Publication of Christopher J. Lee's 'Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa'

In Unreasonable Histories, Christopher J. Lee unsettles the parameters and content of African studies as currently understood. At the book's core are the experiences of multiracial Africans in British Central Africa—contemporary Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Drawing on a spectrum of evidence—including organizational documents, court records, personal letters, commission reports, popular periodicals, photographs, and oral testimony—Lee traces the emergence of Anglo-African, Euro-African, and Eurafrican subjectivities which constituted a grassroots Afro-Britishness that defied colonial categories of native and non-native. Discriminated against and often impoverished, these subaltern communities crafted a genealogical imagination that reconfigured kinship and racial descent to make political claims and generate affective meaning. But these critical histories equally confront a postcolonial reason that has occluded these experiences, highlighting uneven imperial legacies that still remain. Based on research in five countries, Unreasonable Histories ultimately revisits foundational questions in the field, to argue for the continent's diverse heritage and to redefine the meanings of being African in the past and present—and for the future.

"Unreasonable Histories makes an important intervention in a number of fields: African studies, imperial history, the history of race, and the history of the family. It also invites creative thinking about how to render pasts that unfold at the margins. Conceptually innovative, clearly written, and deeply informed, it is far and away the best work to address Coloured and other multiracial communities in colonial and postcolonial Africa." — Clifton Crais, author of History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain.

"Unreasonable Histories is a brave and erudite book that focuses on historical communities and political projects that conventional historiographies have often dismissed as dead ends. By treating these experiences seriously, Christopher Lee reminds us that racial thought in the colonial world took multiple, complex, and innovative forms. In doing so, he productively challenges binary assumptions that continue to underlie African studies—assumptions, he argues, that are ultimately rooted in colonial forms of knowledge."—Jonathon Glassman, author of War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar.

"This is a wonderfully ambitious book that tackles a history that is challenging as a matter of theory, of historiography, of politics, and of the empirical substance of past experience. Christopher J. Lee's book arrives at a critical moment in Africanist scholarship and will become a part of a new historiographical turn."—Timothy Burke, author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe.

For more information about Unreasonable Histories, see here. To order it, see here.