Critical Historicities: Between Africa and the Diaspora

Co-investigators and their institutions:

Peter J. Bloom, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Percy C. Hintzen, Director, Center for African Studies and Professor of
 African American Studies, UC Berkeley
Stephan F. Miescher, History, UC Santa Barbara

At the heart of Critical Historicities between Africa and the Diaspora is
the question of how teleologies of difference between the African continent
and the Diaspora have ruptured developmental approaches to modernity. In
order to move beyond the complacency of difference implied by alternative
modernities, we seek to establish a context that enables greater engagement
with multi-sited research methodologies both on the African continent
itself as well as in Asia, Europe, the Global South, and North America. We
also seek to examine the relationship between late colonial and
postcolonial national infrastructures on the African continent through the
movement of successive generations abroad, and an examination of how a
sense of integration and return can be more broadly construed.