ASA, November 2010, Bold Mamas and Audacious Entrepreneurs: The importance of understanding early African gender dynamics on the study of the African Diaspora. ASWAD, October 2011, Bold Mamas and Audacious Entrepreneurs: The importance of understanding early African gender dynamics on the study of the African Diaspora.
- Western ideological assumptions in approaches to women’s/gender history often skew the meaning of women’s strength, power, and status in early African societies, which can lead to an inverting and undermining of their historical relevance in the African Diaspora. The common effect is that conclusions drawn end up pathologizing women of African origin as man-dominating matriarchal figures or silent and victimized African women. Both extremes are based on the belief that these roles are a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The latest research on early African social history acknowledges women’s respected and long-enduring roles in most pre-colonial African societies, and this new research opens an opportunity for new interpretations and appreciation for the persistence of African origin traditions throughout the African Diaspora. This panel emphasizes that we must aim to link pre-colonial social history with the African Diaspora so that claims about “African” origin can be set within the a solid foundation that considers the intertwined history of gender, economics, religion, kinship, hospitality, politics, and more.
AHA, January 2012, Bold Mamas and Audacious Entrepreneurs: Early African Gender Dynamics and the African Diaspora
Chair: Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburg
- The Trail of the Mothers: African Gender Dynamics in the America by Christine A. Saidi, Kutztown University; Potions, Power, and Persecution: African Women and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City by Rhonda M. Gonzales, University of Texas at San Antonio;Well-Behaved Women: Hospitality as an Identity Marker by C. Cymone Fourshey, Susquehanna University; Spoken Like a Market Woman: Learning Language in Malanje by Carolyn 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 Af