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Locating Africans on the World Stage: A Problem in World History

Abstract:This article reviews the character of the world-historical literature from the shared standpoint of Africans and people of the African diaspora. The world-historical literature has achieved strengths in comprehensiveness, disciplinary specialization, and coherence—as well as in its balance of multiple perspectives and its development of “the world stage” as a rhetorical device. Nonetheless, Africans and people of the African diaspora are represented only marginally in the major studies of world history, even though the historical literature on the black past has expanded impressively. The problem, it is argued, is that world historians still give credence to horizontal separations of civilizational groupings and to a vision of initiative relying on vertical distinctions, such that innovations are seen to arise mainly among the elite. To challenge these inherited views, the article offers a narrative of world-historical shifts initiated by black people in subaltern positions, showing ways to link the top-down influences of the elite to the bottom-up history of ordinary people. It argues that world historians should emphasize a global social history that balances top-down and bottomup approaches and should balance discrete civilizational history with cross-cutting diasporic history.