In An Unformed Map, Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of Caribbean people who joined the British and French colonial administrations in Africa between 1890 and 1930. Caribbean administrators grew up in colonial societies, saw themselves as British and French, and tended to look down on Africans. Once in Africa, however, they were doubly marginalized—excluded by Europeans and unwelcome among Africans. This marginalization was then reproduced in colonial archives, where their lives appear only in fragments. Drawing on sources beyond the archives of empire, from dictionaries and language exams to a suitcase full of poems, Janzen considers how Caribbean administrators reckoned with the profound effects of assimilation, racism, and dislocation. As they learned African languages, formed relationships with African intellectuals, and engaged with African cultures and histories, they began to rethink their positions in the British and French empires. They also created new geographies of belonging across the Atlantic, foundations from which others imagined new political horizons. Ultimately, Janzen offers a model for reading across sources and writing history in the face of archival fragmentation.

Philip Janzen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Florida.

“In this important and sophisticated book, Philip Janzen subverts the French and British imperial bureaucratic machinery to suture back together the lives of colonial subjects who were fragmented by the archive. By building a network of extra-bureaucratic sources, Janzen demonstrates that the illusion of archival plenitude renders imperially irrelevant lives irrecoverable by conventional historical methods. An Unformed Map will find an enthusiastic readership not only among Caribbeanist and Africanist historians, historians of empire and anthropologists, but to all those historians interested in methodological and conceptual innovation.”
-- Stephan Palmié, author of Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa