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EVERYONE - I seem to have missed the opening statement in this particular thread (my finger does the walking sometimes, and it just mistyped "threat" - see following), but I find my opinion solicited. With amply due respect to my colleagues and friends, I could not resist the suggestion here more strongly. And I will do so if need be. Here's my reasoning. The entire point of the AHA "opening" strategy is to integrate trans-regionally. We all have our regional special associations - the ASA for ourselves, the OAH for the Americanists, and so on and on. The AHA is the only pan-disciplinary trans-regional professional venue that we have (other than The Historical Society), and it's the prime opportunity that we Africanists have now earned to engage our colleagues in other regional fields on a fully and mutually supportive and stimulative basis. We need them as much as they need us. And vice versa. This year's program, thanks to Carolyn, and last year's as well, was a model of distributing the conventional (and outmoded) fields across panels and other sessions. (And I found those panels enormously exciting - and so did my Americanist friends.) Our job as Africanists is to bring Africa in from its long-marginalized position into the mainstream of the discipline; please read my presidential address in the AHR, first issue for 1999. We don't do that by segregating ourselves in a cozy miniature of what we already do at the ASA. Epistemologically, we are on the verge of the most radical revisioning of the (modern) discipline of history since Hegel - and I mean that. The discipline grew as a virulently self-centered aspect of nationalism in the nineteenth century. We have spent the last half century trying to overcome that parochialism (even xenophobia) by detouring out through the social sciences (Africanists most of all, since we started from ethnographies as major sources). We are now at the point of doing real history, in real time depth. History consists of reasoning from contexts, as rich ("thick" thanks to Geertz) as possible. Africa's global context includes the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and modern Europe (for starters) - which means that all of the contexts of all of those regional histories also include Africa in a serious way. And the same is true of all other world regions - as the recent (still mostly social-science) efforts at "world history", "trans-national", "global", etc., etc. are trying to show. National histories will and should continue to be taught (I'll spare you the reasons why), but they will never be taught in the same isolated (exceptionalists, all) way. The future of departments will consist in linking across the conventional divides (and then we'll discover new ways to disagree, of course). The AHA is uniquely positioned to lead the way by concentrating all of its activities along these lines. For those who haven't seen my discussion of Africa in terms of "world history", see "Historically Speaking: Newsletter of the Historical Society", vol. 6, no. 4 (2004), forum on "Africa in World History" - where some of our (and my) good Africanist friends joined in the discussion. A Conference of African Historians at the AHA would be a major step backward in time, a major abdication of our hard-won intellectual ability and responsibility. I know that the Latin American historians have their Conference of Latin American History that meets with the AHA - as do another 130 or so "affiliated" specialized societies - Polish history, Church History, and so on. But these are all either hold-overs from the past or valid specialized fields that can't afford to meet on their own. The AHA is a viable shelter/umbrella for them. But we have the ASA -- and, more important, we have a mission as historians. I hope that all will join behind Carolyn's marvelously productive efforts and continue to integrate - infiltrate, subvert - the conventional aspects of the profession by joining across its outworn regional/national divides in the main AHA program, and otherwise. Finally - let me be very clear that the ASA is as necessary, for the regional/interdisciplinary vitality that enables our distinctive contributions to the AHA as historians ... African historians belong in both. Our ability to contribute to either one is weakened without the other. Perhaps a bit costly from time to time -- but no campaign worth fighting comes without its costs. Best to all - JOE
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