In Unreasonable Histories, Lee challenges what he views as the excessive focus of African studies on communities that can be traced through time and used as the basis for nativist myth making. He studies instead a more fragmented and disparate group, namely, multiracial people between the 1910s and the 1960s in the British imperial territories that are now Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. The result is a rich and thought-provoking study that speaks beyond its immediate subject to raise issues about the boundaries of African studies and the ways in which archives are framed to promote particular epistemologies.
Terminology is problematical for Lee, given his commitment to breaking down essentialist categories. Lee rejects the dated terms mixed race or mulatto in favor of the more capacious multiracial, but all such descriptors tend to enshrine certain ideas about ethnicity. Be that as it may, in twentieth-century British Central Africa, racialized...