Short Abstract

How can historians write African histories across colonial, national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries? This roundtable will bring together scholars of various themes like mobility, gender, and law, to debate the methods and stakes of transnational/regional history.

Long Abstract

Histories of Africa have long been organized through territorial frames: the colony, the nation, the city, the region, or the diaspora. Yet African historical actors have repeatedly moved across, inhabited, and reworked these boundaries, both within Africa and outside of it. This roundtable asks what becomes visible when we treat transnational and transregional connections not simply as objects of study, but as problems of historical method.

Our goal is to find participants drawing on research across the African continent (including North Africa), whose work speaks about transnational dynamics inside the continent as well as globally. Roundtable participants will examine, among other potential themes, how mobility, migration, gender, sexuality, law, labor, religion, political activism, and everyday forms of belonging linked places that imperial and national archives often separate. Rather than presenting a sequence of individual papers, participants will offer brief provocations from their ongoing research before engaging one another and the audience.

The roundtable will address several questions: How do we follow people, practices, and political ideas across unequal jurisdictions without flattening historical difference? How did colonial and postcolonial institutions make belonging, rights, and mobility portable—or precarious—across borders? What concepts, archives, and scales allow historians to connect local worlds to wider African and imperial histories without reproducing the territorial assumptions they seek to question? By tracing overlapping, contested, and historically changing geographies, the roundtable invites a collective conversation about the possibilities and limits of transnational and transregional history.

Propose contribution