** Please visit our website: http://www.africanassociation.org **

The University of Wisconsin African Studies Program's spring symposium will
be held March 11-13, 2005 at the Pyle Center in Madison.  Entitled
'Pre-Colonial African History in a Post-Colonial Age', participants will
critically assess innovative methods developed in African history over the
past half century.  While many of these techniques were first devised to
study pre-colonial history, they have been increasingly employed for
colonial and post-colonial history as well in order to recover African
historical perspectives, experiences, and thinking in such diverse fields
as environmental history, labor history, medical history, cultural history,
religious history, intellectual history, and political history.

In the process, a new dynamic has developed between pre-colonial, colonial
and post-colonial history in Africa as historians explore the ongoing
connections between the deep past, the more recent past, and the
present.  On a methodological level, techniques developed to study the
pre-colonial past have been extended and reconsidered to develop innovative
approaches to understanding colonial and post-colonial societies.  And from
a theoretical perspective, the debate between pre-colonialists,
colonialists, and modernists has changed dramatically as analytical
categories forged by pre-colonialists (such as 'tradition,' 'peasant
discourse,' 'moral economy', etc.) have influenced historians' scrutiny of
later periods and vice versa.

In addition to the scheduled presentations, we will celebrate the 45th
anniversary of the African History program at a dinner at the University
Club on Saturday night.

To obtain more information, register, or make reservations for dinner,
please see the symposium web site: http://history.wisc.edu/symposium2005.

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