Abstract
Although ‘provincializing Europe’ is a recent phrase, the idea that ‘non-western’ history is best written without recourse to ‘western’ categories of thought has existed for several decades. This project examines UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964-1999) as a rare large-scale attempt to put this idea into practice. The aims of the project are to investigate the strategies used to create a distinctively African historiography and to assess the extent to which these strategies yielded the desired outcome. The working hypothesis informing this project is that while the GHA produced valuable results, many of its higher-level ambitions were never realized, partly because it was unclear what viable alternatives to western historical categories would look like, partly because alternative methods like oral history turned out to be less than ideal, and partly because the pan-African approach favored by the GHA created practical and ideological difficulties. A key observation underlying the project is that the GHA was committed to creating an African type of historian. The project therefore examines the GHA through the prism of ‘scientific personae’, or models of what it takes to be scholar. Consequently, the project focuses on how editors and authors negotiated ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ personae. It examines the difficulties encountered in the course of these negotiations as well as retrospective perceptions of it by contributors and critics alike. Notably, this PhD project is not an exercise in African history as such, but aims at furthering current debates on scholarly personae by bringing non-European perspectives into the discussion.