Doing Conceptual History in Africa

Employing an innovative methodological toolkit, Doing Conceptual History in Africa provides a refreshingly broad and interdisciplinary approach to African historical studies. The studies assembled here focus on the complex role of language in Africa's historical development, with a particular emphasis on pragmatics and semantics. From precolonial dynamics of wealth and poverty to the conceptual foundations of nationalist movements, each contribution strikes a balance between the local and the global, engaging with a distinctively African intellectual tradition while analyzing the regional and global contexts in which categories like "work," "marriage," and "land" take shape.

Axel Fleisch is a Professor of African Studies at the University of Helsinki. His focus is southern Africa, including African languages and historical linguistics. He is the author of Lucazi Grammar: A Morphosemantic Analysis (2000) and the co-editor of Grandmother's Footsteps: Oral Tradition and South-East Angolan Narratives on the Colonial Encounter (1999).