Archaeologies of Knowledge: The Journal of African History

A Year-by-Year Tour

My reader poll was a bit inconclusive, though it told me what I really needed to know, which is that my writing about photography was boring some of you as much as it was starting to bore me.

So here’s what I’m going to do otherwise: split the difference. Some of you wanted to hear about my books, read and unread, and some of you wanted a retrospective of a pivotal journal in my field. I’m going to do both by alternating weeks, which I think will keep both concepts fresh. Games, comics and popular culture will show up on Fridays or Saturdays if and when I have something pressing to write about.

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Let me start my thinking about the Journal of African History with three prologues.

The first is: why write about a specialized journal in this painstaking way, picking a random article from each year it has been published, in this case, since 1960? I may decide as I go along that one a year is just too much—after all, that will be 65 such essays over the course of 2025 and 2026. Maybe I’ll do two articles per essay, to give a compounded sense of how the field grew and changed.

I’ve never been a great fan of scholarly journals as such. Starting in the 1980s, the number of journals began to grow at a rapid pace, even as academic institutions began to intensify their transition towards contingent faculty labor and neoliberal austerity. Journals were a major, if unintentional, instrument for squeezing faculty between those two terrors. They were a vehicle for tracking scholarly production in quantitative terms rather than in terms of quality or contribution, and they became the singular tool that for-profit publishers used to intensify their hold on academic libraries—the costs of serials began to massively outstrip the cost of monographs, and in some fields that were both in high demand and more focused on journal publications than long-form scholarship, some of the prices for individual serials became extortionate even before digitization. The pressure to maintain journals through free labor, both editorial and in peer review, ground a lot of faculty down and yet for many people seemed crucial for producing the reputation capital necessary to get hired in a tenure-track position and then maintain their status enough to move up in the profession.

That was then, this is now. I’d still like to see fewer journals, I’d like to see smarter approaches to editing that would reduce the power of unreasonable or gatekeeping peer reviewers, and I’d like to see a lot of editorial boards just detach from for-profit publishers and relaunch their journals with new titles in an open-access, non-profit platform. But the journals that exist are nevertheless rich repositories of scholarly work, and they’re a great way to see how specialized fields of inquiry have grown, receded, changed, and remained steady, to see both weakness and strength in particular ways of knowing and particular kinds of knowledge.

I think that kind of insight is now urgently necessary as we get buried by a wave of information pollution and slop produced by generative AI. We need to look back at the scholarship that was patiently deposited year by year by generations of scholars before that storm fully arrives, and make it a lighthouse that can always bring our research back into safe harbors. We need to recognize that even the work that has been done is under threat in the sense that it won’t be long before generative AI is not just attempting to read what is in our archives and obliterating our own memories but potentially corrupting our indices, our catalogues, and perhaps even the texts themselves. I don’t know if a review of this kind is a gravestone or a museum, but either way it seems important to do it.

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The second preface I have to offer is aimed at another dire aspect of our present, which is the immense threat posed by the current American regime to scholarship and teaching in many fields and disciplines.

The thrust behind that threat significantly predates our current moment, however. It really goes back to the 1980s, to an earlier round of culture war, to demagoguery aimed at “political correctness” rather than “wokeism”. It is as offensive now as it was then, but it is also vastly more dangerous now because it has the full weight of government behind it.

When I say “offensive”, I am not talking here about the alignment behind this attack and any particular kind of discriminatory -ism, whether that’s racism or sexism or anything else. What I find offensive is both more fundamental than that and yet also more rooted in my own worldview. What is offensive is that then and now, the people who set out to complain about the growth of scholarly fields like “African history”, “women’s history”, “the history of sexuality” and many others were in a very deep way betraying knowledge. They were rejecting the idea that it is always good to know more about more things: about exoplanets, about the interactions of quarks, about the evolution of viruses, about the biomechanics of insect movement, about the neuroscience of dementia, about the properties of superconducting materials, about the emergence of Indo-European languages, about the development of Confucian thought, about the origins of liberalism, about price cycles in industrial economies, and so on. What can be known, should be known.

And yes, while there’s an economy governing how much knowledge-making we can underwrite and how many courses we can teach, we live in a rich world and have capacious institutions for making knowledge, transmitting information and teaching the next generation. There is a lot of room to know a lot of things.

