A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo Unavailable

A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo is an original and provocative study, richly deserving of the 2013 Arnold Rubin Prize and nomination for the 2014 Herskovitz Award. The author, Allen F. Roberts, examines a fateful encounter in December 1884 between two warlords, Lusinga lwa Ng'ombe and Emile Storms, in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They met before the die was cast, before the Conference of Berlin, and Storms's mission was to lay the groundwork for the claims of Léopold II of Belgium to the region. Roberts was inspired by Edward Said's call to develop a “contrapuntal perspective … to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations” (quoted by Roberts, p. 6). Despite the aspirations of scholars to demonstrate that domination and resistance are mutually constitutive one...