Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T06:58:25.443Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Life Begins at Fifty: African Studies Enters Its Age of Awareness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Joseph C. Miller
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in “studying” anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 1 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2007

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

Adenaike, Carolyn Keyes, and Vansina, Jan, ed. 1996. In Pursuit of History: Fieldwork in Africa. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Ajayi, Jacob. 1968. “The Continuity of African Institutions under Colonialism.” In Emerging Themes of African History, edited by Ranger, T. O., 179–200. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Appiah, Anthony. 1992. In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Appiah, Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Asante, Molefi. 2007. The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ashforth, Adam. 2005. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Austen, Ralph A. 1987. African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency. London: J. Currey.Google Scholar
Austen, Ralph A., and Jansen, Jan. 1996. “History, Oral Transmission and Structure in Ibn Khaldun's Chronology of Mali Rulers.” History in Africa 23: 17–28.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 1991. I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 2001. Generation of Plays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Bender, Thomas. 2006. A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Bender, Thomas, ed. 2002. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Berlinerblau, Jacques. 1999. Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Bemal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Bemal, Martin. 2001. Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bemal Responds to His Critics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2007. The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Carney, Judith. 2002. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2000 “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History.” In History after the Three Worlds: Post-Eurocentric Historiographies, edited by Dirlik, Arif, Bahl, Vinay, and Gran, Peter, 157–90. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2001. “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective.” African Affairs 100: 189–213.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Coplan, David B. 1985. In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip. 1964. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip. 2005. On the Margins of History. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Deng, Francis. In press. “Genocidal Wars of Identity.” In New Encyclopedia of Africa, edited by Middleton, John and Miller, Joseph C.. 5 vols. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale.Google Scholar
Dalton, George, ed. 1971. Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1955. Nations nègres et culture. Paris: Éditions africaines.Google Scholar
(The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? Translated by Cook, Mercer. New York: L. Hill, 1974.)Google Scholar
Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1960. L'Afrique noire pré-coloniale; étude comparée des systèmes politiques et sociaux de l'Europe et de l'Afrique noire, de l'antiquité à la formation des états modernes. Paris: Présence africaine.Google Scholar
Doyle, Shane. 2006. “From Kitara to the Lost Counties: Genealogy, Land and Legitimacy in the Kingdom of Bunyoro, Western Uganda.” Social Identities 12: 457–70.Google Scholar
Drayton, Richard Harry. 2000. Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1915. The Negro. New York: H. Holt.Google Scholar
Egharevba, Jacob U. 1971 [1936]. The City of Benin… Benin Law and Custom… Some Stories of Ancient Benin… Some Tribal Gods of Southern Nigeria. Nendeln: Kraus Reprint.Google Scholar
El-Nadoury, R., with Vercoutter, J.. 1981. “The Legacy of Pharonic Egypt.” In [UNESCO] General History of Africa, vol. 2, 155–77.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fage, John D. 2002. To Africa and Back. Birmingham: Centre of West African Studies.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les damnés de la terre. Préface de Jean Paul Sartre. Paris: F. Maspero. Google Scholar
(The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Farrington, Constance. New York: Grove, 1963.)Google Scholar
Fasolt, Constantin. 2004. The Limits of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, Steven. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, Steven. 1993. “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History.” In Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Bates, Robert H., Mudimbe, V. Y., and O'Barr, Jean, 167–212. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Feierman, Steven. 1995. “Africa in History: The End of Universal Narratives.” In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Prakash, Gyan, 40–65. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Feinberg, Harvey M., and Solodow, Joseph C.. 2002. “Out of Africa.” Journal of African History 32: 255–61.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1992. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. 3rd edition. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D. 1974. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Geschiere, Peter. 1995. Sorcellerie et politique en Afrique. Paris: Karthala. (The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Translated by Peter Geschiere and Janet Roitman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.)Google Scholar
Guyer, Jane I., et al. 1995. “Wealth in People: Wealth in Things.” Journal of African History 36: 83–140.Google Scholar
Hahn, Emily. 1933. Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Heintze, Beatrix, and Jones, Adam, ed. 1987. “European Sources for Sub-Saharan Africa: Uses and Abuses.” Special issue of Paideuma 33.Google Scholar
Henige, David P. 1974. The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Henige, David P.. 1980. “The Disease of Writing: Ganda and Nyoro Kinglists in a Newly Literate World.” In The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History, edited by Miller, Joseph C., 240–61. Folkestone: Dawson.Google Scholar
Hess, Robert A. 1971. “J. F. Ade Ajayi and the New Historiography in West Africa.” African Studies Review 14: 1–4.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence, ed. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2000. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Inikori, Joseph E. 1999. “Slaves or Serfs? A Comparative Study of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe and Africa.” In The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, edited by Okpewho, Isidore, Davies, Carole Boyce, and Mazrui, Ali A., 49–75. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Inikori, Joseph E.. 2003. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic. Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Isaacman, Allen. 2003. “Legacies of Engagement: Scholarship Informed by Political Commitment.” African Studies Review 46: 1–38.Google Scholar
