Eric Morier-Genoud

Introduction: Portugal, Empire, and Migrations — Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?

It is a well-established understanding in historiography that empire building is closely linked to human migration, both as a cause and a consequence. The historiography on the subject is rich, with many articles and books about the movement of metropolitan people to the colonies as well as colonised individuals and groups moving within the empire and to the metropole (the mother country) during and after empire. As noted by many, the coincidence between empire and migration is not perfect since many people migrated during empire but outside the formal imperial space or within the imperial space but before or after formal subjugation. Still, the coincidence remains very important.1

Women, Migration and the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique, 1945–1975

contributors also invoke Lahra Smith’s important conception of “meaningful citizenships” (8). It would have been productive to see these frameworks engaged with more consistently, providing more coherence and giving further depth to one of the main aims of the study: revised readings of the past that can provide new perspectives on the present. But there is a danger here as well: terming all of these various formations as either thin or thick versions of citizenship may flatten African experiences of belonging, over-emphasize the state, and foreclose other, alternative ways of imagining the relationship between the state and its peoples. Greater attention to some of the lingering questions around territory, mobility, and cross-border movements and affinities may have helped move us beyond the limitations of the contemporary nation-state as the focus of analysis – an underlying tension that bridges Lonsdale and Cooper and yet remains under-examined in the intervening contributing chapters. Overall, the volume makes an important contribution and represents an admirable attempt to bring a variety of voices, spaces, and disciplinary approaches into dialogue on the still pressing questions of citizenship and belonging in Africa’s past, present, and future.

Twenty Years after Of Revelation and Revolution: An Interview with Jean Comaroff

Jean Comaroff and John Comaroffs acclaimed Of Revelation and Revolution (Vol. I) has reached its 20th anniversary. SSM editor Eric Morier-Genoud takes this as an opportunity to conduct an interview with Jean Comaroff, in which they discuss Jeans intellectual trajectory and her views of the present. The interview elicits Jean Comaroffs reflections on the origins and heritage of Revelation and Revolution, and it discusses her and her husbands recent book about the privatisation of identities and religion.