Abject / Ethnographic / Africa: Material Encounters Along the Cape-to-Cairo Route

Culture, the customary, and the role of (colonial) anthropology in creating these remain critical problems for African thought. Debates about the “inventedness” and “authenticity” of African materials and practices exist alongside various political projects which seek to mobilize ideas of Africanity. This dissertation examines the confluence of these problems, through particular attention to the ethnographic frame through which African subjects are transformed (racialized and indigenized) into proper objects of anthropological attention. Based on a year-long research journey along the historic Cape-to-Cairo route, this dissertation examine ideas of race, culture, and Africanity as they emerged in cities and museums along its path, and four sets of ethnographic materials: Zulu objects collected by Max Gluckman during his doctoral fieldwork, 1940s-era Zambian witchcraft objects, turn-of-the-20th century ethnographic postcards of Zanzibar, and museological and literary representations of Nubia. These are examined as materials with claims to ethnographic and historical truth, articulated by messily situated colonized subjects, for whom there are political consequences for understanding an object to be an ethnographic one. In doing so, this dissertation explores how an attention to the ethnographic illuminates the role of anthropology (and its layered, extra-curricular aftermaths) in making imperial and neocolonial possibility, and how such an attention accordingly provides an idiom both through which to read the political structures of the neocolonial present, and through which to expand African political imagination. Crucially, this idiom does not offer a simply nativist narrative of redemption, in which the already-desired emerges as the viable alternative to the already-known. Instead, this dissertation stays with the ethnographic trouble Africa is in, and the entangled political and epistemic disability and possibility this trouble has produce