Meredith Terretta

Assistant Professor

Office: RH 407
Phone: (315) 445-4476
Email: terretme@lemoyne.edu

I concentrate on modern Central African social, cultural, and political history. My research interests include cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and the postcolonial state, and African intellectual history.

I received my PhD in African history in 2004 and my MA in 2000 from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where I also minored in Postcolonial Studies. I obtained my BA in History and French from the University of Tennessee –Chattanooga.

In the classroom, I strive to demonstrate how for centuries, Western travel narratives, ethnographies, visual images, and even academic scholarship have distorted American views of Africa. By raising a consciousness of the ways in which outsiders have constructed our understanding of Africa, my perspective on African history at once casts a critical gaze on the production of knowledge in the West. I also emphasize the continuities in the oppression of Africa and its exploitation, which unfortunately have yet to be relegated to History, but endure in daily life on the continent and in the African diaspora.

In addition to World Civilizations, in the year 2004-2005, I will be teaching the History of Africa, 1300-1870, and 20th Century African History. The seminar component to the latter will focus on the intellectual history of African Nationalism. Through primary sources written by African nationalists, students will explore anti-colonial nationalist movements, locating their intellectual, political, and philosophical roots in intellectual traditions that existed prior to European occupation as well as in the international ideological trends of the period – Communism, Pan-Africanism, the United Nations Human Rights, and anti-colonialism.

My doctoral thesis, The Fabrication of the Cameroonian Postcolony, 1948-1971 explores the popular nationalist movement, Union des Populations du Cameroun at the grassroots level in two different regions in Cameroon. In this work, I explain why the nationalist movement failed to gain power in the newly independent government of Cameroon, but nevertheless continued to influence popular political consciousness in Cameroon.

Convinced that historical sources can be found, not just in libraries and in archives, I use oral tradition, narrative accounts, proverbs, language, and village songs, and visual narratives inscribed in images and material culture to probe local expressions of popular nationalism.

I have spent over a decade in Cameroon, where I grew up, and traveled extensively in Africa and Europe.