This week involves two lectures which provide key context for the course. The first lecture provides an overview of the history of European colonization and African resistance in Southern Africa from c. 1600 to 1900. The second lecture provides an overview of the chronology and themes of the course.

Core Reading

Alois S. Mlambo and Neil Parsons, A History of Southern Africa (London, 2019), chapters 4, 5 and 6.

B. Wainaina, ‘How to Write about Africa’, Granta 92 (2006).

Please note, readings for each week are also listed on Talis Aspire.

Further Reading

Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review 99 (5) (1994), pp. 1516-45.

Frederick Cooper, ‘Africa’s Pasts and Africa’s Historians’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34 (2000), pp. 298-336.

Stephen Ellis, 'Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa', Journal of African History 43 (2002), pp. 1-26.

John Edward Philips, Writing African History (Rochester, 2007).

Richard Reid, ‘Past and Presentism: The “Precolonial” and the Foreshortening of African History’, Journal of African History 52 (2011), pp. 135-55.

A. L. Stoler, and F. Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire. Colonial Encounters in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 1-56.

A. L. Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2 (2002), pp. 87-109.

A. L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009).