Alirageh Barreh (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown University, where he studies the early history of East and Central Africa. His work uses historical linguistics, material culture, anthropology, and oral history to research questions of exchange and the transmission of knowledge. He is also interested in the philosophy of history, with a particular focus on the relationship between the ‘speculative’ tradition and the historical discipline.
Project: Reproducing the World: Gender, Value, and the Gift in Central Africa (working title)
This project uses comparative historical linguistics to reconstruct the deep history of exchange vocabulary across the Sabi languages of Central Africa, with a particular interest in the gendered moral categories employed by early communities to distinguish between kinds of giving (bridewealth, tribute, initiation prestation, trading gift, etc) and the historical processes through which those distinctions were transmitted and naturalized. Drawing questions from the value-form critical reassessment of social reproduction theory exemplified by Marxian feminist scholars like Lise Vogel, Kirstin Munro, Alyssa Battistoni, and Amy De’ath, it also takes up Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s historical linguistic method for denaturalizing inherited gender categories. The project argues that for Africa to be centered as a site of feminist theorizing, Africanist methods and the premodern past must also be taken seriously.