Reflection II

As an Africanist I will discuss my own research, ranging from precolonial East African religious movements to twentieth-century South African politics and trade union organizing to connections between African Americans and South Africans. My latest book (forthcoming in spring 2016) analyzes the interconnected webs of politics, economics, family life, and sexuality in twentieth-century Africa. I will also reflect on my own interests as a historian in the context of a critical analysis of African women’s history from the late 1960s to the present.

 African women's history developed in a different context than the history of women and gender in Europe and the United States.  Relatively new as an accepted academic field, African history grew rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s as former colonies discarded the bonds of more than a half century of foreign rule.  Like all national entities, these emerging countries tied their legitimacy in part to a reimagined past, both precolonial and colonial.  With a natural tendency to build an identity around ideas of unity, nationalist historical writings rarely entertained the idea of “women” as a social category, ignoring the abundant evidence of African women’s activist and organizational strength in many parts of the continent. 

My presentation will focus on these beginnings as well as on how the field developed – through concerns with struggle, class conflict, and strong women and women’s organizations in its early years to more recent concerns with gender identities, sexuality, masculinity, childbirth, diasporas, and such issues as globalization, immigration, and transnationalism.