Contested Memories, Subalternity, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of Northeast Africa

This special issue discusses the ways in which Northeast African societies and states recollect and interpret their pasts and use them in the present. Its aim is to shed light on how “battling with the past” also means struggling for the present and future, and how different versions of the past are not equally audible.¹

Since the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of historiography have become increasingly aware of the many perspectives from which the past can be recounted, as well as the multiple effects of power on representations of the past. On the one hand, historiographical approaches such as Thompson’s style of “history from below,” inspired by a culturalist reading of Gramsci, or Ginzburg’s and Levi’s “microstoria” have opened the door to a brand of social and cultural history that is sensitive to the experience and life-world of subaltern actors.”² They have shifted the focus to the margins and the singular, while articulating different scales of analysis to enrich our understanding of historical processes from multiple entry points.

Furthermore, different strands of poststructuralist, subalternist, feminist, and postcolonial historiography have sought to write the history of subordinate groups. At the cost of oversimplifying these widely differing trends, it can be argued that three major concerns have been expressed. First, the spotlight has been placed on the extent to which history is strewn with absences—typically women, the indigenous, immigrants, unskilled workers, homosexuals, the sick, and so on.³ Second, light has been cast on how power configurations of the past and present have a role in constructing historical objects.⁴ The struggle over the past is not only to recover the historical agency of subaltern actors, but also to overcome a certain set of representations that has reduced them to undeserving subjects of history.⁵ Third, poststructuralist thinkers have also questioned the epistemological foundations of historiography as a truthful representation of the past. As facts cannot be intelligible without interpretation, historiographical claims to “truth” must be nuanced by an understanding that the act of narrating history also constructs the past in itself.⁶ Finally, these various strands converge to redefine history as both what has happened and what is “said” to have happened, and this type of narrative of the past is wrapped within a web of power relations.⁷

Historians with a deconstructionist agenda have worried mainly about how a certain dominant narrative has been created or imagined—be it that of the nation, the elites, or the State. Feminists, subalternists, and others have attempted above all to recover the “lost” narratives of subordinate groups. These works have opened the door to another domain of historical research that may be broadly defined as “memory studies,” which analyzes why societies remember in the way they do; this strand has become extremely popular, at least in Western historiography, since the 1990s.⁸ The importance of “memory studies” has served above all to underline the plurality of memories and to shift the focus from assessing the accuracy of content to understanding the complex process that leads to its production.

This special issue takes its inspiration from these different strands of historiography, and is dedicated to the entanglements among memories, subaltern groups, and power. The question is explored through a rich set of case studies drawn from a variety of contexts (Djibouti, Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia) in which the relationship between the State and specific communities or social groups, the connections between gender, State, and subalternity, and finally the refashioning of identity within different contexts of power are seen by the various contributors of this volume through the prism of memory and contested pasts.

The historiography of modern Northeast Africa has been affected to different degrees by the various trends mentioned above. On one hand, even before the emergence of the “microstoria,” a Marxist historiography provided carefully crafted “histories from below,” which analyzed the development and dynamics of subordinate groups such as the working class and the peasantry. It is sufficient here to mention the works of O’Brien on the...