I am a cultural and social historian of Africa whose research focuses on the relationship between religion/ritual and politics during the eras of the slave trade and colonial rule. I am particularly interested in continuity and change in the historical construction of gender and ethnicity and in how migrations on the continent of Africa and throughout the African diaspora influence the use of cultural productions to shape social and political relations and control material resources. My recent article and book manuscript illustrate my innovative use of oral and other ethnographic evidence alongside missionary sources to understand precolonial Nigeria. My chapter published an edited volume and another chapter awaiting review by a university press demonstrate my use of historical images and manumission records of African and African Diasporic pearl divers to understand the development of the African Diaspora in the Gulf region. Two short videos offer an introduction to the ways in which women participate in a Yoruba ancestral masquerade practice and organization known as Egungun, a key factor in my research in Nigeria.
John Thabiti Willis
Carleton College
Research
Overview
Interests
- History and Memory
- Archival and Ethnographic Sources as Performances
- Gender and Kinship
- Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean World
- Christianity and Islam
Marlon Bailey
Ethnographic Research Collaborator
Owen Yager
Summer Research Assistant
Jamonte Strawder
McNair Research Fellow
Jackie Culotta
Research Assistant, GIS Specialist
Amazing Research Collaborators
I have had the privilege of working with an amazing team of intellectuals who bring a range of archival, ethnographic, and technological research skills to my evolving agenda.
Research Projects
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My manuscript, entitled Masquerading Politics: Gender, Kinship, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town, will be published in print and digital media in early 2018. I explore an overlooked aspect of African history, the centrality of organizations, whose members are bound by a ritual oath, within the governmental structures of African societies. I offer a multifaceted historical analysis of a subject that art historians and anthropologists have framed as a form of “social control.” My work focuses on the shifting coalitions of royals, chiefs, warriors, and imperial administrators who sponsored masquerade performances over a 150-year period. I illustrate how the authority invested in masquerade (and other ritual) performers enabled them to play key roles in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and, ultimately, projecting individual or group power.
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White was born to Yoruba ex-slaves in Sierra Leone before marrying an Igbo woman and migrating to Lagos to found the city’s first Church Missionary Society church and primary school and later to Otta (Nigeria) to build a Christian community. White belonged to the first generation of African agents to promote the Christian gospel at Yoruba missions in Nigeria, and was among the first to promote the creation of Christian worship music in the Yoruba language. This book will investigate how British Victorian gender, class, and aesthetic values influenced Yoruba ritual practitioners and consider how the latter channeled their artistic talents to build a Christian community in early colonial Nigeria.
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At present, my work does not include an analysis of the evolving and overlapping spatial and political status of the families within the ward structure of the town. My current analysis only considers the status of a few families who produced masquerade performances and organizational leaders. With GIS I will provide a comprehensive spatial analysis to enable a fuller placement of Otta history “on the map.”
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This project places emphasis on the ways in which women both participate and are represented in the costumes and embodied practice of Yoruba masquerades. Through documentary film, this project illustrates that women’s participation as leaders in masquerade organizations and performances complicates the conventional view of masquerades as a way of controlling women.
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During the height of the pearling trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Africans and their descendants were a large portion of divers and pullers in pearling crews. Many of the historical images of these individuals that appear in heritage sites show individuals with African features while written texts or audio materials are silent on the historical relationship between Africa and the pearling economy of the Gulf. My research explores this silence, interpreting it as part of the global African Diasporic experience.
Research Methodologies
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Click hyperlink to website created in collaboration with Jackie Culatto
- Heritage from below
- Performance theory and practice
- Semi-structured and open ended-interviews