Hodgepodge Historiography: Documents, Itineraries, and the Absence of Archives

Abstract

Abstract African historians frequently argue that it is almost impossible to research postcolonial history because of the absence or haphazard nature of African archives. I argue that this is not so much an obstacle to writing the history of Africa after 1960s as it is a complement to it: incomplete and chaotic archives and documents scattered around the globe reveal some of the sloppiness of governmentality and how hit-and-miss statecraft has been in the recent past.

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