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A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

Allen F. Roberts

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Description for A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo Paperback. Reveals the theatricality of early colonial encounter and how it continues to influence Congolese and Belgian understandings of history today Series: African Expressive Cultures. Num Pages: 328 pages, 30 b&w illus. BIC Classification: 1HFJC; 1HFJZ; 3JH; HBJH; HBLL. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 228 x 154 x 19. Weight in Grams: 454.

A Dance of Assassins presents the competing histories of how Congolese Chief Lusinga and Belgian Lieutenant Storms engaged in a deadly clash while striving to establish hegemony along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the 1880s. While Lusinga participated in the east African slave trade, Storms' secret mandate was to meet Henry Stanley's eastward march and trace "a white line across the Dark Continent" to legitimize King Leopold's audacious claim to the Congo. Confrontation was inevitable, and Lusinga lost his head. His skull became the subject of a sinister evolutionary treatise, while his ancestral figure is now considered a ... Read more

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Product Details

Format

Paperback

Publication date

2012

Publisher

Indiana University Press United States

Number of pages

328

Condition

New

Series

African Expressive Cultures

Number of Pages

328

Place of Publication

Bloomington, IN, United States

ISBN

9780253007506

SKU

V9780253007506

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days

Ref

99-50

About Allen F. Roberts

Allen F. Roberts is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author (with Mary Nooter Roberts) of A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal, which was awarded the Herskovits Prize.

Reviews for A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

Allen Roberts uses . . . [the] assassination to explore the encounter between late nineteenth-century European and Congolese, specifically Tabwa, cultures. There is no scholar more familiar with Tabwa culture, art, and customs, as revealed in his many writings over the last few decades. But Roberts proves equally adept in describing a European culture steeped in an arrogant worldview that ... Read moreit claimed to be 'scientific' and progressive but was often little more than a justification for European conquest.March 2014
Jrnl of African History
Ultimately, this is an excellent, well-crafted meditation on the collision of colonial and indigenous worlds, and how the indigenous world has enfolded and come to its own terms with an irruption that invading world has largely never understood. . . . Highly recommended.
Choice
At the end of the day, A Dance of Assassins makes a compelling case for the necessity of ethnography—quality ethnography—in the interpretation of history as a means of opening the past to a more equitable exchange of voices and the 'what-might-have-beens.' It is also, as John Mack notes in his endorsement, a 'veritable page-turner.'
African Arts
[The]broader themes [of this book] conjure up a bitter and dramatic sense of the colonial past, still contested and poorly understood by both Belgians and Congolese. It imaginatively shows how much may be learned by examining the colonial record from a combination of African and European (and other) points of view. It also suggests how material culture may teach us to fashion new analyses.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
A Dance of Assassins . . . is a deeply engaging account of the complex struggles that connected the lives of Europeans and Africans in the earliest days of the colonial encounter in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Elegantly written, this book challenges prevailing thinking about colonization and its effects on Africans and Europeans.
H-Net Reviews H-AfrArts
"A Dance of Assassins" is an engaging, vigorously researched historical ethnography that uses a set of micro-level events and interactions to reveal the complexity and nuances of the early colonial encounter in what would become the Belgian Congo. This book would be of interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in African Area Studies, Anthropology, History, Museum Studies, and even Performance Studies.
Anthropos
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A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo

Allen F. Roberts

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