Sunday, July 01, 2012
Current Writing Project
Yesterday I had a pretty good idea for a journal article. I started writing it out and I have got 16 pages double spaced finished so far. I even managed to work some of the material I found in the archives here into the footnotes. The article is a comparison of African diasporic populations to other similar diasporic groups in the USSR such as the ethnic Germans, Koreans, Jews, Greeks, Finns, and other nationalities with ancestral origins in Europe and East Asia. There is not a whole lot written on Soviet citizens of African ancestry, but I think I have enough to write a solid comparative article. It certainly continues my development along a path of doing more comparative scholarship with regards to Africa.
While you're at it, you could do a general comparative article, comparing Europeans in Africa using military force in tandem with colonial administrative formation, crop specialization in pursuit of integration with a broader imperial/global economy, and forced labor mobilization, both of native Africans and by means of subaltern labor migrations (Indians, Chinese); and then compare that with the tsarist/Soviet enterprise in their own colonial fringe.
ReplyDeleteYour proposed research project sounds more ambitious than a mere article. It looks like a book. I did write a book chapter comparing German colonial policies in German Togoland and Russian Turkestan regarding cotton cultivation recently. But, cotton is of course only one crop and Togoland only one colony in Africa. The idea is, however, intriguing.
ReplyDeleteWell, it could also be a book. But you can also have a broad theoretical article that acts as an outline of the book to come. Either way, do mention me in the acknowledgments.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds very interesting. I have been wishing I could find more to read about Africans in Asia: Central Asia, but also India and elsewhere.
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