The Future of Africa's Past: Observations on the Discipline

I

In April 2007 David William Cohen and his graduate students held a symposium on the future of African Studies at the University of Michigan.² David Cohen, two graduate students—Isabelle de Rezende and Clapperton Mavhunga—as well as five invited speakers with different disciplinary backgrounds—Pius Adesanmi, Tim Burke, Jennifer Cole, Paul Zeleza, and myself—contributed papers. The purpose of the conference, entitled "2020: Re-Envisioning African Studies," was twofold. First, it appeared timely to reflect yet again on the state of African Studies in disciplinary-based and area studies departments. Second, David Cohen had the idea of 2020 representing both the utopia of ideal vision and the concrete question of what the field might look like when the graduate students participating might conceive their second book projects. What follows are the thoughts—not a list of solutions—by a historian who has studied in three academic contexts—Germany, Zimbabwe, Britain—who has taught in as many—Britain, Germany, USA—and who has gathered experience both in area and disciplinary-based departments.

Finding one's intellectual home in area studies is problematic for a range of reasons, not least for the exoticization and marginalization of non-western world regions in the global flows of ideas. At the same time, African Studies make for a comfortable sense of belonging. This is a community of scholars who provide a productive and engaging, if at times impassioned, conversation with colleagues across disciplinary boundaries, time periods, and the great diversity of African and diasporic societies and regions. The question is: what place does the historical discipline occupy within this field, and what is its future?

II

As Africanists we have not yet succeeded in taking on the project of provincializing Europe as first postulated by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in the early 1990s.³ Chakrabarty and the subaltern studies school have pointed out that Europe serves as a "silent referent" against which historians measure all other historical developments and experiences.⁴ While historians of Africa have embraced Chakrabarty's challenge to question critically the colonial archive, terms and concepts, and the creation of academic narrative, as well as to make the power which knowledge represents transparent, one major obstacle remains. At least since G.F.W. Hegel's famous dictum in his series of lectures on world history that Africa "is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit," most treatments of Africa's history have been repudiations of its absence.⁵ This began with the early nineteenth-century writings by African-American scholars, continued with the founding of African history as an academic discipline after World War II, and recently found an influential voice in Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony (2000).⁶ Mbembe poses the framework for his much-celebrated book when he maintains that the notion of "Africa's absolute otherness" derives from it apparently being "incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind."⁷ The order for the historian is thus tall: we need to address this prejudice without reproducing it. We argue with our back to the wall, but cannot afford to see ourselves as victims in academic discourse.

Chakrabarty himself acknowledges that Europe cannot be provincialized, that we can only strive for transparency in our epistemological endeavors.⁸ But there are practical steps African Studies scholars can take which go beyond that. We have all faced what he calls "asymmetric ignorance," Africanists' familiarity with works outside their field and even their discipline, while the reverse is rarely the case for scholars of the western world.⁹ How often, for example, has an Americanist been asked by an editorial board or fund proposal readers to engage African historiography in order to have a manuscript accepted or a grant awarded?

To turn this around, one way of deprovincializing Africa is to break out of the area studies mold in our publications, whether articles, chapters in edited volumes, or monographs. The recent shift of the past few years in the American Historical Review, for...