Significant attention has been directed at Area Studies in recent years as a neo-colonial framework that locks in place a hegemonic Western knowledge regime inherited from the colonial period. More practically, the current configuration of Area Studies has made it difficult to measure development or to understand history in non-western societies in any way other than by comparison to the West. Forgetting these divisions however helps to reveal the very intimate relationship Africa, Africans, and African Americans had with Burma over the course of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1940s and the impact Burma has had on shaping historical memory in Africa since. This presentation examines this history, why it is the most forgotten of “forgotten histories” of Burma, and why remembering this past should be important to a Burma Studies (and a Burmese) audience. Understanding Burma through African (and African American) eyes rather than through those of the West (or White privilege) reveals a more diverse panoply of constructions of Burma on horizontal rather than vertical terms, indirectly meeting Chakrabarty’s call to provincialise Europe and by exposing the fragility of Western framed Area Studies, helps to facilitate rather than to obfuscate the potential to decolonise knowledge about the country’s past.
Event Speakers
Professor Michael W. Charney
Professor Charney is a military historian of Asia at SOAS, University of London. His main research interests are on the history of military logistics, armies and warfare in modern and contemporary Asia, the historical culture of war in Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, and West Africa, and the emergence of religious and national cultures in Myanmar (Burma) and the greater Bay of Bengal.