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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]
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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 

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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

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