Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa by Christopher J. Lee (review)

In Unreasonable Histories, Lee challenges what he views as the excessive focus of African studies on communities that can be traced through time and used as the basis for nativist myth making. He studies instead a more fragmented and disparate group, namely, multiracial people between the 1910s and the 1960s in the British imperial territories that are now Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. The result is a rich and thought-provoking study that speaks beyond its immediate subject to raise issues about the boundaries of African studies and the ways in which archives are framed to promote particular epistemologies.

Terminology is problematical for Lee, given his commitment to breaking down essentialist categories. Lee rejects the dated terms mixed race or mulatto in favor of the more capacious multiracial, but all such descriptors tend to enshrine certain ideas about ethnicity. Be that as it may, in twentieth-century British Central Africa, racialized categories were crucial for the functioning of colonialism: Inhabitants were categorized as “native” or “non-native” and were subject to different legal regimes as a result (British common law or African customary law). “Multiracial” people, who usually had “African” mothers and fathers of South Asian or European descent, did not fit readily into these categories. Their histories might be seen as “unreasonable,” Lee claims, from a number of perspectives. Lee chose the term unreasonable carefully; it does considerable work in framing the project (19). In one sense, unreasonable refers to the difficulty of assembling evidence about an under-documented group. Lee uses this first sense to shape the opening section of the book, which he terms “histories without groups”; in this section, he examines historical beginnings in the 1910s and 1920s and explores fragmented archival evidence.

In the second sense, which frames the middle portion of the book, unreasonable refers to the disruption of assumptions and the thorny challenges posed by the very existence of a group of people who did not fit colonial typologies. In what sense were they “non-native” in colonial terms, with the attendant legal implications? Focusing on commissions and policy responses, the middle section of the book looks at colonial attempts to create categories and develop policy in response to the perceived problem of an impoverished community of partial European descent (because the nub of the “problem” seems to have been that this community was comprised of primarily the neglected or unrecognized children of white officials, policymakers seem to have given more attention to the descendants of Europeans than of Asians).

The final section examines the responses of multiracial people themselves and their efforts to make claims on the colonial state. Lee uses unreasonable in this context to describe the racism that often permeated the call of multiracial people for the state to give priority to their paternal rather than their maternal heritage. The book thus traces an arc that moves from individual family relationships to the fleeting creation (or attempted creation) of political community: Colonial kinship ties were transformed from a “familial phenomenon” to “an articulated genealogical imagination that sought political connection and entitlement” (20).

An important point for Lee is the limitation of the archive. He accordingly highlights the documents that he uses and is scrupulous about acknowledging their limitations, laying bare some of the sleights of hand to which scholars resort to disguise the limits and provenance of their sources—a move that is arguably more routine for anthropologists than for historians, given anthropology’s longer-standing engagement with the politics of self-reflexivity. He also beautifully explores some of these documents themselves, including their eloquent silences. A particularly haunting example is the anonymous testimony of a colonial official about the African woman who had borne his out-of-wedlock son and still lived in his house even though they were estranged, blackmailing him and (he claimed) furiously and violently tormenting him. He wanted advice about how to expel her...