colonialism

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Afrophobia

When, in September 2019, the editors of the Journal of Modern African Studies invited Professor Moses Ochonu, a historian at Vanderbilt University, to write a brief on recurrent xenophobia in South Africa, we were unsettled by the apparent contradiction between repeated attacks on individuals from other African countries, and the idea of Ubuntu, a philosophical insistence on Afro-human solidarity championed most vigorously within the South African academy.

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Projections of Desire and Design in Early Modern Caribbean Maps

There is a unique pleasure that comes from being involved in research that exceeds the expertise of any single scholar. Perhaps every historian entertains ideas for such projects, yet demur when confronted with acquiring another language, familiarity with new archives or historiography, or proficiency in a different time period.

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The White Ant’s Burden

My article explores the different meanings of termites, or white ants, for the British empire in India... and shows how South Asians in the 19th and 20th centuries themselves internalised the British imperial rhetoric of white ants to pursue their own distinct political agendas.

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Why (not) Feathers? Period Hands and Material Encounters in Colonial Peru

My article on feather-work in colonial Peru shows, above all, that we should no longer differentiate between non-literate (material) Native Americans with feathers on their heads and literate Europeans with feathers in their hands. Far more important should be the historian’s distinction between non-literacy and knot literacy as this separates or connects cultures in the stories that we tell about the past.

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