Abstract
This volume brings together a collection of original analyses of African colonial worlds that illustrate the relevance of African archaeologies to the study of colonial materialities in other archaeological contexts, and to the related fields of anthropology and history. This introduction outlines critical and theoretical problems framing the book, and offers background on the conversations informing its interventions. I situate the volume in relation to three broad intellectual fields: (1) how, historically, African archaeology has grappled with colonial situations; (2) archaeology’s implication with questions of colonial modernity, and more recently, with themes and perspectives inspired by postcolonial theory; and (3) anthropologies of colonialism, and the foregrounding of embodied practice and materiality in the making of colonial worlds. This review identifies zones of mutual engagement between archaeological, historical, and anthropological studies of colonialism. African archaeology, I argue, stands out by its interdisciplinary commitments, theoretical insights derived from African cultural contexts, and hybrid knowledges, which, in turn, can productively mesh with archaeological work on colonialism elsewhere. Concurrently, archaeology’s particular take on temporality and materiality can also contribute to histories and anthropologies of colonial contact in Africa, especially by materializing ineffable histories that challenge common perceptions about colonialism and bring into view the persistence of its legacies in the present. In this sense, archaeological scholarship on colonialism carries resonance beyond the past into the political present of postcolonies.
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Notes
- 1.
For more general reviews of archaeological studies of global encounters in western, eastern, and southern Africa, see chapters by Thiaw and Richard, Croucher, and Swanepoel, in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology (Mitchell and Lane 2013). See also Mitchell (2005) for a lucid exploration of what Bayart (2000) calls African strategies of “extraversion” across the continent, which maps African societies” long-term linkages to wider (regional, trans-Saharan, oceanic) systems of exchange.
- 2.
One may debate the merits and demerits—the historical appropriateness or political dangers—of a narrow, period-specific application of the framework of colonialism in parts of Africa that did not experience the political shock of early white settler occupation. Yet, we can wonder whether in restricting the concept of colonialism to the nineteenth century, archaeological studies of African history did not also miss a chance to plug themselves into broader comparative conversations in history, anthropology, literature, and critical studies, where ideas of colonialism have served as conceptual currency (Loomba et al. 2005). There is little doubt that the dynamics of power were very different in much of Africa, say, in the 1500s and 1900s. Yet it is also undeniable that the different moments that have punctuated global engagements on the continent since the fifteenth century are part of a shared trajectory of modern colonialism begun with the maritime expansion of Europe (Loomba 2005). While this process involved various projects and histories of imperial domination, some deeply threaded through African landscapes and others more superficially woven, they collectively created planetary conditions of uneven accumulation, economic imbalance, and asymmetrical power relations. Residents in Gorée, James Island, Whydah, or Elmina in the seventeenth century may not have been able to impose their political or military imprimatur on African kingdoms, but they sought to effect domination in other ways. Such attempts often focused on acquiring control over the terms of exchange (not always successfully and not always in the short-term), with a view for profit-making, resource extraction, and the establishment of structures of economic dependency.
- 3.
- 4.
More generally, Kus and Raharijaona’s (2006) analyses of the entwinement between poetic forms and state power in Madagascar are a model of the genre.
- 5.
Seminal here is Jane Guyer’s work on questions of “wealth in people/knowledge” and the distinctive logics of composition (as opposed to accumulation) underwriting African conceptions of wealth (Guyer 1993; Guyer and Eno Belinga 1995), as well as her examinations of the practices associated with African money (Guyer 1995, 2004).
- 6.
Perhaps, it is important to insist on published works, which, of course, enjoy privileged circulation. From my own experience in Senegal, the Department of History at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar boasts dozens and dozens of unpublished MA and doctoral theses in history and archaeology written over the past three decades. These monographs, some of which are of very high quality, target myriad aspects of Senegal’s regional and national pasts, and speak to a fertile and diverse tradition of scholarly production in the country, which vastly exceeds in volume published research. I suspect similar situations would hold in countries with dynamic university institutions, such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
- 7.
As a doctoral researcher, I remember being caught off guard when A. Sagna, the village chief heading the small community of Simal, raised the unprompted question of C14 technology in one of our conversations about the village’s settlement history. Mr. Sagna was intrigued about the promises of radiocarbon-dating as an anchor to the chronology of oral traditions.
- 8.
See Olivier (2011) for a compelling argument that archaeology functions more like memory than history. Its recollections are contingent and partial, called up by things and places. It fashions material spaces that summon the past into the present, suspending both in place simultaneously.
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Richard, F. (2015). Materializing Colonial Pasts: African Archaeological Perspectives. In: Richard, F. (eds) Materializing Colonial Encounters. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6_1
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