Andrew Apter
Professor of History and Anthropology, University of California, LA
Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: October 2023 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »›Yoruba Culture‹ in the Frobenius Archive: A Critical Exploration« Project outline: Over the past three decades if not longer, cultural anthropology has been critically engaged with the politics of ethnographic knowledge and practice by highlighting the imperial conditions of anthropological reason and those epistemological legacies of its discourses, appropriations, and modes of objectification which remain so difficult to exorcize from the discipline’s remit. Can we ever escape the pitfalls of what V. Y. Mudimbe has called the colonial library? Can we improve our self-reflexive awareness by critically attending to what Bruno Latour has dubbed »the ethnographic interface« between observer and observed? Can we salvage cultural anthropology from the dustbin of its checkered history, or, as some recent critics have advocated, must we simply »burn it down«?
These are some of the larger, indeed pressing, questions that motivate my more focused project on the »Yoruba« collection in the Frobenius Institute’s archive. For a Yoruba specialist like myself, this collection is a treasure trove of fieldnotes, artifacts, images and »data« that exemplify both the racism and violence of Africanist ethnography and the valuable insights it still can provide when critically relocated in its historical and ethnographic contexts. Following an earlier text-based work I presented at the Frobenius Colloquium in 2022 entitled »Frobenius Unbound: Black Atlantis and the Poetics of Displacement in the Yoruba Diaspora,« my current project as a resident fellow will explore the networks of secrecy, exchange, substitution, and appropriation that mediated Frobenius’s Yoruba data collection in Nigeria and underlie the very categories of his archive.
(Andrew Apter) Research partner: Andrew Apter follows the invitation of Dr. Sophia Thubauville at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Scholarly profile of Andrew Apter Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he co-founded the Atlantic History Colloquium and directed the African Studies Center. Prior to UCLA he taught at Columbia University (1987–1989) and the University of Chicago (1989–2003). He has held visiting appointments at the University of Lagos; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; St. Antony's College, Oxford University; and the University of Utrecht. Most recently, he was a Heinz Heinen Senior Fellow at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (2021). Apter has conducted fieldwork and archival research in Nigeria, Ghana, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and among Congolese refugees in Zambia.
Apter’s books focus on West Africa and the Black Atlantic. He is currently working on Atlantic Slavery and the Spirits of Capitalism, exploring how Atlantic slavery and its fetishized forms of human commodification remain deeply buried within the core of racial capitalism.
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Please find more information about Andrew Apter here.
Main areas of research: Regional: Black Atlantic (Yoruba in Nigeria, Fante in Ghana) and the African Diaspora (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba); Thematic: Ritual, Politics and Historical Memory; Atlantic Slavery and Racial Capitalism; Race, Gender, and Creolization; African Epistemologies and Philosophies of Language; Oral History; Archival Theory.
Selected publications: - »Frobenius Unbound: Black Atlantis and the Poetics of Displacement in the Yoruba-Atlantic«, in: Paideuma 68 (2022), p. 119-148.
- Oduduwa’s Chain: Locations of Culture in the Yoruba Atlantic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2018.
- »Queer Crossings: Kinship, Gender and Sexuality in Igboland and Carriacou«, in: Journal of West African History 3, 2 (2017), p. 39-66.
- »Ethnographic X-Files and Holbraad’s Double-Bind: Reflections on an Ontological Turn of Events«, in: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, 1 (2017), p. 287-302.
- »History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle, Ghana«, in: American Historical Review 122, 1 (2017), p. 23-54.
- »The Blood of Mothers: Women, Money and Markets in Yoruba-Atlantic Perspective«, in: Journal of African American History 98, 1 (2013), p. 72-98. [= Special Issue on Women, Slavery, and the Atlantic World, ed. by Brenda S. Stevenson]
- »Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within«, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, 2 (2013), p. 356-387.
- Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007.
- The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005.
- Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992.
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