AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
 

Symposium: Pre-colonial African History in a Post-Colonial Age, 03/05


The University of Wisconsin African Studies Program's spring symposium will be held March 11-13, 2005 at the Pyle Center in Madison. Entitled 'Pre-Colonial African History in a Post-Colonial Age', participants will critically assess innovative methods developed in African history over the past half century. While many of these techniques were first devised to study pre-colonial history, they have been increasingly employed for colonial and post-colonial history as well in order to recover African historical perspectives, experiences, and thinking in such diverse fields as environmental history, labor history, medical history, cultural history, religious history, intellectual history, and political history.

In the process, a new dynamic has developed between pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history in Africa as historians explore the ongoing connections between the deep past, the more recent past, and the present. On a methodological level, techniques developed to study the pre-colonial past have been extended and reconsidered to develop innovative approaches to understanding colonial and post-colonial societies. And from a theoretical perspective, the debate between pre-colonialists, colonialists, and modernists has changed dramatically as analytical categories forged by pre-colonialists (such as 'tradition,' 'peasant discourse,' 'moral economy', etc.) have influenced historians' scrutiny of later periods and vice versa.

In addition to the scheduled presentations, we will celebrate the 45th anniversary of the African History program at a dinner at the University Club on Saturday night.

To obtain more information, register, or make reservations for dinner, please see the symposium web site:
http://history.wisc.edu/symposium2005.



Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.

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