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Pointless Little Countries

I actually enjoyed this year’s American Historical Association meeting. Normally the sight of pained and anxious job candidates produces a flash of remembered trauma, but this time I just managed to have fun seeing friends and colleagues, including some of my fellow Cliopatria bloggers. On the plane ride home, in an aircraft stuffed to the gills with historians, I did happen to overhear the conversation of three historians in the aisle next to me. At least two of them were Americanists; I’m not sure what the specialization of the woman next to me was, as she was rather quiet while they were talking.

One of them said, “Well, at least I won’t have to think about African history any more.” Sympathetic murmur from her colleague. “Reading all those letters and dossiers! All those pointless little countries!”

I had to pinch myself to avoid saying something. I sometimes think every Africanist begins their career in a midnight ritual where they burn Hugh Trevor-Roper’s infamous declaration, “There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of history,” into their memory. In some ways, the entire field of African history is imagined as a sustained answer to Trevor-Roper.

Almost any practicing Africanist nurtures an exquisitely fine-tuned sense of their own exclusions, both imaginary and real, from the larger discipline. Almost any AHA meeting I’ve been at, I’ll bump into an Africanist colleague who will mope about their perception of Africa’s exclusion from the program.

This is partly why I bit my lip, because I generally don’t share in the complaining by my colleagues. Sure, that overheard lament does make me roll my eyes a little, and makes me feel a little bit sorry for whomever the future colleague of the historian on the plane might be. Still, there’s something to it. Not that Africa’s history is the history of a bunch of pointless little countries, but that clamoring for an equal place at the disciplinary table is something best done within the intellectual marketplace, not by guilt-tripping the incurious and smug.

Sometimes African history really is written as the history of little places, and the only answer it provides to the question, “So what?” is “Because it is there”. Africanists have themselves to blame some of the time: like all area studies scholars in history, they have a tendency to lock themselves up inside their geographical and temporal box and assume that its relevance is self-evident. This is true of course even in European or U.S. history: both fields boast many monographs about topics whose significance is evident only to a small handful of fellow specialists, if even to them.

Not everyone should have to write history to answer the most compelling, marketable and wide-ranging kinds claims of significance. Somebody has to write careful scholarship about the detailed empirical history of places like the Central African Republic in order for wider or more expansive interpretations of that history to exist. But I think Africanists often neglect the second task and regard the value of the first as self-evident. Written too much and too self-centeredly in that way, African history really does amount to the pointless history of many little countries.

To matter, any field of historical writing has to eventually lodge meaningful claims about why it matters with a wider range of historians, intellectuals and various publics. I suspect many of us work in fields where eavesdropping on planes or in bars at AHA meetings could be irritating. My Cliopatria colleague KC Johnson seems to suspect, for example, that he would overhear social historians and others dismissing diplomatic and political history as boring and reactionary. His suspicions are correct. I haven’t just overheard such conversations, but I’ve nodded neutrally at others making such remarks.

All casual remarks about our own specializations made by others bear some truth to them. The reaction to older modes of writing in diplomatic and political history isn’t entirely unfair: some of it really was unusually sterile and formal in the way it defined its subjects of legitimate interest. Some military history really has been written with a kind of breathlessly boys-own-adventure celebration of battle minutia. Some social history of Annales variety really does act as if quantifying something is tantamount to analyzing it. Some history-from-below ends up disfigured by its own presumptions of radical achievement. Some cultural history wallows in the hopelessly trivial and prattles on expansively about transgressiveness. Name a field, and there’s a stereotype to match that a pair of well-tuned ears can pick up out of the background noise in the hotel restaurant at any given annual meeting.

Some of the stereotypes amount to well-honed secret weapons in the ceaseless turf wars between specialists, the war to claim positions, journals, grants and so on. Some of them are honest reactions to the actual content of a field. Whichever it is, the only answer is to write history as if every word, every idea, every argument has to earn its own keep with the widest possible legitimate audience, to not rely on the in-built crutches and alibis that our fellow specialists provide us. That’s really why I didn’t say anything: it would amount to nothing more than a self-conscious scolding reservation of my own team’s place at the table, not a persuasive argument about why particular African histories matter to more than those who lived them.