Towards a critical interdisciplinarity? African history and the reconstruction of universal narratives

Abstract

This article examines the question of whether interdisciplinary research has the potential of radically transforming current understandings of the historical discipline by looking at the case of African historiography. It starts by explaining current debates about the nature of history by looking at the arguments of reconstructionist, constructionist and deconstructionist historians. It acknowledges that the majority of Africanist historians subscribe to a practical-realist position and explores whether their interdisciplinary work challenges or endorses this perspective. After making a distinction between critical and instrumental interdisciplinarities, the article goes on to examine the collaborations between historians and archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists. These experiences demonstrate that Africanist interdisciplinarity can be characterized as instrumental since it has not effected radical change in the definition of the discipline. However, Africanists' interdisciplinary experiences do highlight the difficulties of maintaining a practical-realist understanding of history while using sources that have been filtered through modern theoretical and methodological filters. The article concludes that interdisciplinary practices are necessary for the broadening of the frontiers of historical research, but this can only be achieved if new definitions of the goals and standards of validity are established.