A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...
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locked by both <strong>German</strong> and African initiatives. The realization of this combined<br />
influence is absent from many of the cultural and social histories of the period.<br />
By examining the social and the cultural, this study moves against the “statist”<br />
vision of contemporary <strong>German</strong> history in favour of an Alltagsgeschichte of <strong>German</strong><br />
colonialism that refuses monolithic conceptions. In this total vision of culture, it is<br />
evident how culture connects with social and political issues to both propel and restrain<br />
colonial power. Thus by eschewing the thinly-veiled economic or political determinism<br />
of some historians as well as the narrow focuses upon social and cultural manifestations,<br />
a fuller and deterritorialized vision of <strong>German</strong>y’s colonial expansion in Africa can<br />
develop. But in order to most accurately render the multi-faceted and complex terms of<br />
colonialism, studies must fuse the social and cultural with the economic and political.<br />
This discussion has engaged the imaginaries of <strong>German</strong> colonialism, but now returns to<br />
the concrete realities of colonial rule in order to convey the utopian and pragmatic<br />
articulations of <strong>German</strong> colonial expansion.<br />
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