2,011), 135-55.
5. J.-B. Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 189 0-1923 (Athens, OH, 1999).
6. N. L. Gayibor (ed.), Histoire des Togolais, Volume I, Des Origines à 1884 (Lomé, 1997);
7. N. L. Gayibor, Le Togo Sous Domination Coloniale (1884-11)60) (Lomé, 1997).
8. S. E. Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: IN, 2002);
9. D.H. Laumann, 'Remembering and forgetting the German occupation of the Central Volta region of Ghana' (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1999);
10. P. A. Napo, 'Le Togo à l'epoque allemande (1884-1914)', 5 vols. (unpublished PhD thesis, Sorbonne, 1996);
11. P. Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Life of the Borderlands since 1914 (Athens, OH, 2002);
12. P. Sebald, Togo 1884-1914: Eine Geschichte der deutschen 'Musterkolonie' auf der Grundlage amtlicher Quellen (Berlin, 1988).
13. J. Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856-1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995);
14. G. C. K. Gwassa, 'African methods of warfare during the Maji Maji War, 1905-1907', in B. A. Ogot (ed.), War and Society in Africa (London, 1972), 123-48;
15. J. Iliffe, Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905-1912 (Cambridge, 1969);
16. I. N. Kimambo, Penetration and Protest in Tanzania: The Impact of the World Economy on the Pare, 1860-11)60 (Athens, OH, 1991);
17. M. R. Moyd, 'Becoming Askari: African soldiers and everyday colonialism in German East Africa, 1850-1918' (unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2008);
18. M. Moyd, 'Making the household, making the state: colonial military communities and labor in German East Africa', International Labor and Working-Class History, 80:1 (2,011), 53-76;
19. T.R. Sunseri, Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH, 2002);
20. T.R. Sunseri, Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820-2000 (Athens, OH, 2009);
21. M. Wright, 'Local roots of policy in German East Africa', The Journal of African History, 9:4 (1968), 621-30.
22. R. A. Austen and J. Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600-c. i960 (Cambridge, 1999).
23. Two important exceptions are the work of Nina Berman, who continues a multi-year fieldwork project in Kenya as part of her transnational studies, and that of Michelle Moyd
24. whose work is an important contribution to German history as well as to East African history.
25. See N. Berman, Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln, NE, 2004);
26. N. Berman, 'Yusuf's choice: East African agency during the German colonial period in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Paradise', English Studies in Africa, 56:1 (2013): 51-64;
27. N. Berman, K. Mühlhahn, and P. Nganang (eds.), German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor, forthcoming 2013);
28. Moyd, 'Becoming Askari';
29. Moyd, 'Making the household'.
30. Pioneering for this critical imperial historiography were works by the anthropologists J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983);
31. S. W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985);
32. and E. R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA, 1982);
33. and by the literary scholar E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
34. Historians have since produced a vast critical literature. For examples, see the works cited in fns n, 13, 14-16
35. F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 4.
36. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York, 2004 [orig. pub. 1961]), 58.
37. A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995);
38. J. P. Short, Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2012).
39. Sumit Sarkar made a similar point when he complained that subaltern studies had shifted focus from the history of Indian societies to 'critiques of Western-colonial power-knowledge'.
40. S. Sarkar, 'The decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies', in Writing Social History (Delhi, 1997), 82-108.
41. See especially E. W. Said's first work on the topic, 'The Arab portrayed', in I. Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective (Evanston, IL, 1970), 1-9.
42. G. Steinmetz, The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007).
43. S. Feierman, 'African histories and the dissolution of world history', in R. H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and J. O'Barr (eds.), Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago, 1993), 167-212, esp. 197.
44. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
45. See also R. Guha, 'The prose of counter-insurgency', in R. Guha and G. C. Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York, 1988), 45-86.
46. R. D. G Kelley, '"But a local phase of a world problem": black history's global vision, 1883-1950', The Journal of American History, 86:3 (1999), 1045-77.
47. J. L. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ, 2005);
48. S. Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, NC, 2002).
49. S. Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, trans. S. O'Hagan (Cambridge, 2010), 22;
50. G. E. Marcus, 'Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography', Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995), 95-117.
51. See also G E. Marcus, 'Multi-sited ethnography: five or six things I know about it now', in S. Coleman and P. von Hellermann (eds.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (New York, 2011), 16-32.
52. Marcus, 'Ethnography in/of the world system', yy. H. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (London, 1965), 9.
53. See Fig. 3, 'Proportion of listed faculty specializing in geographic region, 1975 to 2005', in R. B. Townsend, 'What's in a label?: changing patterns of faculty specialization since 1975', Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 45:1 (2007), 7.
54. I93), 103-40.
55. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973 [orig. pub.1966]), 3.
56. N. Kodesh, 'History from the healer's shrine: genre, historical imagination, and early Ganda history', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49:3 (2007), 527-52. (Pubitemid 47039801)
57. J. W. Scott, 'The evidence of experience', Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 773-97.
58. Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Demny, 15 May 1871, in S. A. Whidden (ed.), Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, trans. W. Fowlie (Chicago, 2005), 377.
59. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For a response defending theory, see V. Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London, 2012).
60. My own defense of theory differs from Chibber's. This literature is too vast to cite here.
61. Especially important for me are I. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC, 2005);
62. P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000);
63. and Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. See especially Palmié's definition of Atlantic modernity on p. 15.
64. W. Pietz, 'The problem of the fetish, I, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9 (1985), 5-17, esp. 6-7.
65. See also W. Pietz, 'The problem of the fetish, II: the origin of the fetish', RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 13 (1987), 23-45;
66. W. Pietz, 'The problem of the fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism', RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 16 (1988), 105-23;
67. E. S. Apter and W. Pietz (eds.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY, 1993).
68. Letter from Karl Marx, Brussels, to Pawel Wassiljewitsch Annenkow, Paris, 28 Dec. 1846, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, III/2 (Berlin, 1972), 70-80.
69. I am currently exploring the relation of Marxism and the antislavery struggle in my own research.
70. On this topic, see also K. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, 2010).
71. For an important work on the broader tradition, see C.J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000 [orig. pub. 1983]).
72. We do not yet possess an account of this process equivalent to that produced by William Pietz for the fetish.
73. I am currently working on this theme.
74. O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982).
75. For one important critique of this concept, which nonetheless highlights the centrality of death in slavery
76. see V. Brown, 'Social death and political life in the study of slavery', The American Historical Review, 114:5 (2009), 1231-49.
77. Even more influential than Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been A. Kojève
78. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. A. Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr (Ithaca, 1980 [orig. pub. 1947]).
79. S. Buck-Morss, 'Hegel and Haiti', Critical Inquiry, 26:4 (2000), 821-65.
80. See especially J. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 36-9.
81. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA, 1998 [orig. pub. 1995]);
82. J.-A. Mbembe, 'Necropolitics', trans. L. Meintjes Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), 11-40;
83. R. Depestre, Hadriana dans Tous Mes Reêves: Roman (Paris, 1988);
84. J. Dayan, 'France reads Haiti: an interview with René Depestre', Yale French Studies, 83 (1993), 136-53;
85. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (2nd edn, Chicago, 1998 [orig. pub. 1958]);
86. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1990 [orig. pub. 1976]);
87. P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. S. Woolf (New York, 1993 [orig. pub. 1958]).