Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:52:06.712Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2019

Abstract:

Regional distinctions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed, originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Different East and Central African historiographies reflect – and reproduce – these distinctions. However, the inhabitants of those spaces never stopped crossing and entangling them. Likewise, this section approaches East and Central Africa empirically as a space of historical entanglement. Moreover, the authors question the traditional divide between both regions epistemologically, by transferring research perspectives from one region’s historiography to the other. They thus illustrate that bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would otherwise remain hidden or marginal.

Résumé:

Les distinctions régionales entre “Afrique de l’Est” et “Afrique centrale” ont été établies à l’origine par des étrangers majoritairement. Les différentes historiographies de l’Afrique de l’Est et de l’Afrique centrale reflètent et reproduisent ces distinctions. Cependant, les habitants de ces espaces n’ont jamais cessé de les traverser et de les enchevêtrer. De la même façon, cette section aborde empiriquement l’Afrique de l’Est et l’Afrique centrale en tant qu’espace d’enchevêtrement historique. En outre, les auteurs s’interrogent épistémologiquement sur le clivage traditionnel entre les deux régions, en transférant les perspectives de recherche de l’historiographie d’une région vers l’autre. Ils illustrent ainsi que faire le lien entre les histoires de l’Afrique de l’Est et l’Afrique centrale permet de révéler des histoires qui autrement resteraient cachées ou marginales.

Type
Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baker, Samuel J.K., “The East African Environment,” in: Oliver, Roland and Mathew, Gervase (eds.), History of East Africa, volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 122.Google Scholar
Birmingham, David, and Martin, Phyllis M. (eds.), History of Central Africa, 3 volumes (London: Longman, 1983–1998).Google Scholar
Bley, Helmut, “Die Großregionen Afrikas oder die Grenzen des Autochthonen,” Periplus – Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 4 (1994), 114.Google Scholar
Bley, Helmut, “Ostafrikanische Welt,” in: Jaeger, Friedrich (ed.), Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, volume 9 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009) col. 587589.Google Scholar
Castryck, Geert, “The Bounds of Berlin’s Africa: Space-Making and Multiple Territorialities in East and Central Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Cheeseman, Nic, “Why Rwanda’s development model wouldn’t work elsewhere in Africa,” The Conversation (8 January 2018), http://theconversation.com/why-rwandas-development-model-wouldnt-work-elsewhere-in-africa-89699, accessed 29 January 2019.Google Scholar
Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, L’Afrique des grands lacs. Deux mille ans d’histoire (Paris: Aubier, 2000).Google Scholar
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, “Introduction: African Urban Spaces: History and Culture,” in: Salm, Steven J. and Falola, Toyin (eds.), African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), xv–xl.Google Scholar
Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, “The Rise of Francophone African Social Science: From Colonial Knowledge to Knowledge of Africa,” in: Martin, William G. and West, Michael O. (eds.), Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 3953.Google Scholar
Fabian, Johannes, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Freitag, Ulrike, and von Oppen, Achim (eds.), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grataloup, Christian, L’invention des continents: comment l’Europe a découpé le monde (Paris: Larousse, 2009).Google Scholar
Gunn, Simon, “The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place,” in: Gunn, Simon and Morris, Robert J. (eds.), Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 111.Google Scholar
Hountondji, Paulin J., “Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies,” RCCS Annual Review 1 (2009), 121131.Google Scholar
Howard, Allen, and Shain, Richard (eds.), The Spatial Factor in African History: The Relationship of the Social, Material, and Perceptual (Leiden: Brill, 2005).Google Scholar
Kweku Assan, Joseph, and Walker, Lawrence, “Enhancing Citizens Capability to Compete Globally: Rwanda’s Formal Language and Education Policy and its Implications for Development,” Journal of Education and Human Development 7 –1 (2018), 3746.Google Scholar
Lewis, Martin W., and Wigen, Kären E. (eds.), The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maquet, Emma, Baba Kaké, Ibrahima and Suret-Canale, Jean, Histoire de l’Afrique centrale (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971).Google Scholar
Middell, Matthias (ed.), Handbook of Transregional Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).Google Scholar
Middell, Matthias, and Naumann, Katja, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Journal of Global History 51 (2010), 149170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mudimbe, Valentin Y., The Idea of Africa (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Newbury, David, and Newbury, Catharine, “Bringing the Peasants Back In: Agrarian Themes in the Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in Rwanda,” The American Historical Review 1053 (2000), 832877.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nordling, Linda, Rwanda, : From Killing Fields to Technopolis,” Nature 5377618 (1 September 2016), S4–S5.Google ScholarPubMed
Nugent, Paul, “Critical African Studies: A Voluntarist Manifesto,” Critical African Studies 11 (2009), 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nugent, Paul, and Asiwaju, A.I. (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (New York: Pinter, 1996).Google Scholar
Oliver, Roland, and Mathew, Gervase (eds.), History of East Africa, 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).Google Scholar
Parker, John, and Reid, Richard J. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reyntjens, Filip, “Rwanda, Ten Years on: From Genocide to Dictatorship,” African Affairs 1032 (2004), 177210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reyntjens, Filip, “Post–1994 Politics in Rwanda: Problematising ‘Liberation’ and ‘Democratisation,’” Third World Quarterly 276 (2006), 11031117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saunier, Pierre-Yves, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheriff, Abdul, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (London: Currey, 1987).Google Scholar
Sidaway, James D., “The Geography of Political Geography,” in: Cox, Kevin R., Low, Murray and Robinson, Jennifer (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 4155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soja, Edward W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989).Google Scholar
Tiyambe Zeleza, Paul, “African Studies and Universities since Independence: The Challenges of Epistemic and Institutional Decolonization,” Transition 1011 (2009), 110135.Google Scholar
Vellut, Jean-Luc, “Configurations of Space in Central African History,” in: Füllberg-Stolberg, Katja, Heidrich, Petra and Schöne, Ellinor (eds.), Dissociation and Appropriation: Responses to Globalization in Asia and Africa (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999), 255264.Google Scholar