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NONCONFORMITY IN AFRICA'S CULTURAL HISTORY*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2017
Abstract
This article uses E. P. Thompson's last book – Witness against the Beast (1993) – as an occasion to claim oddity, peculiarity, and nonconformity as subjects of African history. Africa's historians have been engaged in an earnest effort to locate contemporary cultural life within the longue durée, but in fact there was much that was strange and eccentric. Here I focus on the reading habits and interpretive strategies that inspired nonconformity. Nonconformists read the Bible idiosyncratically, snipping bits of text out of the fabric of the book and using these slogans to launch heretical and odd ways of living. Over time, some of them sought to position themselves in narrative structures that could authenticate and legitimate their dissident religious activity. That entailed experimentation with voice, positionality, and addressivity.
- Type
- JAH Forum: E. P. Thompson in African History
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
Footnotes
*
This article was presented at the workshop on ‘History after E. P. Thompson’ at the University of Michigan (Nov. 2015), at the conference on ‘African Intellectual History’ at Yale University (Apr. 2016), and at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota (Oct. 2016). I thank the participants at each of these occasions for their helpful comments. Author's email: [email protected]
References
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