Early Modernity Beyond the West: Bruce Hall: Does an ‘Early Modern’ Africa Begin with Paper?

Please join Early Modernity Beyond the West for a talk entitled, "Does an ‘Early Modern’ Africa Begin with Paper?: Arabic Writing and Manuscripts in West Africa" with Professor Bruce Hall (History, UC Berkeley). 

The talk seeks to address the historical logics of circum-Saharan textual practices and the values attributed to amassing collections of manuscripts. If, as Judith Scheele (2012) has argued, Saharan commercial capital was invested in nodal points of exchange, both in creating irrigated gardens and sites of Islamic religious authority, then we should expect to find libraries at these points of Saharan interaction and integration, and they should tell us something about this larger history. The paper seeks to identify and analyze Saharan centers of scholarly production and networks of textual exchange across the region since the 16th century, as part of a wider history of human and capital circulation in the desert. It uses both the accounts of Saharan scholars and the contents of libraries as evidence of the overarching history of this intellectual world, but also as a way of distinguishing temporal and regional differences. 

RSVP for the Bruce Hall talk

Hosted by Early Modernity Beyond the West and co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies, the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS), the Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS), and the Department of History 

More details to follow. 

Early Modernity Beyond the West aims to investigate whether and how the concept of early modernity can be extended to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia between the 15th and the 18th centuries. The project brings together professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from Stanford and from other institutions, who work in the early modern field in history, art history, literature, and religion. In this way, the group fosters reflection on the features and issues of early modernity.

Assessing the breadth and relevance of early modernity for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia helps reconsider the concept on a global scale. In turn, defining early modernity as a transnational concept allows for more accurate analyses of each region’s specificities. Hence, the group’s guiding questions are: What are the defining traits of early modernity? What are the specificities of local experiences of early modernity? How do these specificities combine to delineate early modernity as a transnational concept?