Jeff Schauer (History) participated in a conference on "Neoliberalism, Race, and Empire" at the University of California, Berkeley, in honor of the retirement of James Vernon (Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History).
In reflecting on Vernon's influence on his own work, Schauer shared "Writing Africa through Zambia", and argued that the 1960s and 1970s were characterised by attempts to write about Zambia as a way of writing about Africa. This occurred between white supremacist and decolonised states in southern Africa, and also through competing forms of allyship in Britain itself. The variety of interests seeking to define Zambia in the world were really attempting to define Africa as a political, cultural, and civilisational space and thereby to make large claims about the continent's long term history and capacities for self government in the "present" of the 1960s and '70s. "Writing Africa through Zambia" seeks to introduce a moment of important contingency into the longer arc of intellectual and political hostility toward Africa and its people.
