Universalism in Unevenness: Writing History at the Hill

Abstract

This essay explores the discourse produced in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) as part of an intellectual genealogy at the University of Dar es Salaam and Rodney’s involvement in a political landscape that was global in nature. The author proposes that the book offers a methodology of writing history, both in terms of the periodic expanse of such a history and positing the historical problematic. She argues that Rodney produces a universal history insofar as universality is assumed in the social relations of exploitation and consequently solidarities of revolutionary praxis globally. This necessitates a further interrogation into the historical question that, the author posits, in Rodney’s work lies in deciphering the spaces of contradictions and crisis.