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CAROLYN and (historian) Colleagues - I am not copying here Carolyn Brown's latest message on the opportunity that the forthcoming 2007 AHA program offers us, as historians of Africa, and through the earlier stages of this discussion I have been lurking, since Carolyn seems to have it all so well under control. But now the AHA Program Committee has come down to specifics, and it's time for us to respond -- or will be, as soon as we all survive the ASA annual meeting next week in DC. Some of you may know that I presided over the AHA in 1998. I gave a presidential address (AHR, first issue for 1999) arguing that Africa had (then, almost ten years ago) come of age as a field of history, in terms that our colleagues in other regional fields could recognize as such. I closed with the assurance that when they did they would find what we are doing interesting to themselves. A valiant lot of our colleagues, doubling mostly as "world historians", have been writing to bring Africa into the global historical narrative - you will know their names. For myself, since then I have been directing NEH seminars on Africa-for-non-Africanists ... which have expanded to complement the usual pleas for them to understand us with pleas to us (Africanists) to start to communicate actively and intelligibly to them. We have tended to sit back in our holes and talk mostly to one another. The AHA is the only forum in the country where we can - and must - start to engage the discipline as a whole - as Africanists. That AHA program ought to feature (if not be devoted entirely) to trans- regional scholarly engagements -- with Africa represented at least potentially in all (sic!) of them. We, as a rule, know more about their business than they do about ours, so the responsibility of closing the gap falls on us. Last year Karen Kupperman (NYU, historian of Jamestown, and of seventeenth-century native America) and I organized a pair of AHA panels - one in which our Africanist colleagues reacted to papers by Native Americanists, and the other in which Native Americanists reacted to papers by Africanists. I offer this personal experience to encourage all of you to join in this direct engagement with the rest of the profession. Doing so has now become extremely timely; it's the next move that historians of Africa can make in continuing to develop their own field, and we will also join our colleagues in South Asia and Latin America in de- centering the existing discipline as a whole when we make this move. Unlike fifty (or even fifteen) years ago, we will be welcomed - at least in the thoughtful circles with whom we would want to associate in any event. This AHA initiative that Carolyn is bringing to us is strong evidence of that fact. As for the original formulation of the issue ("Do we need a separate caucus such as, for example, the Conference on Latin American history, meeting coordinately with the AHA?) - the strong implication of my position is NO. The last thing we need is to retreat again into the quiet corner from which we are now prepared to burst forth. We have the ASA in which to continue to be Africanists, as we must (sic!) also do - and we need the ASA as such very much, and all the more as we advance also into our respective disciplines. But this is not the place to don the other hat that I am about to put on, next week; I will have a year to write to you then on behalf of the ASA. Thanks to Carolyn for taking this extremely important lead in presenting this opportunity, and thanks also to the wise leaders at the AHA, before my time and since, who have been moving consistently for more than a decade to keep that Association open to the rich and diverse realities of the 21st-century profession. Let's get busy.
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