Reconstructing Contemporary Africa: A Historiography of Violence, Defiance, Politics, Religious Syncretism and Revivalism
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.
Source: African Studies Review
Author: Nnanna Onuoha Arukwe
Institution: University of Nigeria
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4416842458
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: