Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T05:09:34.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

AFRICA IN IMPERIAL AND TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY: MULTI-SITED HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE NECESSITY OF THEORY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2013

Andrew Zimmerman
Andrew Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
George Washington University
*
Author's email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyond imperial history decades ago, and these fields provide important resources and models for transnational historians. Transnational history, nonetheless, always risks reproducing the boundaries between colonizer and colonized that it seeks to overcome. The need to think outside of empire from within a world structured by empires requires that historians embrace critical theory, but in a manner consistent with the groundedness of multi-sited historiography.

Keywords

HistoriographytransnationalmethodWest Africaimperialismslave trade
Type
JAH Forum: Africa and Global History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 331 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Johanna K. Bockman, Jessica A. Krug, and Paul S. Landau for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

1 This project resulted in Zimmerman, A., Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar. My work on imperial history was Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001).

2 Cooper, F., ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, The American Historical Review, 99:5 (1994), 1516–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cooper also criticizes the limitations of the national histories that resulted from this initial decolonizing maneuver.

3 Reid, R., ‘Past and presentism: the “precolonial” and the foreshortening of African history’, The Journal of African History, 52:2 (2011), 135–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Gewald, J.-B., Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Athens, OH, 1999)Google Scholar.

5 Gayibor, N. L. (ed.), Histoire des Togolais, Volume I, Des Origines à 1884 (Lomé, 1997)Google Scholar; Gayibor, N. L., Le Togo Sous Domination Coloniale (1884–1960) (Lomé, 1997).Google Scholar

6 Greene, S. E., Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (Bloomington: IN, 2002)Google Scholar; 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); P. A. Napo, ‘Le Togo à l'epoque allemande (1884–1914)’, 5 vols. (unpublished PhD thesis, Sorbonne, 1996); Nugent, P., Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Life of the Borderlands since 1914 (Athens, OH, 2002)Google Scholar; Sebald, P., Togo 1884–1914: Eine Geschichte der deutschen ‘Musterkolonie’ auf der Grundlage amtlicher Quellen (Berlin, 1988)Google Scholar.

7 Glassman, J., Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995)Google Scholar; Gwassa, G. C. K., ‘African methods of warfare during the Maji Maji War, 1905–1907’, in Ogot, B. A. (ed.), War and Society in Africa (London, 1972), 123–48Google Scholar; Iliffe, J., Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905–1912 (Cambridge, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kimambo, I. N., Penetration and Protest in Tanzania: The Impact of the World Economy on the Pare, 1860–1960 (Athens, OH, 1991)Google Scholar; M. R. Moyd, ‘Becoming Askari: African soldiers and everyday colonialism in German East Africa, 1850–1918’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2008); Moyd, M., ‘Making the household, making the state: colonial military communities and labor in German East Africa’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 80:1 (2011), 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sunseri, T. R., Vilimani: Labor Migration and Rural Change in Early Colonial Tanzania (Portsmouth, NH, 2002)Google Scholar; Sunseri, T. R., Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820–2000 (Athens, OH, 2009)Google Scholar; Wright, M., ‘Local roots of policy in German East Africa’, The Journal of African History, 9:4 (1968), 621–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Austen, R. A. and Derrick, J., Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and their Hinterland, c. 1600–c. 1960 (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 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, whose work is an important contribution to German history as well as to East African history. See Berman, N., Impossible Missions? German Economic, Military, and Humanitarian Efforts in Africa (Lincoln, NE, 2004)Google Scholar; Berman, N., ‘Yusuf's choice: East African agency during the German colonial period in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novel Paradise’, English Studies in Africa, 56:1 (2013): 51–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berman, N., Mühlhahn, K., and Nganang, P. (eds.), German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor, forthcoming 2013)Google Scholar; Moyd, ‘Becoming Askari’; and Moyd, ‘Making the household’.

10 Pioneering for this critical imperial historiography were works by the anthropologists Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Mintz, S. W., Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Wolf, E. R., Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA, 1982)Google Scholar; and by the literary scholar Said, E. W., Orientalism (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. Historians have since produced a vast critical literature. For examples, see the works cited in fns 11, 13, 14–16, and 18.

11 Cooper, F. and Stoler, A. L., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Fanon, F., The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York, 2004 [orig. pub. 1961]), 58Google Scholar.

13 McClintock, A., Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Short, J. P., Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 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’. Sarkar, S., ‘The decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies’, in Writing Social History (Delhi, 1997), 82–108Google Scholar.

