Unreasonable Histories

In "Unreasonable Histories," Christopher J. Lee stages a provocative challenge to the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At its core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in the former territory of British Central Africa--present day Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia--from contingent beginnings during the early twentieth century to forms of social death following regional decolonization. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence--including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony--this book traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Eurafrican, and Euro-African subjectivities that constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness which defied colonial categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and often economically impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a genealogical imagination that drew on kinship and racial descent to make political claims. But these critical histories equally confront and subvert a contemporary postcolonial reason that continues to occlude these experiences, a condition of exclusion highlighting imperial legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries, "Unreasonable Histories" ultimately revisits foundational questions in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present--and for the future.