Abikal Borah
MA (History), The University of Texas at Austin
Contact
- E-mail: aborah@utexas.edu
- Office: BEL 212 N
Interests
Sub-Saharan Africa, Africa and the Indian Ocean World, Global and Transnational History, History of Migration, History of Violence, Postcolonial Theory
Biography
Abikal Borah earned an MA in English Literature (2008) and MPhil in Comparative Literature (2011) from the University of Delhi. In 2015, he earned an MA in History from UT, Austin. His primary interest is Southern Africa with a focus on histories of race and violence. His doctoral dissertation, titled "Aftertaste of Empire: Amandiya and Racial Violence in South Africa, 1843-1949" examines the entangled histories of race and violence in colonial Natal. It narrates a history of migration, land, and labor in the region to explain the social relationships between the indigenous Zulus and the migrant Indians in pre-apartheid South Africa. Simultaneously, it maps the discursive formations of race to narrate a social history of the political in South Africa. His articles have appeared in Africa Today, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. He is the co-editor of Imagining Vernacular Histories: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola and Creative Incursions: Cultural Representations of Human Rights in Africa and the Black Diaspora.
