Overview
Provides a rich sample of the vibrant archaeological research conducted in Africa today
Blends conceptual theoretical sophistication with inspired fieldwork
Combines archaeological, historical and ethnographic sources
Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Circulations: Scale, Value, Entanglement
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Mediations: Things, Texts, Oral Traditions
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Memory: Imagining and Remembering Colonial Worlds
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Power: Politics, Capitalism, and the Making of Colonial Worlds
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“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)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Materializing Colonial Encounters
Book Subtitle: Archaeologies of African Experience
Editors: François G. Richard
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2633-6
Publisher: Springer New York, NY
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4939-2632-9Published: 19 September 2015
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4939-4790-4Published: 22 October 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4939-2633-6Published: 19 September 2015
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 307
Number of Illustrations: 19 b/w illustrations, 15 illustrations in colour
Topics: Archaeology, Anthropology, Cultural Heritage