Materializing Colonial Encounters: Archaeologies of African Experience

This volume investigates the material production and expression of colonial experiences in Africa. It combines archaeological, historical, and ethnographic sources to explore the diverse pathways, practices, and projects constructed by Africans in their engagement with the forces of colonial modernity and capitalism. This volume is situated in ongoing debates in archaeological and anthropological approaches to materiality. In this respect, it seeks to target archaeologists interested in the conceptual issues provoked by colonial enfoldments. It is also concerned with increasing the visibility of relevant African archaeological literature to scholars of colonialism and imperialism laboring in other fields. This book brings together an array of junior and senior scholars, whose contributions represent a rich sample of the vibrant archaeological research conducted in Africa today, blending conceptual inspiration with robust fieldwork. The chapters target a variety of cultural,historical, and colonial settings. They are driven by a plurality of perspectives, but they are bound by a shared commitment to postcolonial, critical, and material culture theories. While this book focuses on western and southern Africa – the sub-regions that boast the deepest traditions of historical archaeological research in the continent – attention was also placed on including case-studies from traditionally less well-represented areas (East African and Swahili coasts, Madagascar), whose material pasts are nevertheless essential to a wider comprehension of variability and comparability of ‘modern’ colonial conditions. Consequently, this volume lends a unique wide-ranging look at African experiences across the tangle of imperial geographies on the continent, with case-studies focusing on Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch-speaking contexts. This volume is an exciting opportunity to present this work to wider audiences and foster conversations with a wide community of scholars about the material fashioning of colonial life, relations, and configurations of power.

Table of Contents:
Introduction François Richard.- Part 1: Circulations: Scale, Value, Entanglement.- Chapter 1: The devolution of a currency: Cowries as ‘entangled objects’ in the Northern Territories of colonial Ghana Natalie Swanepoel.- Chapter 2: Circulations through ‘worlds apart’: Predation and wealth in the Atlantic era Ann B. Stahl.- Part 2: Mediations: Things, Texts, Oral Traditions.- Chapter 3: Language and historical archaeology: Colonial writing at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1795 Yvonne Brink.- Chapter 4: The signs of mission: Rethinking archaeologies of representation Zoe Crossland.- Part 3: Memory: Imagining and Remembering Colonial Worlds.- Chapter 5: Remembering and reworking the Swahili Diwanate: The role of objects and places at Vumba Kuu Stephanie Wynne-Jones.- Chapter 6: Margins of difference: A study of the collapse and restoration of the Kekana chiefdom under the rule of chief Mugombane  Amanda Esterhuysen.- Part 4: Power: Politics, Capitalism, and the Making of Colonial Worlds.- Chapter 7: The ‘dirty’ business of state building in central Madagascar:  From indigenous state to indigenous colonial power to external colonial imposition Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona.- Chapter 8: The politics of absence: The longue durée of state-peasant interactions in the Siin (Senegal), 1850s-1930s François G. Richard.- Chapter 9: Colonial encounters in the South African diamond fields: Exploring the materiality of finance capital Lindsay Weiss.- Part 5: Discussion.- Chapter 10: On Materializing Colonial Encounters: A commentary Ibrahima Thiaw.- Chapter 11: African archaeologies in transition: Hybrid knowledges of colonial pasts Michael Rowlands.    

About the Author :
François G. Richard is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His interests lie in social theory, political landscapes, government, subjectivity, materiality, colonialism and postcolonialism, and peasant societies, in Africa and within the African diaspora. He has published papers on the history of archaeological thought in Senegal, histories of objects and valuations, and geographies of power in Senegambia over the past 500 years. He has recently currently completed a book, titled Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin (Senegal) (to appear with the University of Chicago Press), which examines how the material qualities of rural worlds both assisted and obstructed projects of political centralization in west-central Senegal during the Atlantic and colonial eras.

Review :
“The book is successful in materialising colonial encounters, as its title promises. It brings things to the forefront and demonstrates that they were crucial in shaping the social interactions, economic regimes, cultural practices and forms of power that emerged in the encounter between Europeans and Africans. … the book is a great read and commendable for bringing back objects, landscapes and materials into the agenda of African colonial studies.” (Alfredo González-Ruibal, Azania, Archaeological Research in Africa, May, 2016) “The studies presented here, each in its different way, successfully help us to navigate the complex and varied processes of European colonialism in Africa with an emphasis on material practice. … Materializing Colonial Encounters is a welcome addition to the archaeological study of colonialism in Africa, one that will provide a starting point for many interesting debates to come.” (Sam Spiers, African Archaeological Review, Vol. 33, 2016)