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In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in British Central Africa-contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia-from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence-including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony-Lee traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning. But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries, Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present-and for the future.
List of contents
A Note on Illustrations ix
A Note on Terminology xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genealogical Imagination 1
Part I. Histories without Groups: Lower Strata Lives, Enduring Regional Practices, and the Prose of Colonial Nativism 23
1. Idioms of Place and History 27
2. Adaima's Story 53
3. Coming of Age 72
Part II. Non-Native Questions: Genealogical States and Colonial Bare Life 91
4. The Native Undefined 95
5. Commissions and Circumventions 111
Part III. Colonial Kinships: Regional Histories, Uncustomary Politics, and the Genealogical Imagination 141
6. Racism as a Weapon of the Weak 147
7. Loyalty and Disregard 175
8. Urbanization and Spatial Belonging 207
Conclusion: Genealogies of Colonialism 233
Notes 249
Bibliography 305
Index 337
About the author
Christopher J. Lee
