- Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Emma Hunter
University of Edinburgh, History, Faculty Member
- African History, Global History, Eastern Africa, History, Colonialism, African Studies, and 11 moreHistoriography, Imperialism, Empire, Political History, Citizenship, Citizenship In Africa, Print Culture, Decolonization (African History), Nationalism, Imperial History, and African Intellectual Historyedit
- My research is in the field of modern African political, intellectual and cultural history. My current work focuses on two connected areas of research. The first of these exp... moreMy research is in the field of modern African political, intellectual and cultural history. My current work focuses on two connected areas of research.
The first of these explores the intellectual history of twentieth-century Africa in a global context. While the texts produced by African intellectuals and statesmen have attracted considerable attention, historians have often neglected the texts produced by those who were not leading politicians or great thinkers but who were nevertheless engaged in intellectual work, reflecting on the changing world around them and employing new political ideas and reinterpreting older idioms to challenge colonial states and create new political formations.
My first book, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization, is a study of the remaking of political concepts in decolonization-era Tanzania, and is based on a close reading of texts produced in Tanzania’s Swahili-language public sphere. I am now working on two book projects which develop these themes on a wider canvas. The first project, based on research funded by a British Academy Small Grant, is called Concepts of Democracy in mid-twentieth-century Africa and takes Kenya, Senegal and Tanzania as core case studies. The second project is an edited volume entitled Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present which results from the 2011-12 Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme on the theme ‘Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa'.
Alongside these book projects, I have published a number of articles and book chapters arising from this research which contribute to the histories of ethnicity and nationalism, the history of development and the history of political engagement in post-colonial Africa.
The second area of research is that of the history of African print cultures, newspapers and the history of the Swahili language in East Africa. This emerges out of the work that I have done in assembling and reconstructing the textual spheres in which ideas were debated and worked through.
I am currently working on two projects relating to my interest in newspapers, periodicals and print culture.
The first project is a book which I am co-editing with Stephanie Newell and Derek Peterson. This book, which has emerged from the African Print Cultures Network, brings together in one volume new research exploring newspapers in colonial and post-colonial Africa.
The second project is a conference on ‘Print Media in the Colonial World’ to be held at CRASSH in Cambridge in April 2015 which brings together scholars working in different disciplines on the colonial societies of Africa, the Middle East, East and South East Asia to consider colonial newspapers in a comparative perspective. It will consider the newspaper, the journal and the magazine as tools of education and government whose owners, contributors and readers often thought of these media as edifying publications. They were purveyors not just of knowledge about their own societies and the wider world, but also of political prescriptions, linguistic conventions, and ethical norms, which reinforced notions of the self and the other, the state and society, modernity and its lexicons. Together, we hope to encourage enduring and inter-disciplinary conversation amongst scholars about the place newspapers, magazines, and journals played in the constitution of vernacular modernity in various locales, and to lay down the foundations for a new global history of print in the long twentieth century.edit
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge The growing interest in citizenship among political theorists over the last two decades has encouraged historians of twentieth-century Africa to ask new questions of the colonial and... more
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge The growing interest in citizenship among political theorists over the last two decades has encouraged historians of twentieth-century Africa to ask new questions of the colonial and early post-colonial period. These questions have, however, often focused on differential access to the rights associated with the legal status of citizenship, paying less attention to the ways in which conceptions of citizenship were developed, debated, and employed. This article proposes that tracing the entangled intellectual history of the concept of ‘good citizenship’ in twentieth-century Tanzania, in a British imperial context, has the potential to provide new insights into the development of one national political culture, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the global history of political society.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT Tanzania's post-colonial social and economic policies, often referred to with the shorthand term of ujamaa and variously translated as 'familyhood' or 'African socialism', have attracted the attention of... more
ABSTRACT Tanzania's post-colonial social and economic policies, often referred to with the shorthand term of ujamaa and variously translated as 'familyhood' or 'African socialism', have attracted the attention of scholars since their inception. While the first analysts were ...