It has always been gross that most of the culture-war complainers have been people who otherwise believe that capitalism creates unending growth, that we do not live in a zero-sum world. There is also a falseness to their embrace of scarcity and austerity in this one domain—they complain that there is too much trivial attention to histories and societies and people and texts that don’t really matter and then seem satisfied with the idea that a pre-1980s scholarship would be stuck reworking a much narrower canon of classic texts or much narrower studies of conventional historical subjects forevermore, that you needed to reallocate all the units of scholarly inquiry invested in reading “Goblin Market” back to Shakespeare and all the units of scholarly inquiry invested in African history back to one more analysis of James Weaver’s campaign in the U.S. Presidential election of 1892, when it’s all those “other” topics that have been slanged as politically correct or woke that we didn’t know about back when attention shifted, and still know less about, in some fundamental empirical sense long before we make any claims about what work that knowledge can do in creating greater equity or justice in the world.

Many years ago, I objected to Niall Ferguson’s book Empire, a companion to a BBC series, on several grounds, but most especially on the observation that Ferguson was being lazy because he simply waved off thousands and thousands of pages of scholarship by hundreds of authors as being nothing more than the political motivations he ascribed to those authors, that they contained nothing of factual substance that he would have to reckon with. That drew a response from Ferguson, back in the days when the Internet was much smaller, that summed to “don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you puny little assistant professor”, but he particularly disliked the charge of laziness. Because, he said, look at all the books he’d written. But it’s not the page count, it’s the ethos. If you’re going to disregard what’s written, you need to reckon with it first. There are historians who have, both in the field of African history and otherwise. They aren’t the kind of people who fuel culture wars like Ferguson or Bruce Gilley because in digging into the guts of three generations of scholarly work, while they may find both interpretations and facts they question deeply, they can see the craftwork and substance of what most of those scholars have produced. And they can see that it is patently offensive to simply cancel it. Because “cancellation” in this sense is not what the woke do, it’s what the know-nothings in culture wars try to do—to sweepingly annihilate bodies of knowledge without ever having to engage them, recognize them or understand them.

So now more than ever, it’s important to dig down into that labor and appreciate the accumulated craft it represents, and defend it as an achievement against people who are rejecting knowledge-making in a fundamental way. Their motives may be racist or sexist or discriminatory in any number of ways, but I see them first as blasphemers, as looters, as acting cumulatively as if they were the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan. We know so much more about human history, in so many fields, than we did 75 years ago, so much more about language, about culture, about what we have been and could be. That is a great achievement, and shame on anyone who says otherwise.

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I begin this work with The Journal of African History because it’s a flagship journal in the field at the heart of my own expertise. I expect both to know more about what I’m reading and yet also to be enlightened by the unexpected. After all, I’ve only read the output of the journal selectively, largely at need in relationship to either my own research or when the need to understand a particular historiography has developed in my teaching or my reading.

I’ll say more in the next installment, when I talk about the first year of its publication, but JAH is also an apt focus for meditating on the institutional history of my field, and in particular its bifurcated development in the Anglo-American academy, where it was for a very long time the province of white scholars who were based outside the countries and regions of their expertise. JAH has in many ways reflected the self-anointment of some of the earliest accredited scholars who called themselves “Africanists” and believed they had created a new field of study from nothing, in answer to the needs of the new powers of the Cold War world as well as the new nations of Africa. That was always factually incorrect in that there were knowledgeable productions of African history that were found elsewhere—in writing by intellectuals of the African diaspora, in writings by African intellectuals, in the anthropology and administrative record of European empires in Africa. One of the things I’m curious about in this year-by-year engagement with this journal is to see where and when the men who saw themselves as inventing a field began to take note of those other bodies of knowledge and see them as peers of a kind. I have my informed intuitions about when and how, but I’m open to discovering something new.

Obviously, this also means working out in public something I’ve always had complicated feelings about, which is my own status as a white American writing and teaching about African societies. I think it’s tremendously important to accredit all the work done in this field (and in those peer contexts) as knowledge, to welcome that it was done and to appreciate the craft and commitment of the people who did it. But there’s also no getting away from the fact that the site of production matters, and is in some sense evidence of what was done to African societies through colonialism, that even now few African nations support university systems, publication systems and faculties that can freely, openly and critically produce historical inquiry to the extent that it could be produced—which is not just a matter of funding but also that few postcolonial states are governed by rulers, officials and institutions that would welcome such inquiry. (A condition that Americans sadly are now seeing up close themselves.) I think that grappling with this history is valuable for me and I hope for my readers, but also hope it won’t be the main point of these essays. What really matters is that knowledge, and to see it for what it was and what it still is in a dangerous moment where there are powerful enemies who reject knowledge or are haphazardly poised to deface it, by design or accident.