Unreasonable Histories

Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa

Christopher J. Lee

 

Book not available in Zimbabwe.

Synopsis

In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in British Central Africa—contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence—including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony—Lee traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial categories of native and non-native.

Review

[E]rudite and ambitious.... Lee brings to his study a sharp mind, a deep knowledge of recent African historiography and a readiness to develop arguments in a provocative but appealing manner.... - Canadian Journal of African Studies

Author

Christopher J. Lee is based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.