lyn Vieira Martinez, Chapman University
Africa Conference, UT Austin April 2012, Lifting the Loincloth: Interrogating Anthropological Spectacles
- This panel of historians will present papers that critique long-entrenched, and misguided interpretations and representations about Africans that were propagated in early anthropological literature. While acknowledging that as a discipline anthropological questions and methods are refined, the panelists contend that nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropological scholarship continues at best, to misinform, and at worst, to influence current thinking and the research of all disciplines engaging and interrogating the continent. Together these historians seek to expose the origins of familiar spectacles and to offer alternative ways of analyzing and using the ethnographic sources that created some persistent and erroneous images.
NERWHA September 2012, Listening to African Voices: Integrating early African History into World History--A Roundtable Discussion
- In the last decade significant new research on early African history, ranging from 300 to 12,000 years ago, has been published, yet rarely is any of this research found in recent world history publications or world history textbooks. Historians typically steer away from research areas without written sources. Historians of Africa too have followed this paradigm focusing almost exclusively on the very late precolonial when written sources from outsiders, both European and Arab, become more abundant. This round table addresses how research into earlier eras is feasible based on useful historical data through linguistic, archeological and oral tradition. These less commonly employed sources along with documents written in Arabic and European languages provide a tremendous wealth of evidence that challenges the notion that it is not possible to break the boundaries of early and pre-colonial African social history without an arsenal of written documents. Additionally the data from these sources place Africa and Africans back into world history. We will demonstrate the value of non-written sources in understanding early history as well as present teaching strategies that integrate topics such as gender, religion and migration patterns within and outside of Africa. Each of these approaches has applicability for African history, as well as other world regions and will provide insight how to engage students in oral, written, linguistic, and archaeological analyses in World History courses.
MAWHA November 2012, African Migration Stories
- The two most common ways that Africans have found their way into world history stem from historical migrations—the forced migrations of the Atlantic Age, and the myth and manner of the Bantu expansion. The sense that there was a world of migration experience in Africa beyond what was described in documents has led historians to explore other techniques of historical reconstruction alongside archaeology and oral traditions. In this round table the participants will discuss some of Africa’s lesser-known migrations, and offer new insights into the historical experience of Africans. Gonzales focuses in on the strategies enslaved and semi-free African women used to create opportunities to generate profit, to sustain community, and to shape diaspora medicinal and religious culture in early Colonial Mexico City. Saidi describes the matrifocal social institutions that placed migrating Bantu speakers in advantageous positions vis a vis newly neighboring settlements. Fourshey looks at how metaphors of hospitality were employed to regulate behaviour between Bantu and Batwa, and the prescription of indigeneity. Weise explores the contradictions between Nupe, Igala and Ebira migration traditions and the linguistic evidence. Vieira-Martinez discusses how we know that matrilineality was already operational when western savannah language groups migrated into the Kasai and Kwanza river basins. Although these are more local and more constrained cases of historical migration in Africa than those widely known by