Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"[E]rudite and ambitious.... Lee brings to his study a sharp mind, a deep knowledge of recent African historiography and a readiness to develop arguments in a provocative but appealing manner.... [I]t provides the most sophisticated analysis currently available on the emergence and changing shape of these communities in the colonial and postcolonial periods." -- John McCracken * Canadian Journal of African Studies *
"Christopher Lee demonstrates in
Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa that the close analysis of this quintessentially liminal population can illuminate the workings of race as a relational category in British colonial Africa—a category that, Lee argues, has been neglected by historians of mid-twentieth-century Africa in favor of the more compelling one of ethnicity. He uncovers and makes a convincing case for the importance of multiracialism to understanding how racial difference was imagined, constructed, and functioned," -- Miles Larmer * American Historical Review *
"[A] rich and thoughtprovoking study that speaks beyond its immediate subject to raise issues about the boundaries of African studies and the ways in which archives are framed to promote particular epistemologies." -- Elizabeth Elbourne * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
"This book is a welcome addition to the histories of mixed-descent communities in Britain’s former Central African dependencies.... In this well-organized, carefully researched book, Christopher J. Lee charts the histories of what he describes as ‘multiracial’ Africans from 1910 to the 1960s." -- Juliette B. Milner-Thornton * Journal of African History *
"
Unreasonable Histories is elegant and creative, well researched and very interesting....The materials are rich, and the stories he tells of the lives of multiracial Africans are moving. It is in his recovery and retelling of these personal accounts that the book comes alive, taking on a vibrancy that leaves no doubt to its relevance to African Studies and African history today." -- Melissa Graboyes * Canadian Journal of History *
"Lee’s important book on multiracial people in British Central Africa has insights that will be appreciated by scholars of historiography, method, colonialism, postcolonialism, racial thinking, and nativism. . . . Fresh and insightful. . . . Lee’s imaginative approach recreates a multiracial history grounded in genealogical connections and the opportunities such ties brought." -- Allison K. Shutt * African Studies Review *
Table of ContentsA 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
