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THE AFFECTIVE, THE INTELLECTUAL, AND GENDER HISTORY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2014

Nancy Rose Hunt
Nancy Rose Hunt*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

The integration of gender as a vibrant stream within African historical writing suggests a remarkable success story with many prominent historians and fresh thematics involved. Alongside an interest in subjectivities has emerged vigorous attention to the affective, emotions, and the senses. Why affect has emerged now matters. At the same time, new kinds of intellectual histories are burgeoning in the African field, frequently forwarding an unacknowledged masculinity. With the affective and the intellectual seemingly at odds with each other, it is crucial to seek ways to cross and combine them, while remaining alert to methodological perils and innovative forms.

Keywords

Historiographygendermethodemotionintellectual
Type
JAH Forum: Gender and Sexuality
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 331 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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72 I know of this issue from critiquing doctoral students’ Social Science and Research Council proposals, an academic genre that knows its own form of intertextuality. One successful candidate who took up the practical and ethical issues with finesse, addressing how to stay alert to the way ‘memory work’ findings collected in a research field may become marked by the impact of scholar-introduced images and texts was a visual historian. See I. M. de Rezende, ‘Visuality and colonialism in the Congo: from the “Arab War” to Patrice Lumumba, 1880s to 1961’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2012); and de Rezende, I. M., ‘Elsewhere in the Belgian Congo ca. 1953: Luc de Heusch films the Tetela-Hamba’, Visual Anthropology, 27:1–2 (2014), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Hartog, with F. Brandi and T. Hirsch, Chambre de veille, 187.

74 At least if one considers recent annual meetings of anthropologists in North America; see ‘Ontology as the major theme of AAA 2013’, Savage Minds blog, (http://savageminds.org/2013/11/27/ontology-as-the-major-theme-of-aaa-2013/), 27 Nov. 2013.

75 Hemmings, C., ‘Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies, 19:5 (2005), 548–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Ibid. esp. 558.

77 ‘Interview with Nancy Rose Hunt’.

78 N. R. Hunt, Suturing New Medical Histories of Africa, Carl Schlettwein Lecture, no. 7 (Berlin, 2013).