Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe - Timothy Burke
“This is a wonderfully ambitious book that tackles a history that is challenging as a matter of theory, of historiography, of politics, and of the empirical substance of past experience. Christopher J. Lee’s book arrives at a critical moment in Africanist scholarship and will become a part of a new historiographical turn."
Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid - Sarah Nuttall
"I highly recommend this brilliant book for what its author calls its 'epistemic disobedience'. Christopher Lee argues that the colonial native question still structures and shapes the contours of academic research in the long aftermath of decolonization, with postcolonial nativism taking on its mantle. Embracing rather than simplifying demographic complexity and insisting on bringing into focus interracial histories, Lee radically undoes the discrete boundaries of racial terminologies often employed by postcolonial scholars, opening many more ways of being African to our scrutiny."
Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-colonial Period to 2008 - Brian Raftopoulos
"Christopher Lee's Unreasonable Histories is a major contribution to the history of racial minorities in southern Africa. The book tracks the genealogy of a racialized nativist discourse from its colonial inception and construction to the advent of postcolonial imaginaries that have pursued national unity through the promotion of indigenous identities and cultures. Through this process, the experiences of 'multiracial' Africans were often rendered invisible within nationalist narratives. Lee consequently demonstrates the potential of these minority experiences to unsettle the past and present effects of colonial nativism, while remaining critical toward the racialized politics that have also accompanied such histories. Overall, this is a timely book that will raise new questions regarding citizenship in post-settler societies across Africa."
War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar - Jonathon Glassman
"Unreasonable Histories is a brave and erudite book that focuses on historical communities and political projects that conventional historiographies have often dismissed as dead ends. By treating these experiences seriously, Christopher Lee reminds us that racial thought in the colonial world took multiple, complex, and innovative forms. In doing so, he productively challenges binary assumptions that continue to underlie African studies—assumptions, he argues, that are ultimately rooted in colonial forms of knowledge."
History Lessons: A Memoir of Madness, Memory, and the Brain - Clifton Crais
"Unreasonable Histories makes an important intervention in a number of fields: African studies, imperial history, the history of race, and the history of the family. It also invites creative thinking about how to render pasts that unfold at the margins. Conceptually innovative, clearly written, and deeply informed, it is far and away the best work to address Coloured and other multiracial communities in colonial and postcolonial Africa."