Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance

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Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Lawrance, B. N., & Kumalo, V. R. (2020). New edition of Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost [1969], with Foreword by Nadine Gordimer and Afterword by Barney Simon, co-edited with Vusumuzi Rodney Kumalo. Athens: Ohio University Press.
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  A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds.The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggie’s response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africa’s oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggie’s story, as one critic puts it, offers “an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes” that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets’ refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them.Duggie exploits South Africa’s bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As “a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts,” Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggie’s Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boetie’s narrative celebrates humanity’s relentless drive to survive at any cost.This new edition of Boetie’s out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams’ haunting poem, “Soweto Funeral,” composed after attending Boetie’s interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.
• Carpenter, N. R., & Lawrance, B. N. (2018). Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity. Indiana University Press.
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  The enforced removal of individuals has long been a political tool used by African states to create generations of asylum seekers, refugees, and fugitives. Historians often present such political exile as a potentially transformative experience for resilient individuals, but this reading singles the exile out as having an exceptional experience. This collection seeks to broaden that understanding within the global political landscape by considering the complexity of the experience of exile and the lasting effects it has had on African peoples. The works collected in this volume seek to recover the diversity of exile experiences across the continent. This corpus of testimonials and documents is presented as an "archive" that provides evidence of a larger, shared experience of persecution and violence. This consideration reads exiles from African colonies and nations as active participants within, rather than simply as victims of, the larger global diaspora. In this way, exile is understood as a way of asserting political dissidence and anti-imperial strategies. Broken into three distinct parts, the volume considers legal issues, geography as a strategy of anticolonial resistance, and memory and performative understandings of exile. The experiences of political exile are presented as fundamental to an understanding of colonial and postcolonial oppression and the history of state power in Africa.

Chapters

• Lawrance, B. N. (2021). Les Éwé de la ‘Volta Region’: Évolution administrative, économique et social de 1914 à 1956. In Les Ewe (Togo, Ghana, Benin): Histoire et Civilisation Volume II, edited by Yves Marguerat and Nicoué Gayibor(pp 21-43). Lomé, Togo: Univ. de Lomé.
• Lawrance, B. N., & Kumalo, V. R. (2020). Introduction. In to Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost or Tchotcholoza [1969]. Athens: Ohio University Press.
• Lawrance, B. N. (2019). Country of Origin Information, Technologies of Suspicion, and the Erasure of the Supernatural in African Refugee Claims. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum(pp 129-152). Athens, OH: Ohio UP.
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  Across the globe, migration has been met with intensifying modes of criminalization and securitization, and claims for political asylum are increasingly met with suspicion. Asylum seekers have become the focus of global debates surrounding humanitarian obligations, on the one hand, and concerns surrounding national security and border control, on the other. In Technologies of Suspicion and the Ethics of Obligation in Political Asylum, contributors provide fine-tuned analyses of political asylum systems and the adjudication of asylum claims across a range of sociocultural and geopolitical contexts.
• Alanamu, T., Carton, B., & Lawrance, B. N. (2018). Colonialism and African Childhood. In Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History(pp 389-412). New York: Palgrave. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59426-6
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  During the period of European colonial rule over Africa, from the mid-eighteenth until the mid-to-late twentieth centuries, children were central to African social, productive, and cultural life, but often marginal to colonial power. What we know about children’s experiences and societal attitudes to and conceptualizations of children is very limited because sources are sparse and children, until very recently, have been relatively ignored by historians. There is still no single history of childhood in colonial Africa, and few readily available sources. In this chapter we discuss shifting ideas and definitions of childhood through the eyes of historical observers and historians, the stages of childhood, and children’s activities such as labor, education, pastimes and play.
• Lawrance, B. N. (2018). A Nation Abroad: Desire and Authenticity in Togolese Political Dissidence. In Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity(pp 286-302). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Lawrance, B. N., & Carpenter, N. R. (2018). Reconstructing the Archive of Africans in Exile. In Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity(pp 1-36). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Journals/Publications

