Book Review

Christopher Lee’s important book on multiracial people in British Central Africa has insights that will be appreciated by scholars of historiography, method, colonialism, postcolonialism, racial thinking, and nativism. Indeed, Lee’s book provides a model for conceptualizing research projects that use traditional disciplinary approaches and sources—such as interviews, private letters, government documents, and archival records—but are not trapped by colonial epistemologies into excluding histories on the colonial edge of racial visibility. Lee titles his book Unreasonable Histories to call attention to the ways in which the histories of multiracial peoples upset “methodological, categorical, and sociopolitical” approaches to the African past (20). He emphasizes nativism over racism, connection rather than conflict, and ephemeral communities over bounded ethnic groups. Over eight chapters organized into three parts, Lee demonstrates how histories that work against received models can reveal new paths of inquiry and escape the colonial imprint on our thinking. His introduction lays out the conceptual issues at stake in this history, while his conclusion makes a case for reconceptualizing the African past as a matter of urgency. In part one of the book, Lee frames his approach as writing a “history without groups” in place of the colonial scheme of a native/non-native binary. Lee’s revision begins with an argument about the way colonial obsessions with groups has informed academic studies, a point that other scholars have made as well. Still, Lee’s analysis is fresh and insightful. In chapter one, he makes the important point that “black peril” cases camouflaged more common, though still infrequent, multiracial sex. In turn, we lost sight of multiracial people. Lee pushes this critique further by writing a history out of ephemeral connections, contingency, and few sources. Lee’s imaginative approach recreates a multiracial history grounded in genealogical connections and the opportunities such ties brought. To make this point, in chapter two Lee focuses on the story of an individual woman who exploited the sentimental ties her former lover had for their child to extract goods