Isichei, Elizabeth. 2002. Voices of the Poor in Africa. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.Google Scholar
Jasanoff, Maya. 2005. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Jones, Steve. 2006. Antonio Gramsci. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. 1975. African Apostles: Ritual and Conversion in the Church of John Maranke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Kagame, Alexis. 1943. Inganji Karinga (“The Victorious Drums”). Kabgayi: [s.n.].Google Scholar
Kagame, Alexis. 1949–1951. Isoko y'mäjyambere (“Sources of Progress”). 3 volumes. Kabgayi: Ibitabo by'injijuramuco (Éditions morales).Google Scholar
Keim, Curtis. 1999. Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Keita, Maghan. 2000. Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Rogers, Guy MacLean, ed. 1996. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Pion. (The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfield and Nicholson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.)Google Scholar
Ludden, David, ed. 2001. Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalisation of South Asia. Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1978. “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of the Natives.” History in Africa 5: 101–21.Google Scholar
Mama, Amina. 2007. “Is It Ethical to Study Africa? Preliminary Thoughts on Scholarship and Freedom.” African Studies Review 50: 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Maquet, Jacques. 1967. Africanité, traditionelle et moderne. Paris: Présence africaine. (Africanity: The Cultural Unity of Black Africa. Translated by Joan R. Rayfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.)Google Scholar
Matory, J. Lorand. 2006. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcohny. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mcintosh, Roderick J. 2005. Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mcintosh, Susan Keech, ed. 1999. Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C. 1999. “History and Africa/Africa and History.” American Historical Review 104: 1–32.Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C.. 2004a. “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-Centric World History Needs Africa.” Historically Speaking 5: 7–12.Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C.. 2004b. “Multi-Centrism in History: How and Why Perspectives Matter-Rejoinder.” Historically Speaking 5: 27–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mokhtar, G., ed. 1981. [UNESCO] General History of Africa, vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk. 1994. Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Muriuki, Godfrey. 2002. “Western Uniqueness? Some Counterarguments from an African Perspective.” In Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate, edited by Rüsen, Jörn, 142–47. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Oliver, Roland. 1997. In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Parkinson, C. Northcote. 1958. Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Peel, J. D. Y. 2001. Religious Encounter and the Making of Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Perinbam, B. Marie. 1982. Holy Violence: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon: An Intellectual Biography. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press.Google Scholar
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, Karl, Arensberg, C. H., and Pearson, H. W., ed. 1957. Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Ranger, Terence O. 1967. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–97: A Study in African Resistance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Allen F., and Roberts, Mary Nooter. 2004. A Saint in the City: Sufi Art in Urban Senegal. Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Roberts, Allen F., and Roberts, Mary Nooter. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: The Beni ngoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-l'Ouvertüre.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Salman, Michael. 2004. “Resisting Slavery in the Philippines: Ambivalent Domestication and the Reversibility of Comparisons.” Slavery and Abolition 25: 30–47.Google Scholar
Scheub, Harold. 1977. African Oral Narratives, Proverbs, Riddles, Poetry, and Song. Boston: G. K. Hall.Google Scholar
Schildkrout, Enid, and Keim, Curtis. 1998. The Scramble for Art in Central Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. 1976. Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C.. 1985. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C.. 1990a. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C.. 1990b. Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, James C.. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. 1971. The Foundations of “Africanité” or “Négritude” and “ara-bité.” Paris: Presence Africaine.Google Scholar
Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stoger-Eising, Viktoria. 2000. “‘Ujamaa’ Revisited: Indigenous and European Influences in Nyerere's Social and Political Thought.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 70: 118–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strother, Zoe. 1998. Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sutton, John. 1997. “The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade before the Black Death: Al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali.” The Antiquaries Journal 77: 221–42.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: V. Gollancz.Google Scholar
Thornton, John K. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1500–1680. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trevor-Roper, H. R. 1965. The Rise of Christian Europe. London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Trevor-Roper, H. R.. 1969. “The Past and Present: History and Sociology.” Past and Present 62: 3–17.Google Scholar
Trouilot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Trouilot, Michel Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's/Macmillan.Google Scholar
Vail, Leroy, and White, Landeg. 1991 Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 1974. “The Power of Systematic Doubt in Historical Inquiry.” History in Africa 1: 109–27.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 1984a. Art History in Africa. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 1984b. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 1990. Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 1994. Living with Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan. 2005. How Societies Are Born: Governance in West Central Africa Before 1600. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wylie, Diana. 2002. Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 1997. Manufacturing African Studies and Crises. Dakar: CODESRIA.Google Scholar