History unclassified on acknowledgments

Abstract

WHEN I SEE THE SPINE of Decolonization and African Society on my bookshelf, two stories come to my mind. The first takes place in the 1940s, when African dockworkers and railroad workers across the continent organized unions and went on strike, bringing the colonial economy to a halt. Their efforts forced not only a renegotiation of work terms, but also a reckoning with the contradictions of empire: the French and British had justified their empires in Africa with the rhetoric of “modernization,” but when Africans took up this rhetoric and made demands as “modern” workers, the colonial system broke down under the weight of its own contradictions. The second story takes place in the late 1980s, when a young historian named Frederick Cooper traveled to the Soviet Union with his wife, Jane Burbank, a scholar of Russian history who had won a fellowship to conduct archival research for a book. During the day, while Burbank worked in the Soviet archives, Cooper sat in a dimly lit room in a brutalist dormitory in Moscow, grappling with his archival material, constructing a narrative and honing the arguments for the manuscript that would become Decolonization and African Society.1 The first of these two stories is deeply interwoven with my professional life, informing the questions I pose in my research and the narrative arc of many of the courses I teach. The second story, about Cooper and Burbank and the dormitory in Moscow, is also clear in my head-but what is it doing there? In other words, what is the status of what I learn by reading an author's acknowledgments?.