Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History
Author(s)
Cooper, Frederick
Abstract
Although the work of the Subaltern Studies Group has just begun to touch the work of historians of Africa, Frederick Cooper notes that Africanists have long been examining the particular paths that Africa followed out of colonial rule. Just as the concerns of the Subaltern Studies Group reflect the course of independence and its discontents in South Asia, the work of Africanists has been confronting in new and fruitful ways the specific problems of colonialism and its aftermath in its own sphere. Using insights from the Subaltern Studies Group, Cooper notes that some of the valuable new work on Africa nevertheless remains caught in the dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, Western/non-Western, dominations/resistance that it sets out to criticize. He argues for an approach that recognizes both the power and limitations of colonial discourses and capitalist involvement in Africa, and that moves beyond the concept of resistance to an examination of the ways in which African engaged, appropriated, and reformulated the cultural categories that the colonial situation bequeathed them.