15 See especially Said's, E. W.first work on the topic, ‘The Arab portrayed’, in Abu-Lughod, I. (ed.), The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective (Evanston, IL, 1970), 1–9Google Scholar.

16 Steinmetz, G., The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Feierman, S., ‘African histories and the dissolution of world history’, in Bates, R. H., Mudimbe, V. Y., and O'Barr, J. (eds.), Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago, 1993), 167–212Google Scholar, esp. 197.

18 Chakrabarty, D., Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Guha, R., ‘The prose of counter-insurgency’, in Guha, R. and Spivak, G. C. (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York, 1988), 45–86Google Scholar.

19 Kelley, R. D. G., ‘“But a local phase of a world problem”: black history's global vision, 1883–1950’, The Journal of American History, 86:3 (1999), 1045–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Matory, J. L., Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ, 2005)Google Scholar; Palmié, S., Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham, NC, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Conrad, S., Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, trans. S. O'Hagan (Cambridge, 2010), 22Google Scholar; Marcus, G. E., ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995), 95–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Marcus, G. E., ‘Multi-sited ethnography: five or six things I know about it now’, in Coleman, S. and von Hellermann, P. (eds.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (New York, 2011), 16–32Google Scholar.

22 Marcus, ‘Ethnography in/of the world system’, 99.

23 Trevor-Roper, H., The Rise of Christian Europe (London, 1965), 9Google Scholar.

24 See Fig. 3, ‘Proportion of listed faculty specializing in geographic region, 1975 to 2005’, in Townsend, R. B., ‘What's in a label?: changing patterns of faculty specialization since 1975’, Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association 45:1 (2007), 7Google Scholar.

25 Abdel-Malek, A., ‘Orientalism in crisis’, Diogenes, 11:44 (1963), 103–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Adorno, T. W., Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973 [orig. pub.1966]), 3Google Scholar.

27 Kodesh, N., ‘History from the healer's shrine: genre, historical imagination, and early Ganda history’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49:3 (2007), 527–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Scott, J. W., ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), 773–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Arthur Rimbaud to Paul Demny, 15 May 1871, in Whidden, S. A. (ed.), Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, trans. W. Fowlie (Chicago, 2005), 377Google Scholar.

30 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For a response defending theory, see Chibber, V., Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London, 2012)Google Scholar. My own defense of theory differs from Chibber's.

31 This literature is too vast to cite here. Especially important for me are Baucom, I., Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M., The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000)Google Scholar; and Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. See especially Palmié's definition of Atlantic modernity on p. 15.

32 Pietz, W., ‘The problem of the fetish, I’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9 (1985), 5–17Google Scholar, esp. 6–7. See also Pietz, W., ‘The problem of the fetish, II: the origin of the fetish’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 13 (1987), 23–45Google Scholar; Pietz, W., ‘The problem of the fetish, IIIa: Bosman's Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 16 (1988), 105–23Google Scholar; Apter, E. S. and Pietz, W. (eds.), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY, 1993)Google Scholar.

33 Letter from Karl Marx, Brussels, to Pawel Wassiljewitsch Annenkow, Paris, 28 Dec. 1846, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe, III/2 (Berlin, 1972), 70–80.

34 I am currently exploring the relation of Marxism and the antislavery struggle in my own research. On this topic, see also Anderson, K., Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an important work on the broader tradition, see Robinson, C. J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000 [orig. pub. 1983])Google Scholar.

35 We do not yet possess an account of this process equivalent to that produced by William Pietz for the fetish. I am currently working on this theme.

36 Patterson, O., Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982)Google Scholar. For one important critique of this concept, which nonetheless highlights the centrality of death in slavery, see Brown, V., ‘Social death and political life in the study of slavery’, The American Historical Review, 114:5 (2009), 1231–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even more influential than Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been Kojève, A., 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])Google Scholar.

37 Buck-Morss, S., ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry, 26:4 (2000), 821–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 See especially Dayan, J., Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 36–9Google Scholar.

39 Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA, 1998 [orig. pub. 1995])Google Scholar; Mbembe, J.-A., ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Depestre, R., Hadriana dans Tous Mes Reêves: Roman (Paris, 1988)Google Scholar; Dayan, J., ‘France reads Haiti: an interview with René Depestre’, Yale French Studies, 83 (1993), 136–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arendt, H., The Human Condition (2nd edn, Chicago, 1998 [orig. pub. 1958])CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1990 [orig. pub. 1976])Google Scholar; Levi, P., Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. S. Woolf (New York, 1993 [orig. pub. 1958])Google Scholar.