Overview
- Offers new ways of thinking about colonial outlaws, disruption, deviance and disorder as distinctly material experiences
- Contributes to a growing body of research on anxiety in the colonial imagination: how this was constructed and felt in times of uncertainty
- Innovatively combines material culture and archaeological approaches to explore the histories of these outsiders in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains of Lesotho and South Africa
Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with conceptsrelevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.
Reviews
“Rachel King is one of those rare archaeologists who understands that scholars who use archives and material traces have to pay attention to the epistemologies - archaeological and other - that produced those archives and traces as “sources.” They have to do as much work in finding out how the sources were produced as they do using the sources to think about events in the past. King does both things with flair and the results are dramatic. Unpicking the entrenched “habits of thinking” that idealise settlements as monuments to success and present sedentism as progress, King’ study brings the intelligences mobilised by Moorosi and the BaPhuthi of the Maloti-Drakensberg into view. King’s recasting of mobility in the landscape as a political advantage, and the result of strategy, breathes fresh conceptual life into the tired lineaments of the Mfecane debate.”? (Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town, South Africa)
“This archaeologically informed analysis of the politics of place, identity and being in the Malotsi-Drakensberg during the nineteenth century breaks new analytical and theoretical ground on what it means for individuals and groups to be classed as ‘outlaws’. Drawing on diverse conceptualisations of anxiety, affect, dwelling and materiality, King explores and deconstructs colonial constructs of unruly behaviour, highlighting the agency and dynamism of communities living on the boundaries of the emerging colonial state, and the effectiveness of their strategies of resistance. Her book offers a fresh perspective on the history of British-Malotsi relations and their material manifestations in the archaeological record, alongside a wealth of stimulating insights of wider comparative significance and resonance.” (Paul Lane, University of Cambridge, UK)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Rachel King is Lecturer in Cultural Heritage Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK. She holds degrees in archaeology from Stanford University, US, and the University of Oxford, UK, and has held a Smuts Research Fellowship in African Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Claude Leon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her work has been published in Africa, Archaeological Dialogues, History and Anthropology and the Journal of African History, among other journals.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Outlaws, Anxiety, and Disorder in Southern Africa
Book Subtitle: Material Histories of the Maloti-Drakensberg
Authors: Rachel King
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18412-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18411-7Published: 01 July 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18414-8Published: 14 August 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-18412-4Published: 18 June 2019
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 285
Number of Illustrations: 23 b/w illustrations, 13 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Sub-Saharan Africa, Imperialism and Colonialism, Social History, Archaeology, African Culture