The Dougan Letters: An historical ethnography of Afropolitan family life during the Cold War

Inscribed within the fields of cultural anthropology and Afro-European studies, my project aims at producing a historical ethnography of Afropolitan family life and AfroEuropean identities during a period of global history rarely studied in relation to these topics: the Cold War. It will do so by examining the written communications of the Dougans, a transnational African family.

The research will be based on the analysis of approximately 450 letters that ca. 17 family members who lived and worked across Europe exchanged over a span of three decades, from 1968 to 1998. Methods include oral history and ethnographic interviews.

Building on decolonial, gender, and global history perspectives, the study will illustrate how the Dougan letters contain expressions of a certain Afropolitan ethics, as well as ´decentered´ identities that transcend both the North-South rift and the West-East gap.

The study will highlight transculturality and Afropolitanism, not like mechanisms for coping with a sense of ´uprooting´ from a certain ´imagined community´, but as moral, social, and political strengths in their own right.

Insofar as the trajectories of AfroEuropean identity formation that it maps exceed the pervasive dyad assimilation versus resistance, the study will shed light on new pathways to conviviality today, as the world faces a new global political divide.