View the H-Africa Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Africa's November 1997 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Africa's November 1997 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Africa home page.
<tmcclen@socrates.berkeley.edu> While it is probably fair enough to state that most Africanists do not see themselves as postmodernists, there is no doubt that a set of concerns put forward by "pomo-istas" have had significant influence in our field. I think of increased concern with issues of identity, multivocality, sexuality, language and communication, to start. These are not exclusively postmodern concerns by any means, but the influence is there. In the overlap of history and anthropology in Africa, David Cohen, Jean and John Comaroff, and Steven Feierman are all leading lights who have been influenced in varying degrees and in varying manners by postmodern perspectives. It was noted at the 1994 History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand that conference papers cited Foucault more often than Marx, a dramatic shift from earlier years. In fact, the conspicuous revival of Gramsci in the last decade has much to do with an attempt to integrate the strengths of these perspectives.
|