Estudos africanos: abordagens e possibilidades heurísticas de uma área em construção interdisciplinar

Abstract

Scholars presently engaged in African History have to face obstacles inherent to the constraints which involve academic production and its regimens of truth. It is in the circle of academic debates that one may grasp the lack of epistemic autonomy not only in defining our own historical questions, but also our heuristic models and approaches. Being able to call into question such regimens of truth which sustain the production of knowledge about the African continent is contingent on the critical reframing of epistemic vantage points, in spite of the recognition that that the very conceptual frameworks and categorization systems remain embedded in Western epistemology. Critically grasping this fact represents a challenge of daunting proportions. Therefore, to make historical sense of African societies' constitutive processes it is imperative to provincialize the political historicism which insists in placing the State as a definitive, rational and consolidated form of political organization. The analytical gaze deployed in this book intends to set out of the inverse perspective by focusing upon processes of social mobility, associativism and conflict management as constitutive elements of these societies. It is posited that it is possible to approach these processes out of the usual paradigms of modern states - either colonial or contemporary - in order to build heuristic perspectives conducive to the uplifting of social agency and autonomy of African historical processes.