This essay explores the discourse produced in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) as part of an intellectual genealogy at the University of Dar es Salaam and Rodney’s involvement in a political landscape that was global in nature. The author proposes that the book offers a methodology of writing history, both in terms of the periodic expanse of such a history and positing the historical problematic. She argues that Rodney produces a universal history insofar as universality is assumed in the social relations of exploitation and consequently solidarities of revolutionary praxis globally. This necessitates a further interrogation into the historical question that, the author posits, in Rodney’s work lies in deciphering the spaces of contradictions and crisis.
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Research Article|
November 01 2023
Universalism in Unevenness: Writing History at the Hill
Natasha I. Shivji
Natasha I. Shivji is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her work focuses on the political economy in Africa, the world history of the Indian Ocean area, and the intellectual histories of Africa. She was previously director of the Institute for Research in Intellectual Histories of Africa in Dar es Salaam and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. She has taught at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Dodoma in Tanzania.
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Small Axe (2023) 27 (3 (72)): 84–94.
Citation
Natasha I. Shivji; Universalism in Unevenness: Writing History at the Hill. Small Axe 1 November 2023; 27 (3 (72)): 84–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-10899358
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