• Lawrance, B. N., Hooper, L., & Corcoran, E. (2020). Asylum Courts, Transnational Petitioning, and Digital Dispersal in Africa. History in Africa, 47, 243-267.
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  Asylum court records are a potentially important evidentiary basis for postcolonial African history. Asylum-seeking is a contemporary transnational iteration of a rich African petitioning tradition. In the contemporary era, the digitization of court records, and their dispersal as a function of the shifting division of work between ministries, courts, and related bureaucracies, presents a challenge to researchers. Digital record keeping may improve accessibility, but only if researchers are familiar with the technology and archival methods and practices accompanying digitization.
• Lawrance, B. N., & Roberts, R. L. (2019). Viral Video ‘Blood Chocolate’ Activism, Millennial Anti-Trafficking, and the Neoliberal Resurgence of Shaming. Slavery & Abolition, 40(1), 168-198. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2018.1475272
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  Viral videos offer contemporary activists a nimble, provocative tool with which to disseminate humanitarian messages. This article historicizes anti-trafficking video media that imagine a new potential with which to alter behavioral norms around cocoa and chocolate. The article engages theories and approaches to historical and contemporary modalities of naming and shaming, spanning three centuries to the present day. Videos are examined for style, format, and content, with the view to describing a ‘blood chocolate’ visual and textual metonymy. Recurring themes include transnational power, corporate responsibility, and the horrific scale of exploitation. But viral videos also appear deeply influenced by neoliberal economics that celebrate lawful enterprise and promote consumer-driven solutions to exploitative child labor.
• Terretta, M., & Lawrance, B. N. (2019). ‘Sons of The Soil’: Cause Lawyers, the Togo-Cameroun Mandates, and the Origins of Decolonization. American Historical Review, 124(5), 1709–1714. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1029
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  A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that simultaneously promised and denied them the possibility of self-determination? From Palestine, to Namibia, to Kurdistan, and beyond, the legacies of the mandatory moment remain pressing questions today.
• Lawrance, B. N. (2018). Ebola’s Would-Be Refugees: Performing Fear and Navigating Asylum During a Public Health Emergency. Medical Anthropology, 37(6), 514-532. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2018.1457660
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  Chronic and acute illnesses sit uncomfortably with asylum claiming and refugee mobilities. The story of a Sierra Leonean, an athlete who feared Ebola and sought refuge in the UK, provides an opening to examine protection discourses that invoke fear, trauma, and crisis metaphors, to understand how asylum claims are performed, and how related petitions are adjudicated during public health emergencies of international concern. Ebola is revealed as a novel claim strategy, and thus a useful subject matter to investigate the shifting modalities of migrant agency, the unstable fabric of medical humanitarianism, and knowledge production in moments of exceptionality.
• Lawrance, B. N. (2001). Language between powers, power between languages. Cahiers d'Études africaines. doi:10.4000/etudesafricaines.107
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  In a follow-up to his article on linguistic colonialism during the German occupation of Togo, in a recent volume of the Cahiers d'Études africaines, the author examines the evolution of language and schooling under the French mandate administration (1919-1945). This era, marked by the absence of a concrete government education policy, presents a particularly complex and ambiguous problematic for the historian. Three themes guide the narrative: the development of schooling under the mandate; the anglophilia of the southern Togolese population; and the destabilization of the main indigenous language, Ewe. The first section offers also a critical review of a recent work on the subject by Marie-France Lange. Central to the argument is the desire to provoke a discussion of the role of language in colonial education policy. But above ail, in order to further advance the issue of African agency in African history, the author evokes the concept of “engagement” to explain the indigenous participation in their social, and economic and political development.

Reviews

• Lawrance, B. N. (2019. Nana Oforiatta Ayim, curator. Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Bienniale di Venezia (11 May 2019-24 November 2019)(pp 223-229). Ghana Studies Vol. 22.