OooA! Publishing is calling for contributions to an edited volume of essays on the intellectual legacies of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) (1972).
Rodney’s classic of pre-colonial African History, criticism of the empire of capital, and inquiry into development discourse informed the post-colonial moment and continues to foster animated political debate in Africa and the African Diaspora. Some of the topics we shall explore include the following:
- How does Rodney’s developmental discourse in HEUA object to or retain certain aspects of capitalist social relations?
- How is Rodney’s development discourse a commentary on strategies of economic planning by Black led nation-states in pre-colonial times and the post-colonial moment?
- What is the place of traditional African religions, theologies, and cosmologies in Rodney’s HEUA?
- How does Rodney’s historical materialist approach shape analysis of pre-colonial African History?
- How did Rodney’s treatment of specific African ethnic or tribal groups introduce concisely its history and philosophies to those unfamiliar with them? Critical re-assessment of specific case studies would be valuable (ex. Igbo, Yoruba, etc)
- What are some linkages between Walter Rodney’s Groundings with My Brothers (1969), speeches he gave leading up to the Black Power revolt in Jamaica of 1968, and Rodney’s HEUA?
- Comparative readings of HEUA and Chancellor Williams The Destruction of Black Civilization, or Cheikh Anta Diop’s Precolonial Black Africa
- The influence of WEB Du Bois or Eric Williams on Rodney’s methodology in HEUA
- The influence of CLR James or George Padmore on Rodney’s methodology in HEUA
- Comparative readings of Walter Rodney’s A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, West Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Rodney’s HEUA. How does a work produced for a doctoral dissertation get transformed for a popular audience?
- Comparative readings of Walter Rodney’s approach to the Portuguese encounter with Africa and more recent scholarship by John Thornton, Walter Hawthorne and others.
- Is Walter Rodney a forerunner of Atlantic World History? Why or Why not?
- How did Walter Rodney reframe how African Diaspora popular audiences, and Africanist professional scholars, approached the slave trade in Africa? Potential comparative readings include the scholarship of Paul Lovejoy and Sylviane Diouf.
- What was Walter Rodney’s analysis of the African state? How does he access pre-colonial empire, hierarchal regimes, and more decentralized African societies?
- Does Rodney’s HEUA contribute to a greater understanding of class formation and the struggle of social classes in Africa History?
- Does Rodney’s HEUA contribute to a vision of popular self-emancipation by ordinary Africans?
- How do we account for the excellent reception by Rodney’s HEUA by relatively conservative elites and authoritarian rulers in Africa?
- How much did HEUA conform to standard economic histories concerned with trade policies, exchanges of commodities, and development of means of production?
- What has been Julius Nyerere’s, Yoweri Museveni’s and Robert Mugabe’s approach to Rodney’s HEUA?
- How does Rodney address “race” in HEUA? How does this make it an attractive work to non-specialists of a working class background and disturb some professional scholars?
- Does Rodney’s HEUA anticipate an ecological reading of African history?
- If HEUA is animated by a Marxist methodology, what specific traditions of historiography and political thought did Rodney borrow from?
- How was HEUA’s development discourse shaped by how Rodney understood the Russian Revolution?
- How was Rodney’s HEUA influenced by A.M. Babu, and the East African radical tradition’s engagement with Maoist China?
- How did Elsa Goveia influence the methodology of Walter Rodney’s HEUA?
- How was Rodney’s HEUA influenced by his native Guyana’s intellectual legacies (including Ivan VanSertima, Jan Carew, Norman E. Cameron, and Eusi Kwayana)?
- How was Rodney’s HEUA influenced by Monthly Review political economy and especially Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth?
Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words by October 1st, 2012. Along with your abstract, please forward a CV. Independent scholars and unpublished college students are welcome to submit work as well. Final papers should be 6,000-8,000 words in length and are due March 1st, 2013. For final papers, Chicago Manual of Style, is preferred, with end-notes (not footnotes).
CONTACT INFORMATION:
For queries/ submissions: oooabooks@gmail.com
Website: http://oooabooks.org
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