The Birth of an African Private Epistolography, Echo Island 1862–1901
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8978665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jay Spaulding (Kean University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 115-141 |
| Publication date | 1993-03-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of African History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8537 • E-ISSN: 1469-5138 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0021853700033028 |
| OpenAlex | W2161942429 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 24 |
This study examines the surviving private correspondence from Echo Island (Jazīrat Abū Ranāt, formerly Abranarti), a small nineteenth-century agricultural community in the Shāīquiyya country of the northern Sudan. The central question addressed is a discordance between the preoccupations of the letters and the concerns manifested in the considerably larger literature of contemporary legal records surviving from the same community, a clash that finds resonance in the familiar historiographical rivalry between advocates of culturally autonomous consciousness and partisans of material or socioeconomic determinisms. It is suggested that the private correspondence from Echo Island may best be interpreted as a new technique of bond management in the microsociological sense that arose and flourished in an age when the community found itself compelled to respond to a colonial setting vastly larger in scale than what had previously prevailed. The world of subjective ideas evidenced in the correspondence ignored, probably deliberately, most of the pressing immediate concerns of the community revealed in the contemporary legal documents; however, it opened a new ‘mode of communication,’ a conceptual terrain across which members of the elite exercised their virtuosity in mutual manipulations of status
Archaeology · Colonialism · Consciousness · Elite · Genealogy · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Rivalry · Sense of place · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology
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African Women and the Law
The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
Literacy in Traditional Societies
Shared Fantasy
Orality and Literacy
Prelude to the Mahdiyya. Peasants and Traders in the Shendi Region (1821-1885)
Enigmatic Saint
The Old Shaiqi Language in Historical Perspective
Prelude to the Mahdiyya
Microsociology
Slavery, Land Tenure and Social Class in the Northern Turkish Sudan
In the Shadow of Conquest
The Value of Virginity on Echo Island, 1860-1866
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance
The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
Speaking, Writing, and Authority
| Citations per year | 0.19 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1995 - 2026 (32) |
| Highly cited | No |