Black scholars accused white radical historians of reproducing Eurocentric stereotypes of Africans

Evidence

The more assertive and controversial interventions on the subject of race, however, have tended to come from a new cohort of young scholars, many of whom are black, who have drawn attention to the racialized politics of intellectual production in South Africa. … Maloka, for example, accuses “radical” social historians of reproducing stereotypes of black people as Other, in their less politically organised and sophisticated form - an approach which is tacitly informed by a Eurocentric sense of superiority. Of course, Africans do feature as workers or peasants (or as “class”), as well as women (or as “gender”); but they are generally “crowds”, “rebels”, “gangs”, runaway wives or prostitutes. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588

In the wake of postmodern and postcolonial preoccupations with the effects of a researcher’s/writer’s positionality in the production of knowledge, Windsor Leroke, Tshidiso Maloka, Christine Qunta (1987) and others have questioned the extent to which white scholars can effectively and legitimately document the experiences of black peoples. … Other, in their less politically organised and sophisticated form - an approach which is tacitly informed by a Eurocentric sense of superiority. Of course, Africans do feature as workers or peasants (or as “class”), as well as women (or as “gender”); but they are generally “crowds”, “rebels”, “gangs”, runaway wives or prostitutes. In as far as their level of development is concerned, Africans feature in the “formative”, never as organised and sophisticated actors … as the unsophisticated many. Not only is the history of Africans subdued, neocolonised and appropriated in this way, but ‘radicals’ also want to position themselves as the spokespersons and representatives of these ‘many’ on the front of History. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader postcolonial critique of knowledge production and positionality — echoes Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and the politics of who documents whom. — connects to: Textbook portrayals of minorities were historically biased, stereotypical, and Eurocentric — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1105
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did this South African positionality debate interact with earlier debates over white scholars writing on e.g. slavery or the Holocaust elsewhere?
• SEED: Essay angle: the positionality debate as a definitional case of who racialization authorizes as knowledge producer in the academy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588