Sources and texts

DASA researchers continue to identify and analyse a wide range of oral and written texts, in African and European languages. Recent DASA researchers have studied newspapers, chronicles, political chants and songs, and popular religious pamphlets.

Motivated by the field-changing research of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias and Karin Barber, we believe that texts can reveal aspects of the societies in which they are produced, circulated and consumed; but texts can also intervene in social relations, by generating new and competing representations of individuals, political institutions and socio-cultural practices.

Researchers

Academic staff:

Karin Barber: anthropology, popular culture, religion, and the verbal arts, both oral and written. Yoruba and Yoruba print culture.
Stewart Brown: African and Caribbean fiction and poetry.
Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias: early pre-colonial history of Africa, cultural interactions, oral traditions, West African medieval Arabic inscriptions.
Tom McCaskie: history and culture of Asante and Africa, comparative history, history of ideas, historiography.
Nathalie Raunet: belonging, citizenship, authoritarianism, transnationalism and borders
Benedetta Rossi: history and anthropology of twentieth-century West Africa, Hausa and Tuareg societies.
Kate Skinner: social and political histories of modern and contemporary Ghana and Togo, political activism, gender activism, legal reform, print cultures, mass literacy and education in other African countries.

Doctoral research

Kiranpreet Kaur: Not African: negotiating textual identities in travel-writing about Cong (1870-1950). Graduated 2022.
Pernille Nailor: Belonging in Afropolitan texts from Ghana, Nigeria and their diasporas. Graduated 2022.