Natasha Shivji: Writing intellectual history in Africa. Universalism in unevenness

HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Natasha Shivji (Institute for Research in Intellectual Histories of Africa, Tanzania)

Introduction: I work with a tentative thesis that the production of Intellectual history in Africa must go beyond author genealogies of ideas. The material landscape in which certain discourses are produced offers greater insight into the intellectual landscape within this context. At stake in this approach is an attempt to capture the social relations and engagements that create the world in which such ideas are produced rather than thinking of idea-making as parallel or indeed in opposition to the political. I propose that thinking through uneven subsumption offers a methodology of writing history, both in terms of the extent and expanse of such a possible history and positing the historical problematic. As such, I further explore whether a universal history is necessary and what it entails in so far as universality is assumed in the social relations of exploitation and consequently solidarities of revolutionary praxis globally. This necessitates a further interrogation into the historical question, which I would like to propose lies in deciphering the spaces of contradictions and crisis. 

About the speaker: Dr Natasha Issa Shivji is the Director of the Institute for Research in Intellectual Histories of Africa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, UK. She completed her PhD in History at New York University, United States, on secessionist movements and land alienation in Mombasa and the Northern Eastern Frontier in Kenya titled, “Secessionism on the Nation’s Frontier: The predicament of land, labour and dependency in Mombasa and the Northern Frontier District of Kenya (1850–1963)”. She is currently working on a co-authored book manuscript on the Intellectual histories of Eastern Africa supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, East Africa. Her previous publications include the chapter “Circuits of Production and Channels of State: Pastoralists and the state in the Northern Frontier District of Kenya (1910–1958)” in Oloruntoba, S.O., Falola, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).