For the period before 1840, Southern African and Eastern North American historians have asked similar questions: What was the relationship between colonialism and profound indigenous developments that arose beyond the authority of the imperial or settler powers? What did colonialism have to do with new social formations, scales of war, and forms of exploitation--that arose beyond the direct reach of colonizers? Did the Atlantic slave trade (which reached well into the Indian Ocean), or the Atlantic trade more generally, bear strongly on relationships within and among indigenous polities distant from the colonial ports? Can proper history be written by "reorienting" the field to center the interior places of the continent(s), keeping the colonizers at the periphery? Do concepts such as "frontier," "hybridity," and "nation," obscure or reflect reality?

But for all the commonality, the fields remain mostly ignorant of one another. This paper seeks to put historians of Eastern Native North America in conversation with South Africanists. It explains how Southern Africanists have on many scores been ahead of Native Americanists, and it finds that while we are not really talking, we are uncomfortably close cousins.

This session will be chaired by Brandi Hughes (Assistant Professor of History and American Culture) with comments from Matthew Villanueve (Doctoral Student in History).

This event is part of the Michigan Early Atlantic Seminar series.