Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-09T00:29:00.228Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Tensions of an Oeuvre: Historical Materialism, Cultural History, and the Work of Frederick Cooper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2019

Abstract:

Using the Tensions of Empire volume as a pivot point, this article traces Frederick Cooper’s work in relation to trajectories of historical materialism and cultural history over the past forty years. Highlighting Cooper’s contributions to both approaches, it points to a generative tension between these strands of his scholarship – as well as between his oeuvre and the arc of broader historiography on empire. Specific features of Cooper’s approach were key to the success of the Tensions of Empire collaboration, and attention to them can help recapture aspects of these historiographies that have become obscured over time.

Résumé:

En utilisant le livre Tensions of Empire comme point de référence, cet article retrace l’œuvre de Frederick Cooper en relation avec les trajectoires du matérialisme historique et de l’histoire culturelle au cours de ces quarante dernières années. En soulignant les contributions de Cooper à ces deux approches, cet article met en évidence une tension génératrice entre ces deux dimensions de ses publications ainsi qu’entre ses écrits et l’historiographie au sens plus large sur l’“empire.” Les caractéristiques spécifiques de l’approche de Cooper ont été déterminantes pour le succès de l’ouvrage collectif Tensions of Empire. En se focalisant sur le matérialisme historique et l’histoire culturelle, cet article entend apporter un éclairage nouveau à des aspects historiographiques qui se sont effacés au fil du temps.

Type
Frederick Cooper and the Historiography of Africa
Copyright
© African Studies Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cooper, Frederick, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 995 (1994), 15161545.10.2307/2168387Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, “The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa,” in: Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 406435.10.1525/california/9780520205406.003.0013Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Ann Laura (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).10.1525/california/9780520205406.001.0001Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in: Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 158.10.1525/california/9780520205406.001.0001Google Scholar
Dietrich, Christopher, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).10.1017/9781316717493Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974).Google Scholar
Ogle, Vanessa, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 1225 (2017), 14311458.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).Google Scholar
Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).10.4159/9780674919808Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura, “Perceptions of Protest: Defining the Dangerous in Colonial Sumatra,” American Ethnologist 124 (1985), 642658.10.1525/ae.1985.12.4.02a00030Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Tooze, Adam, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018).Google Scholar
Young, Alden, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).Google Scholar