Elena Vezzadini

Rethinking Sudan Studies: a Post-2011 Manifesto

This essay appraises “Sudan Studies” following the 2011 secession of South Sudan. It asks two questions. First, what has Sudan Studies been as a colonial and postcolonial field of academic inquiry and how should or must it change? Second, should we continue to write about a single arena of Sudan Studies now that Sudan has split apart? The authors advance a “manifesto” for Sudan Studies by urging scholars to map out more intellectual terrain by attending to non-elite actors and women; grass-roots and local history; the environment and the arts; oral sources; and interdisciplinary studies of culture, politics, and society. They propose that scholars can transcend the changing boundaries of the nation-state, and recognize connections forged through past and present migrations and contacts, by studying the Sudan as a zone rather than a fixed country. Finally, in their introduction to this bilingual special issue, they highlight the increasing relevance of French scholarship to the endeavor of rethinking Sudan Studies.

Contested Memories, Subalternity, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial Histories of Northeast Africa

This special issuediscusses theways inwhichNortheastAfrican societies andstates recollect and interpret their pasts and use them in the present. Its aim is to shed light on how “battling with the past” also means struggling for the present and future, and how different versions of the past are not equally audible.1 Since the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of historiography have become increasingly aware of the many perspectives from which the past can be recounted, as well as the multiple effects of power on representations of the past. On the one hand, historiographical approaches such as Thompson’s style of “history from below,” inspired by a culturalist reading of Gramsci, or Ginzburg’s and Levi’s “microstoria” have opened the door to a brand of social and cultural history that is sensitive to the experience and life-world of subaltern actors.”2 They have shifted the focus to the margins and the singular, while articulating different scales of analysis to enrich our understanding of historical processes from multiple entry points. Furthermore, different strands of poststructuralist, subalternist, feminist, and postcolonial historiography have sought to write the history of

Spies, Secrets, and a Story Waiting to Be (Re)Told: Memories of the 1924 Revolution and the Racialization of Sudanese History

This article attempts to trace a geography of the memory of the 1924 Revolution in colonial Sudan. It springs from a glaring paradox: though the 1924 Revolution is one of the best documented episodes of colonial history, it has not affected collective memory in the same way other episodes from the country’s modern history have. Eyewitness accounts were first produced in the 1930s and have continued to be published up to the present day; for some of the central episodes of 1924, there are as many versions as there are narrators. The purpose of this article is to investigate the facets of these memories and those who have produced them. It explores two characteristics central to the geography of memory of 1924: on the one hand, the idea that in spite of the number of accounts about the revolution, this event is not fully known, shrouded as it is in mystery, filled with unspoken truths. On the other hand, it is believed that certain people in 1924 “said too much” and became spies, and that this is one of the main reasons why the revolution failed. Finally, the article will tie this peculiar memory configuration into the social trauma that was one of the consequences of the Revolution of 1924, along with the unspoken social divisions that followed it.

Identity, history and power in the historiography of Sudan: some thoughts on Holt and Daly's A History of Modern Sudan

One of the most authoritative works of Sudanese historiography, written by two leading historians in the field, P. M. Holt and M. W. Daly, A History of the Modern Sudan (6th ed. Pearson. 2011. xii þ 199 pp.) might rather be considered as the history of modern Sudan. In fact, students and academics who wish to become acquainted with Sudanese history will most probably begin their journey with this book, as I myself did. It has had an immense impact both inside and outside its field, and has been a source of information not only for Sudanese experts, but also for NGOs, practitioners and the media. It is sufficient just to take a look at popular websites such as the Library of Congress Country Studies or the United Nations Information Gateway on Sudan to see this point. This review has therefore been shaped by my own experience as a young historian writing about the social history of the colonial period. On many occasions during my career as a researcher I have had to deal with the persistence and wide dissemination of the historical paradigms proposed by the book. I also had to observe the extent to which it has had the unfortunate – and certainly unintended – consequence of flattening out the complexity and richness of the Sudanese past. Perhaps the most important objective of this review is therefore not so much to address the Holt and Daly book per se, but to expose some of the underlying premises and fundamental paradigms that inform it, and to stress the importance of questioning them if we as historians wish to capture this complexity. The late Peter M. Holt was an Orientalist of rare erudition. He was a former member of the Sudan Political Service, and later a Professor at the University of London, and pioneered the study of Mahdist rule in Sudan (1885–1898). Martin W. Daly is the leading authority on the colonial history of Sudan. With his distinctive style, a mixture of sharpness, irony and extreme precision (historians often refer to his books to verify incorrect information written by distracted colonial officials), his two major works on the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Imperial Sudan (1991) and Empire on the Nile (2000), are, in the words of one historian, the “seal of the history of the Sudanese Condominium” (Grandin, 1990, 522). The influence of these two historians, who are exceptional in many

Setting the scene of the crime: the colonial archive, history, and racialisation of the 1924 revolution in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillots “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.