The project of the team leader (Benjamin Steiner) deals with the system of information and knowledge about Africa during the early modern period in France. The research focuses on the techniques of gathering information about the continent by French merchants, discoverers, and explorers. The main question is: How was Africa conceived and described within reports, descriptions, cartography, and proto-statistical data collection? Further the project pursues to inquire how normative ideas of acquisition, archiving, and distribution of information within the main institutions for the processing of knowledge (academies, state administration, trade companies) were put, either successfully or not, into practice. Knowledge and information and its agents thus turn out to be testimonies of a long-lasting formation process of a certain discourse and a specific idea of order about the relation between Europe and Africa.
The projects of the doctoral students deal with contrasting approaches within different frames of time and space. The first dissertation proposal (Esther Ries) dedicates its attention on Africans living in Europe during the 18th century. Interestingly, this group of people includes those migrants who voluntarily came to Europe, especially to Great Britain, where the central focus of the project lies. The motives were to learn the language, study, or professionally work as translator in one of the trade companies. Thus, the dominating narrative of the suppression of Africans by Europeans is contrasted with an alternative history that asks about positive cases of this cultural contact and how they influenced the idea of Africa and Africans in Europe.
Another variation of the common theme is viewed upon by the second research enterprise about collective memory in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal during the 20th century (Tina Kramer). This project concentrates from a historiographical as well as from an ethnological perspective on an African culture of memory and history that is primarily concerned with its colonial past. A further question is how the relation between the former colony and its former occupier translates into the memory culture and historiography both of Guinea-Bissau and of Portugal. Therefore archival and ethnographical research in both countries will ask about the role of historical agents, like e.g. students, travelers, merchants, and politicians, to explore the divide between the respective normative orders of an orally transmitted memory culture in Africa and the official historiography in Europe.
Finally, the third project (Felix Schürmann) deals with a transcultural community that could be described as the prototype of a global subculture. The settlements of whalers at the African coast during the eighteenth and nineteenth century constitute social and cultural counterpoint to those of the European seafarers. Private logbooks of crew members serve as main source that tell of experiences at the coasts of the foreign continent and its inhabitants, not only from the eyewitness account of Europeans, but also from the perspective of black officers and harpooneers that were either freed slaves from North America or the Caribbean or Africans hired by whaling ships en route.
